return home / back to myworld

My childhood was a happy one. Even after leaving my home and my friends for the second time at age five, I felt excited about life.

We left our lakeside haven in the middle of nowhere because my parents (mainly my dad) were worried that my English wasn’t developing enough — there were no international schools or communities for me to communicate with, so most of what I was speaking, hearing, reading and writing was in Estonian. There was an international school in the capital, and back then, we were able to afford it.

In the early 2000s, private schools and international anything were still somewhat of a rarity in the relatively recently post-soviet Estonia. The school had just over 100 students, most of them children of diplomats. I loved it there.

For those of you who haven’t been lucky enough to experience going to a small school, imagine this: a small, tight-knit community where everyone generally gets along and the teachers are able to give all their students individual attention. Although there were occasional conflicts, and some kids probably felt less included than others, we generally had a lot of tolerance and were willing to be friends with everyone. I never realised that I was a bit weird, because in a school that small and multicultural, everyone’s a bit weird — idiosyncracies are embraced and encouraged, and social norms are a lot more lax.

I thrived in primary school. Some may even say I peaked. But that would be sad so we won’t say that.

I loved learning, I was good at everything, and I had the freedom to write books about magical unicorns, read everything in our classroom shelves, create elaborate patterns with colourful geometric blocks, and play with my friends. In the summer, I would make them play horses, and in the winter, I would make them play huskies. We also enjoyed “snowboarding” (sliding down the steep and slippery slope to the school gate on our feet) and digging in the dirt for worms. There was a security guard who told us about ladybirds. In second grade, I got really into (non-American) football, and in third grade, the older kids joined our games and I got scared and quit. I played a lot of tetherball. Sometimes, we would build snow forts.

Throughout my early childhood I always had one or two Best Friends. Since most of the students were children of diplomats, they didn’t stay for long — at the end of each year, I’d have to say goodbye to a Best Friend, and at the start of the next, I’d make a new one. I have a distinct memory of saying goodbye to my longest-term Best Friend at the time at the end of 4th grade. I realised that I didn’t feel anything anymore. I had said so many goodbyes that they had stopped affecting me. I was old enough to be scared by that. Would I ever care about anyone again?

That same 4th grade, I got my first boyfriend. He was a new boy the year above me I met on our fieldtrip to Paris, and I fell in love at first sight. We were next to each other in line to buy snacks, and he told me his favourite chocolate was Twix.

I had had intense crushes on boys before, but this was the first time I ever did anything about it. It happened like this:

A few weeks later, the 4th and 5th graders were on a minibus, on our way back from a field trip. Me and my two Best Friends were consulting with each other about our respective crushes, and decided to simply announce them. Emma said, “Stella loves Alex!”. I said, “Gretchen loves Vlad!”. Gretchen said, “Emma loves Brian!”.

The bus buzzed with gossip and soon the news reached us that the three of them loved the three of us, too. And so, we suddenly all had boyfriends.

Alex was half-Norwegian, half-English and had freckles and buck teeth and was really cool and popular. He wore big chunky skater shoes and baggy jeans and short-sleeved shirts layered on top of long-sleeved shirts. I had started dressing similarly (I was also in my Avril Lavigne phase at the time — I even had a pink streak in my hair). The fact that the coolest boy in primary school was now my boyfriend really cemented my belief that I was the coolest girl in primary school.

Of course, our match was not uncontested. One of his classmates (a French girl) loved him too. She challenged me to a rap battle in the school playground and we sang “Girlfriend” by Avril Lavigne. I won, obviously. After that, she mostly left me alone, although she would sometimes send me cryptic messages claiming that Alex actually loves her a lot more than me… Say that to the dozens of “ily” text messages we were sending each other or the glass heart necklace that he made me in art class for Valentine’s Day along with a poem saying “Roses are red, Violets are blue, something something something, And I love you” (I’ve long lost the card, unfortunately).

5th grade was when life started to look a bit less rosy. Firstly, my boyfriend had moved up to 6th grade, which was in middle school and meant all of his classes were now on the second floor while I was still stuck on the first floor with all the little kids. We inevitably grew apart, and he eventually broke up with me over e-mail. I later heard that he had left me for a different French girl (French girls are forever my nemesis).

Puberty was happening, all the girls were talking about bras and periods and I didn’t really want any part of it. Why was any of this exciting? I didn’t want my body to change!

My new Best Friend turned out to be a bit toxic and very troubled, and people around me in general started struggling more with their mental health. That was the year I became the therapist friend, staying up late on Skype convincing my friends that they weren’t fat and that they should eat three times a day.

I can’t lie, between the breakup, the stress of puberty, and the toxic friendship, my self-esteem was starting to feel shaky. I had always been a shy child, but that was when I first remember developing genuine anxiety around other people.

6th grade meant middle school, which meant change, and then, in the middle of the school year, even bigger change — my parents told me and my sister they couldn’t afford to continue paying tuition, so we would have to switch to a local public school. Thus began the downward trajectory of the next few years of my life.