Ken Ebel:  

I am very interested in the fact that I remember my time in high school with such immediate lucidity, almost as if it were not a memory, but an ongoing experience. I have heard may people say that that time for them is either "long gone" and vague or a source "nostalgia," which I take to mean that it is long gone but somewhat regrettably so. For me it is neither of these. It is a part of my living reality. If it is truly gone, happily or regrettably, then what, in terms of time, is finally real? You think your life now is the real life, but it too will pass away. So finally none of it is real. For me it is all real. High school was both a very exciting and difficult time for me. I loved being engaged in the question of who and what I was in the world, but I met with so much resistance in the environment against what I wanted to be that the stress was very great and frequently confusing. I was a very introverted and intuitive type of youth with a natural inclination toward acting on impulse and artistic expressions. I was actually very open, caring and sensitive to other people's challenges, but I felt so shallowly and severely judged and rejected that I became self-defensive and defiantly rebellious with a lot of hidden doubt about what I should do and be. In the end I trusted my intuition and my deepest sense of what was real. People told me I should be primarily concerned with how I was going to survive in the world. But I was more concerned with how I was going to keep from losing my real self in the wo...Expand for more