Today, I have a great guest post by the author of If He Had Been With Me. Read more to find out about this book and the author. Also later on today I will be posting my review of this book as well.
Ten Things I Wish I Could Change about my High School Years
1.
I
wish smart phones had existed, and that I'd had one.
This seems frivolous, I know, but
when I was in high school only the rich kids had cell phones at all, and wi-fi
was a rare and wondrous thing. I can only imagine how cool it must be to get
into hilarious hijinks with your friends, and be able to post pics of your
shenanigans in real time. If we did something cool, we had to tell people about
it later, and we probably didn't have photographic proof, because pictures were
these paper things you had to pay money to have made.
Now, my high school sweetheart was
not a bad guy by any means, but looking back I see how I only dated him for my
entire high school career because I liked the idea of only having one boyfriend
ever. If I had really been following my heart, I would have admitted to myself
that he wasn't the one and only guy for me, and I could have possibly had a
wider range of romantic experience.
3.
I
wish I had broken more rules.
I was a good kid. A really, really
good kid. Sometimes as an adult I wish I had some of the
when-I-was-a-crazy-teen stories that other people have.
4.
I
wish I had learned to drive.
In If He had Been with Me, Autumn manages to graduate high school
without learning to drive. I managed to graduate from college and get married
without a driver's license. I let a small anxiety grow into a massive mental
block, and I wonder what the ego-boost of conquering my fear would have done for
teenage me.
5. I wish I had admitted to others that I
needed help.
As an adult I have been diagnosed
with clinical depression, but as a teenager I hid my depressive episodes from
my loved ones. I can only imagine how different those years would have been if
I would have admitted my to struggle and
gotten the help I needed.
6.
I
wish I had worked harder in Spanish class, and gone to Spain on the class trip.
I ended up minoring in Spanish, but
I never did get the experience of full immersion, and now my skills are so
rusty that I'll probably never be fluent.
7.
I
wish our exchange student had lived with us all four years
Swantje lived with my family for
ten months. She challenged and inspired me, and ultimately changed me forever.
To this day I keep a picture of her by my writing desk.
8.
I
wish I had cared less about what other people thought.
I think everyone feels this way
about their high school years. At the time, I claimed that I didn’t care what
others thought, but when I compare that to how much I really don’t care now...
9.
I
wish I’d been less critical of my body
When I look at pictures of my
teenage self, I just want to grab that girl by the shoulders and scream, “Your
stomach IS flat! It really is! And you are not
appreciating how high your breast are! Your stomach is flat and your breasts
are perky! Go put on a string bikini and feel fabulous! Right Now!”
10. I wish I had written more.
To be fair, I think this is
something I will always say about any time in my life. I guess it's nice to
know that some things will never change.
If he had been with me, he wouldn't have died. Throughout their whole childhood, Finn and Autumn were inseparable—they finished each other's sentences, they knew just what to say when the other person was hurting. But one incident in middle school puts them in separate social worlds come high school, and Autumn has been happily dating James for the last 2 years. But she's always wondered what if... The night she's about to get the answer is also one of terrible tragedy.
Laura Nowlin holds a B.A. in English with an emphasis in Creative Writing from Missouri State University. Her short stories have appeared in The Moon City Review and STEM. In addition to being ambitious writer Laura is also an avid reader who believes that books allow her to live many lives in one lifetime. When she isn’t at home agonizing over her own novels Laura works at the public library where the patrons give her plenty of inspiration for her writing. She lives in St. Louis with her musician husband, neurotic dog, and psychotic cat.
