Open Arms

First off, I would just like to say THANK YOU to all Oak Hill students and staff, for welcoming me, Florida Man, into this community with such open arms for my first and last year here.  It’s been nothing but a positive experience, filled with help and support along the way.

I moved here last summer when I had become tired of being a homeless and hopeless dropout.  I’m grateful for my grandparents for letting me stay with them while I figure some stuff out.  Florida was a really hard place for someone like me to grow up.  I had always been a little ‘different’, but it was hard to be different down there.  I remember being 12 years old and not being able to even imagine a future for myself in the slightest.  It was all blank.  I felt blank for a long time.

Where I came from, help was something that was a lot harder to reach out for, because most of the time, there wasn’t even help to be given, especially if you didn’t conform to what the majority expected of you.  And while there were a bazillion reasons I decided to drop out back in 2018, one of the biggest and broadest, was because I was not able to get help.  For anything really.  I never felt at home in Florida.  And there’s another bazillion reasons I ended up moving to Maine, but after being here for only almost a year, I can already tell that this was the best decision I have ever made.  

You guys have a very close knit community that I had never ever witnessed before.  It’s not perfect, obviously it can’t be, but I have never seen so many people willing to help one another before.  It almost felt surreal, especially at first.  There were admin and students asking me if I needed help getting around, and people asking how I was holding up in my classes.  And I know I was not able to integrate myself and become a part of this huge ‘family’ in the span of one (partial) school year, I really felt almost at home.

Making friends here compared to making friends back at my old school was another culture shock.  I never was able to keep friends because of how blank I was.  It was a big popularity scam down there, and here, people just came up to me and started conversations about anything.  It was definitely weird at first because I had the same expectations as the kids back where I was from. Like, these people are going to leave just like everyone else.  But they didn’t.  And of course the curriculum is completely different here too.  I feel like I learned a lot more practical things this year.  School felt less pointless to me, I didn’t feel like I was wasting my time.

And on top of everything, I learned a lot about myself as well.  I learned that I really actually did want to go to college.  Being passionate about the environment in theory sounds great, but being up here around all this nature really puts things in a different light for me.  I think I’m more appreciative of the things around me, and even myself.

Photo on Foter.com