The Story of My Life

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As many of you know, today was my last day at the law firm. The farewell was quiet and the party was unassuming. In fact, I sit here tonight after drinks, not feeling all that intoxicated. Rather, I am sitting back, feeling quite nostalgic. I look back on the last few years of my life and I see that it is about to change, as of tomorrow.
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But who have I been?
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I was a middle class girl from the suburbs, about 50 minutes out of the city of Sydney. I was born to two middle class people, mum and dad, who happened to give birth to a child three years prior - Annie. She was practice for when it came time for mum and dad to have me (kidding!). I grew up in the suburbs all of my life in the same neighbourhood with the same friends. I do not highlight any part of my child hood as being particularly significant, simply for the fact that it wasnt.
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I grew up in the same way as any other normal kid.My education was just as normal. I went to the local Primary School, a public school three streets away from my home. I then had the horrible experience of going to a strict Anglican school, a private high school for a whole nine months. My sister managed to last there for six years, but not I. I moved to another school, an all girls catholic private school which really was just a haven of over-sexed, drug taking, non-religious women who struggled like every other teenage girl to find each of their own identity - and failed. To my parents great relief, I managed to finish my schooling all the way to Year 12, and finished my HSC on time, and still remain relatively unscathed from my teenage years.
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I was never the brightest of kids. Mum and Dad can confirm that. But apparently when I was only four years old, Mum and Dad were worried about me. I had problems with my hearing (They say I only had 20% of my hearing at one stage, due to some kind of issue with my adnoids?) and mum and dad were finding that i was spending more and more time alone, playing with tiny little micro machine cars and making car noises to myself. This registered as "autism" to my parents, who freaked out and took me to see the Doctor. Here, the Doctor told my parents not to worry, because whilst I was separating myself from the world, every time I moved a micro machine car around a rock or down the path, my mind was ticking over and over. And to this day, I can assure my parents that that was what was going on.
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When I was four, I had an entire imaginary land of cars and houses and happiness. I wasnt autistic, I was imaginative and wanted to be left alone with my imagination. I guess things never change.I didnt excel at primary school and fell under the shadow of Anna, my best friend of eighteen years. She was the smartest kid in the school and to this day, I still remember being yelled at by my year six teacher for copying Anna's work. I was more interested in getting out and playing and being active.
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High school was quite the same. I didnt even want to be there. At that point, I wanted to skate and that was all that mattered. So, instead of studying, I skated. No one was going to change that. Except, in or around year 11, I began to.... study. I actually began to do homework and enjoy classes. It may have been that, in year 11, you could choose the classes that you wanted to do, rather than be forced to do the classes that were part of the curriculum. I managed to slide into the middle class maths, middle class english and a couple of units of business studies. Here, it became a habit of mine to excel at the average classes. I was coming first in english, first in religion, first in maths, first in food technology and first in business studies. Not because I was brainy, but because I had chosen simple classes.
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I think somewhere along the line, being seen as "brainy" became an identity. Feeding of that identity for the sake of my self esteem, I gave up skating and underaged drinking and worked harder and harder at classes. It then came time to choose what I was going to do at university.
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I always wanted to do forensic science. This was prior to CSI Miami and Profiler. I was just interested in the idea of working in an area which was challenging. Finding answers and proving them to be correct. Notwithstanding this, I went to career advisor in early year 12, who assured me that getting into a B Science or B Psych degree was completely impossible given my average classes and average brain. To be told I couldnt do something only fired me up even more. I wanted to get the highest TER (like a GPA for those americans reading!) I could in order to prove that I could get into anything I wanted.I ended up getting one of the highest TERs in my school and almost 18 TER points ahead of the requirement for a B Science degree.
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But I didnt want that B Science degree. I wanted to do business. I wanted to work with money. My sister had done a B Commerce degree so that seemed like natural progression to go and do something like that. My parents were okay with that, but seemed to think I was wasting "20 TER points" by going into just a B Comm. Admittedly, my parents gave me the idea of going into law, which didnt seem to particularly interesting to me. It seemed hard, overwhelming and way out of my league. Mum and Dad said "Even if you go and try it out for a year, what is the harm of doing it? Combine it with a B Comm and if you dont like law, drop the law and carry on with the Commerce."
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Six years later, I walked away with a B Commerce (Management) degree with a distinction/high distinction average. I also walked away with a Bachelor of Laws with a Business Major. And I stood up there on graduation day with three other people to accept my degree with First Class Honours.
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