May 1992

I never wanted to go through again what I had just gone through in the past few months since the breakup.

On May 1, Pearl, Sharon and I were talking about the warm weather while on the sidewalk after a party, and I suggested we go for a walk when we got back to campus. We gathered up a few others there, including Catherine, Rachel and possibly Cindy, and went over to the bridge over the lake. We talked about the ghost of the football field and probably other ones, which freaked out someone, probably Cindy or Sharon. The cattails in the lake were now dried, big, round, cottony things which stuck up high out of the water. I said, "Aah! They look like human heads!" This freaked out Cindy or Sharon even more.

This is probably the time when the wheels of Pearl's scooter got caught in between the planks of the bridge. This bridge was soon blocked off because it had become unsafe and had to be fixed.

The college sold May Celebration T-shirts which had "53082" (the college's zip code) in a logo similar to the one for Beverly Hills: 90210. We all got one.

Heidi and Nicole had only planned to stay at Roanoke for one year. But now, Nicole decided to keep to this plan, while Heidi decided to stay on another year. Heidi had a new boyfriend, and Shawn thought he was the reason she wanted to stay. By the way, this guy and Heidi are now married and live in the States.

Sophomore year, I would no longer have a male roommate. Though it seemed a bit weird at first, it hadn't been all that different from living with a brother--a brother who didn't tease me, that is.

At the very end of the year, we had a sleepover at Krueger. I don't remember who all was there, but I do know Steve, Pearl, Rachel, Sharon and Tara were. Carol may have been there. Some other girl was there. She said the girl who lived in her room before her wrote "so and so loves so and so" on the bed. "She must have loved him quite a bit, because the bed's all broken down," she said.

We played several board games. One had the question, who would you like to see get a pie in the face? I voted for Rachel, and she voted for me because she wanted to see how I'd react if I did get a pie in the face. We then tried to start gossiping. I wrote some of the gossip in my diary, but probably shouldn't tell it here. Then Steve left, but not before giving each of us a hug. Rachel told ghost stories. We finally went to bed, but stayed up talking until around 3.

Afterwards, somebody said, "You probably talked about guys."

We said, "No, we talked about ghosts and UFO's."

We woke up to the alarm at 7, but the person closest to it turned it off. That is, Pearl and I and that person woke up to it. Rachel was dead to the world. I wondered if we'd sleep through Poetry. Pearl woke up about 15 minutes later and woke up Rachel, then I got up.

Pearl later said, "If we were late to Poetry, how would I explain it to Counselor Dude?"

Somebody said, "Think of how embarrassing it would've been if we'd slept until noon right out there in the lounge."

For Poetry finals, we would do a normal workshop class during the scheduled period, and also do individual meetings with Counselor Dude. Everybody in the class got together and conspired what to put in that day's Poetry packet. Counselor Dude had told us he had this thing about women's toes. I guess they freaked him out. So all the poems were about--toes! He was amused. Mine started out, "Mermaids once had toes, back when dinosaurs roamed." After I read it, Counselor Dude said,

"That is the--" his voice boomed--"BEST poem you've written all semester!"

I longed to go home and get away from Peter, though I would greatly miss Shawn. Soon after returning home on Friday the 22nd, I sorted through all my school papers, circulars and mementoes, tossed what I didn’t want, and put the rest in a box. Everything Peter gave me went in the box, as well. I marked the box FRESHMAN YEAR; for the next three summers, I would do the same. When I wrote these memoirs, these boxes were very helpful. So, packrats, even when your mother complains about all the things you keep, don't let this stop you: you just might need them.

I had expected in March that by May things would be so much better, that I would love being home again. At first, everything was fine: We had a new, powerful antenna instead of cable, and it picked up Wisconsin PBS stations, such as channel 10 and sometimes 36. Whenever I got channel 10 in well enough, I would watch it. Both it and channel 34 from Elkhart played different episodes of Are You Being Served?, so I would often see it twice a day.

However, summer began to drag. I missed everyone, and felt bored doing my usual things. I had too much time to think about Peter, though I rarely cried, if at all. I wrote long letters to Shawn and my other friends. Most of the people in the college/career class at church were several years older than I was. My friends were still in the high school class, or left for college and then rarely showed up even in summer. I had lost track of all but one non-church friend. I thought I was just weird, until I went to my 10-year high school reunion and discovered that lots of people lose track of their friends when they leave high school.

There was a bit of excitement in Sunday School one day: One woman in my class had just decided to divorce her husband. It sounded like he was cheating on her. But even though she made the decision, she sounded just like me back in late January/early February. One of my high school friends was there, and several of us sat talking about this even during the church service, because the woman needed support. So much of the advice she got from people at church was confusing and contradictory; we seemed more united. I told her I went through something similar with an ex-boyfriend. She smiled and said something soothing, but I didn't want that. I was trying to make her feel like she wasn't alone.

I loved to listen for the South Bend accent during the singing at church. I wondered if I now had a bit of a S-- accent that would be noticeable as I sang (as if anyone could hear me sing anyway).

From my diary entries, you could say I was obsessed with Jesus. This was because I had almost no one else. (Actually, I think many Christians would say I was not obsessed with Jesus, or that how I felt was a good, natural thing.) After all, according to Shawn, some people would get upset when they saw me coming over to sit at their table, because I would "bring them down" (not a good thing to hear when you're already depressed). Shawn would listen but was far more concerned in changing me and tearing down the way I was than letting me grieve; I didn't want to annoy my family or friends by talking about Peter; my friends were in another state; Peter treated me like a pariah; people told me I shouldn’t get this way over a guy; yet I could not shake the feelings I had. Nobody understood me. It's normal, especially for women, to process emotions verbally after a breakup or trauma. But for those with nonverbal learning disorder, talking becomes especially important for releasing anxiety, and we don't know when to shut up. That's probably why I talked about Peter so much in the early days. But when people began telling me not to, the need to process the situation did not stop, so I had to pour all my feelings into journals.

I now know that what I had was depression, not just the blues, and that I tried to deal with it alone when I should have had the help of a counselor. Various things can work together to make a person so depressed that she can't function properly. The depressed person doesn't want to be this way (though some might think she does), and would give anything to be normal again. As I wrote this part of my memoirs in 1999 and read articles about depression, I saw that I was not odd or at fault for the things I felt, did, and said. The "words of knowledge," though they misguided me, were an attempt to find something to hold onto, something that said this would pass. I believed in those days that this could only pass if Peter came back to me. The writer of the article "When Depression Hits Home" in a 1999 issue of Today's Christian Woman expressed my feelings exactly when she said, "I wasn't crazy--I was depressed!" I had feared I was crazy. Now I know that I wasn't.

This may have been the summer when a squirrel in the tree next door seemed tame. It would go up to our neighbors, probably to get treats. One day, as she hosed off her car, the neighbor lady played with him. He'd run up to her, she'd turn the hose on him, he'd run off, then he'd run up to her and do it all over again.

Summer 1992