High School:
I went to Grove City Senior High School.
First Job
I had a job at a coffee shop and I loved working at that job. It was just a lot of fun.
First Car:
I drove my parent’s 1997 maroon Pathfinder. I still drive around a Pathfinder. Not the same one, of course.
Activities:
I was in chorus. I’m an alto. I can’t sing high. I was a basketball cheerleader. I was a football cheerleader, and I was in the play. I was a chorus member in Mr. Scrooge, one of the narrators in “James and the Giant Peach” and I was a stage director/manager for “Joseph and the [Amazing] Technicolor Dreamcoat, “so I did three years of theater. And I did three years of the basketball and football cheerleading.
Classes:
My favorite class was Creative Writing. And we had Brit Lit, American Lit, Composition; there wasn’t anything crazy. Except for the creative writing. I was always more English and history and the arts. I wasn’t very good at science and math. It wasn’t really my thing.
Favorite Books in High School:
Catcher in the Rye. I love Holden. He was such a slacker and such a pain. He was so annoying yet at the same time there was something I liked about him. Like the things that annoyed him I was like ‘yeah.’ I went through that stage where I was like ‘everyone is fake, everyone is phony,’ and I think that’s just a part of, like, adolescence. But I always loved the Narnia series, too…I read those like a champ.
Career:
Well actually when I was in high school I wanted to be a writer. I thought…I was going to write a great novel…I wrote a lot of poetry and I wrote in my journal all the time…I was always constantly writing. I would get caught in class writing or…reading under my desk all the time.
Personal Struggles:
I think one of the things I struggled with was friends. ‘Who was your friend?’ ‘Who is not your friend?’ I think one of the lessons that I learned was…not to talk about people behind their backs because if you do, they’ll find out. Just watch what you say. Watch who you befriend because some people think that they’re your friend, and then as you go through high school people…change and they get different friends…That was always very hard to accept.
Advice for Students:
Don’t care what other people think about you. Who cares? Like just…be yourself. And if you don’t want negative stuff to come at you, don’t put negative stuff out there. Stay away from anything where you don’t feel valued…Just be yourself, and if they don’t like it, then just don’t talk to them. I never cared what people thought. Ever.
Memories:
My friends and I hung out at Eat’n Park a lot. We would just do our homework, we would drink coffee and we would read and talk and write in our journals. I’ve always liked doing that. And I also had a job at a coffee shop, and I loved working at that job…It was just a lot of fun. It was just more just hanging out with my friends. And as boring as it sounds, it was fun. When I was the narrator in “James and the Giant Peach,” yeah, that was a lot of fun.