About Damion and Mark

These were two men at Harvard who either did help me or were supposed to help me but couldn’t because it turned out that I grew up in the woods and had zero training in social skills or personal habits.

I was brilliant enough to be at Harvard and a man from Yale who was interviewing at Kent School told me that Yale wouldn’t take me but Harvard accepts weirdos (not in those words.)

Then, when I got my 8 acceptances the following April (?), my English teacher and advisor, said “You will never regret not going to Princeton, but you would regret not going to Harvard.”

So! That was it!!! I was going to Harvard.

So, a couple of weeks ago I requested to be expunged. (Everybody’s worst nightmare when we talked about things like that Freshman Year.) That means they erase every trace of you and deny and knowledge of your ever having been associated with Harvard University.

Or rather, I just stated that I had been.

They tell you Freshman year about the “albatross” that Harvard can be. You can spend the rest of your life trying to live up to it and that was certainly the case with me. Or rather, not being able to live up to it. Like a heavy weight that drags you down.

So, I retroactively emancipated myself from my father at age 16 when I did run away from home and THAT was a weight off my shoulders a couple of years ago. (Now, I realize that at the worst moments he was often there to help in ways that I did not see at the time; and to honor both him and my mother.) Dunning myself off of Harvard is similar. I will be doing my best not to go around dropping the name everywhere I go as I had been doing ever since the state hospital.

As for the people whom I’ve known since then and the places I’ve been, I am grateful for them. I’m grateful to God for them.

They used to talk about the “pre-wed” plan. I don’t remember whether anybody dared to say that at Harvard but I was there on the GOD plan. I realized that my letter of acceptance was rigged, and I’m still not quite sure whether I didn’t “get it” that it wasn’t for real.

But I didn’t have the information to my mind to judge what it was they were saying to me. I had lived for 4 years on the top of Skiff Mountain in a “coordinated” boys and girls boarding school where the boys and girls had separate campuses and I had had next to no interaction with the boys. I didn’t wash, i avoided going to the dining hall at lunch when the boys were “up the hill” for classes and I NEVER went to lunch on the boys campus. Somehow I was never “down the hill” for classes ending at lunchtime.

So, I had ONE BOYFRIEND, and he taught me a little bit about sex. He was a lovely man. He wrote me a letter that I didn’t understand about being a born-again Christian and I read it towards the end of my stay in Florida before Alex and I divorce and I returned here to PA. It was very beautiful, unfortunately things have been crazy since then and I don’t remember it well and I don’t know whether I still have it. He broke up with me shortly afterward.

So, the sad fact is that I wasn’t really educated in certain basic factors to be at Harvard and my English teacher was the one person who really cared enough to know it.

But I was pulling from a source he couldn’t know anything about to be quite confident that I could do Harvard.

It was my math/science ability. I had matching SAT’s. I turned to Mr. Gould for the beauty of literature. To me he was the quintessence of all beauty and I was over the top in love with everything about him and every book I read for his class. At the same time I was acing every math class and then calculus and my math teacher adored me. My father was hi hi tech and I had grown up with this in a way that nobody could understand. Even me!!! But I had a core confidence in myself that was unbeatable AT THAT TIME. Once it was validated by my SAT scores, (750/750) (yes, I know, lots of people get 800/800), I was ecstatic, because I turned to the Insider’s Guide to Colleges and saw that I could go to any school with those numbers. And my grades.

My Guidance counselor, who know about me, tried to dissuade me. But I didn’t listen.

I was on the God plan. There is a story here that needs to be told in the right way and at the right time and this is not it. I have told parts of it…

…

So, I had zero training in personal habits and social skills and I am guessing that when Damion sat down with me in the Dining Hall in the Freshman Union first thing Freshman Year he knew who I was. I said the wrong thin and he picked up his tray and walked away. He befriended me a little a while later. But he went to a different Residential house and I never saw much of him.

Mark walked in as I was talking to Sanjay about some mysterious things and I was mad because I was enjoying the conversation, I don’t know what that was about, but Mark and I became close for two years after that.

So now I am letting go of all of this. It’s been a long, long time that I have been out of commission and all of this was lurking over my head and or in the background. It’s a crying shame. What my husband had to put up with because of all this. Obviously it is because of Wernersvile State Hospital and the Hopkins malpractice that should have tidied all of that up a long time ago.

All of this being words and names I would like to be able to refrain from saying ever again as I move into my senior years.

I love my husband. We’ve been separated for 11 years and I still love him. We are similar people. We are the “first family” of our generation of the electronics world, hi-tech society; and he is suffering in a marriage that is not proper because our divorce was not legal. In a CanEnglAmerican world such as we forged it is difficult to be sure of what is legal and what is not in a matter such as this. Obviously American law takes precedence as it is where we are both graced to live.