Even as a kid, classmates asked pointed personal questions about my family. I have conditioned myself to handle it with maturity.
My sense of my own superiority over many of my classmates would have been much more muted if I knew that they had seen me failing miserably at woodwork or cross-stitch.
At school, before I left, I was making cake mixes and taking them to school, giving them to teachers and my classmates.
We used to tie-dye T-shirts and sell them to classmates. We used to make egg rolls and sell them at street fairs. I worked at the mall. My parents probably spent more money on the gas driving me to different jobs than I made.
When I was growing up, I had lots of smart classmates that were girls, but none of us were really pushed into math or computers or anything like that. Girls took AP history and AP English and AP European history. And boys took calculus and physics.
I went to private school for two years, then Aptos Middle School, and I finished at McAteer. Several of my classmates at those schools are my friends today.
I knew I would work in a community that I would like to live in, but I had no idea that I would ever go into politics, even though some of my classmates thought I would.
When I was in high school, I didn't feel like I had to pile on the APs in order to look good to colleges. High-achieving classmates didn't use private tutors.
I was the first in my family to go to college, and I waitressed all the way through, using my earnings to pay for a bachelor's degree first and then a master's. I resented classmates who didn't have to work real jobs, the ones who had the luxury of taking unpaid internships that would eventually position them for high-paying careers.
In high school ethics, they went around and asked what everyone thought their classmates were qualified to do. For me, everyone said actress. But to me it was very much 'if it happens, it happens.'
