A happy outcome of publishing my book has been having some older alumni read it and sending along some kind words.  One of the first to do so was Laura Gilbert.  Laura teased me a bit that her story wasn’t included in the book, and I offered to include her in this blog as an “Alumna Profile.”  (This offer stands for all of you alums out there.)

          Laura has written up her story in a powerful way.  Simply put, she experienced a difficult adolescence.  She ended up having two different moments of North Star membership, as she recounts here. I’m glad that she continues to identify with these times as an alumna.  

          Laura’s story fits into the “Hard Parts” chapter of my book.  I wish things might have gone differently for her.  I did not have the connection with her mother or family that would have been necessary for a different outcome.  Sometimes we have to acknowledge that teens are facing bigger issues than the choice between school and North Star. 

Laura was fighting to do the best she could when she was a member, and she continues to strive to live her best life right now.  She writes that she is now thirty years old, and I wish her well in her new decade.

                                    -K.D.

Liberated: To Learn to Live for a Living

Laura Gilbert
laura.catherine.gilbert@gmail.com

          In the general sense, the adolescent years are a time of growth, change, and learning. Youths spend ages twelve through 18, and sometimes several years past that, in a state of rapidly shifting metamorphosis. During this time, they discover themselves; simultaneously taking in secondary education, navigating the difficulties of interpersonal relationships outside the boundaries of childhood, and preparing for their first steps into the adult world. In short, adolescence, even when experienced in the most textbook and uncomplicated way, is definitively chaotic. This stage of development is additionally a time in which young people encounter a metaphorical torrential downpour of psychological and intellectual input. As all who are familiar with North Star’s mission or the concept of unschooling in general are aware; “learning is natural”.

          It is during the ‘tween’ and early adolescent years that typically, the beginning of self-discovery and exploration of comfort and pride in alternative orientations and gender identities takes place.  Teens make their own associations with sociocultural groups through fashion, makeup, music preferences, and exploration of religious, political, and philosophical ideologies and beliefs that might be considered radical, even rebellious, by their parents, grandparents, and extended families raising the young person, a word I specifically emphasize, with intent. I’m emphatic here not for drama, but because growing up as I did, and progressing through my adolescent years as I did left me wholly convinced that in certain circumstances, when parents or guardians are angered by adolescent development, learning, questioning, growth, and separation from the intellectual dependence of childhood, and when they call it ‘rebellion’, what they are really angered by is their child’s progress from ‘child’ to ‘person’.  In short, my family was not happy with the person I became during my adolescence.

          My name is Laura Gilbert. I joined North Star as a member in January of 2003, after I left eighth grade at my public school, in Ware, Massachusetts.  I was thirteen years old. My mother, a single parent, and I learned of North Star via an advertisement at the movie theatre and investigated further, seeing North Star as an ideal option and alternative to Ware High School, where I was being bullied extensively, and where the academics and low-performing programs in the school district had never been suited to what my mother desired for me. My mother arranged a meeting and interview with Ken and Josh, the co-founders of North Star, and the next week I joined as a member. It was almost an immediate realization for me that I, again, was different in comparison to my peers. Of course, everyone is different in their own way, and uniqueness among others, standing out, and individuality are traits to pride oneself upon. However, joining North Star in 2003, it was very clear that the way I was raised and was still being raised when I became a member that winter was starkly different in comparison to how the vast majority of other North Star members lived at home.

          My family was then and is still now staunchly conservative. Republican, pro-life, pro-second Amendment, the works. Growing up, the expectation was that I would agree with this alignment. I was kept fairly isolated with controlled reading and viewing material and did not have online access freely at home until I was fourteen years old. Over my entire upbringing, I had spent a lot of time with my grandparents, and unless an athletic game was on, the television was always tuned to Fox News; volume blaring. Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity’s words were gospel. In the car, Rush Limbaugh’s show grated our ears while my grandmother agreed with him aloud as we drove from place to place. My mother, a young single parent, was raised the same way, though less of a pious worshipper at the altar of all that is American conservatism. However, she told me proudly about the time when I was less than three years old and saw a pro-life ad on television, identifying a human embryo on the glass screen when the voice-over asked if the embryonic form was a chicken or a baby. As a toddler, supposedly, I pointed and said, “Baby!”.

          To this day, if I argue my stance in support of legalized abortion, I am reminded by my grandmother of my luck as the child of a young, single mother, that I, myself, was not aborted.

          I was removed from North Star in October of the following fall by my mother. She arrived early to collect me from the center one day and expected me to be there, because she knew I would usually have been attending Philosophy class at that time. She called my cell phone, which I’d left behind when I went for a walk down the Hadley Common to the river, as it was a nice day in the early fall and I just felt like a walk with my friend. My mother was irate to learn that I’d done this, and my next day at North Star was my last. I was removed from the center and placed back in public school, the same public school where I’d faced bullying that included physical assault, with the same peers and aloof administration, which felt like the worst possible punishment for something as simple as just making the choice, making a choice, an independent choice for myself, to go for a walk.

          And there it is.

          I made an independent choice and was essentially punished with the worst possible outcome. My mother fully understood what she was doing. However, my point in writing this isn’t to lament my adolescent woes, but to indicate that by spending that crucial year at North Star, I struck a flint to spark independence and began to kindle a fire to light my own path. I spent time over the rest of my teenage years developing my own ideas through learning, figuring out my identity on my terms, sometimes going the wrong way, sometimes going the very wrong way, struggling a little, struggling a lot, falling and getting back up. I was thrown out of my mother’s home when I was 17 and taken in and supported by two families in the North Star community, whose aid I am beyond and wordlessly grateful for. It was at this time that I returned to North Star. I wasn’t the same naïve parrot of my family’s ideals, nor was I a healthy and positive person. However, I was very fortunate that both times I came to North Star’s doors as a member, in 2003 and 2007, I was welcomed and supported. My educational interests and passions for writing and reading and music were encouraged. My weird, quirky personality and frankly, interesting fashion choices, were just part of who I was.

          Ken sent me a copy of his fantastic book, and he and I are friends on Facebook, so I was aware of his blog. I have wanted to say something for a while now about the concept of North Star’s ability to teach me not only educationally, but to teach me to think for myself and to actually learn, as opposed to absorb information by rote as I was told. Writing this essay, however, wasn’t as easy as just getting permission from Ken to take up space on his blog. A lot of memories about those years are buried, and my mother and I have not spoken in over a decade. However, I wanted to tell my story, in the event that it resonates with others. Joining North Star at age thirteen, even if the duration of my original membership was not very long, taught me that beliefs, alignments and identities that differed from the repetitive agenda my natal family instilled into me are worth investigating. Learning how to learn for myself, instead of being taught what others want me to learn, is a skill received from North Star that I continue to use, hope to use, and plan to use for years to come. My favorite spoken word poet, Buddy Wakefield, includes the quote; “Learn to live for a living” in his poem ‘Human the Death Dance’. I think that’s going to be my next step, as I find my way through my thirties and continue my education in college, while caring for my grandmother here in Florida and figure out what exactly I want to do. I am thirty now, and for the last three years I have worked in behavioral health, as a direct care professional for Devereux Advanced Behavioral Health’s Florida residential campus. Specifically, I have been working on the dual diagnosis unit, which is where we house our kids who are diagnosed with autism or another form of intellectual/developmental disability and a mental illness such as bipolar disorder or schizophrenia.

          Unfortunately, my own mental health took a toll, and I’m taking some time off this fall. I’m studying at Eastern Florida State College to become a behavior analyst for clients on the autism spectrum, but like I said, it’s all about always learning, and learning to live for a living.

P.S.  I completely forgot to include that I worked at the Route 9 Diner in Hadley for three years.  I am proud that I was involved in the process of outing and litigation against that restaurant for the sexual harassment of its waitresses for over a decade.  The settlement with the Massachusetts Attorney General led to the closing of that business.