Read more of Tim’s stories here.

The Harbinger’s awards included:

Newspaper Computer Generated Art – 3rd Place – Sam Logan

Newspaper Critical Review Writing – Honrable Mention- Duncan McHenry

Newspaper Critical Review Writing -1st Place – Alex Lamb

Newspaper Editorial Cartoon – Honorable Mention – Alyssa Jolitz

Newspaper Editorial Cartoon – 1st Place – Alyssa Jolitz

Newspaper Facing Page Design – Honorable Mention – Sam Logan

Newspaper Facing Page Design – 2nd Place – Andrew Goble

Newspaper Feature Photography – Honorable Mention – Mackenzie Wylie

Newspaper Feature Photography – Honorable Mention – Mackenzie Wylie

Newspaper Feature Story – 3rd Place – Chris Heady

Newspaper Hand- Generated Art – 1st Place – Alyssa Jolitz

Newspaper In- Depth Series or Special Section – 3rd Place – Staff

Newspaper Infographic Design – 1st Place – Maddy Bailey

Newspaper Informative Feature Story 2nd Place Duncan McHenry

Newspaper News Photography 3rd Place Mackenzie Wylie

Newspaper News Story – 1st Place – Logan Heley

Newspaper Overall Design – 1st Place – The Harbinger

Newspaper Regular Column – Honorable Mention – Mac Tamblyn

Newspaper Single Page Design – 3rd Place – Phoebe Unterman

Newspaper Single Page Design – 1st Place – Maddy Bailey

Newspaper Sports Feature Story – Honorable Mention – Sam Kovzan

Newspaper Sports Photography – Honorable Mention – Mackenzie Wylie

Newspaper Sports Photography – 1st Place – Michael Stolle

The Hauberk’s awards included:

Yearbook Academic Copy – Honorable Mention – Will Kenney

Yearbook Academic Copy – 2nd Place – Mallory Fisher

Yearbook Academics Section Design – 1st Place – Emily Kulaga

Yearbook Best Overall Coverage 2nd Place Gabriella Thompson

Yearbook Club Section Design Honorable Mention Emily Kulaga

Yearbook Club Section Design – 1st Place – Gabriella Thompson/John Francis

Yearbook Clubs Copy – Honorable Mention – Libby Wooldridge

Yearbook Clubs Copy – Honorable Mention – Will Kenney

Yearbook Computer-Generated Art/ Photo Illustration – 1st Place – Gabriella Thompson

Yearbook Headline Package Design – 1st Place – Will Chertoff

Yearbook Portrait Section Design – 2nd Place – Hannah Walter/Ellie Jones

Yearbook Secondary Coverage Design – Honorable Mention – Kate Kulaga

Yearbook Sports Section Design- Honorable Mention – Will Chertoff

Yearbook Student Life Section Design – 1st Place – Gabriella Thompson

The JEMKC honors were a pleasant surprise for the publication coming off of  its “Best in Show” win about a month prior at the NSPA’s spring convention held in Portland Oregon.

On April 17th the Shawnee Mission East journalism department ranked amongst the best in the country roping in a slew of awards for its three publications: The Harbinger, the highly esteemed newspaper, The Harbinger Online, the publication’s website, and The Hauberk, the yearbook. For the first time ever the Online staff got a taste of victory, earning their first ever Pacemaker award.

Runner Up High School Journalist of the Year: Tim Shedor

Online Pacemaker Finalist: The Harbinger Online

Online Pacemaker Winner: The Harbinger Online

Best of Show for Website, 2nd Place: The Harbinger Online

Best of Show 4th place, Special Edition: The Harbinger

NSPA Best of show for 17+ pages: The Harbinger

NSPA Yearbook Pacemaker Finalist: The Haurberk

On top of the previous list of accomplishments, East exceeded even their own expectations this year by being the only school in the country to place in the finalist category in each of its publication.

“It was a huge honor,” Co-Editor Tim Shedor said. “The biggest ego-stroke at the convention was grabbing the Online Pacemaker. We went from not even placing in Best of Show in November to winning the most acclaimed high school journalism award and placing second above publications that had won half a dozen Pacemakers.”

The Harbinger Online’s complete transformation is directly credited to the handiwork of juniors Logan Heley and Patrick McGannon along with seniors Tim Shedor and Michael Stolle. All of whom worked overtime adding new content and keeping the website’s design top knotch.

As East brought home numerous awards for the staff as a whole, several individuals also excelled in their contest submissions at the NSPA event. Senior Whitaker Sherk, junior Alysabeth Albano and sophomore Alex Lamb won “Honorable Mentions” for their respective contest entries. Sherk won yearbook layout, Albano grabbed news writing and Lamb, review writing. Senior Tim Shedor, and sophomores Evan Nichols and Corbin Barnds all won “Excellents” for their work in Feature Writing, Info Graphics, and Sports Writing. Anna Petrow won a “Superior” for her work in Photography Portfolios. Petrow also received a “Superior,” the highest possible rating, in Photography Portfolio.

Lastly, the Haurberk continued its streak as one of the best yearbooks in the nation by winning second in the Best of Show category along with receiving a Pacemaker, an award that only 30 publications across the nation are honored with.

The year was marked by broadcasts of girls’ soccer and basketball games and boys’ basketball and baseball.

Something goes off in Goldman’s brain. What this boy said—it’s sincere, it’s convoluted, it’s completely trusting. He instinctively reaches for his notebook, the one filled with snippets from conversations and notable observations. It’s not there.

Goldman looks around the restaurant waiting area. He grabs a nearby piece of paper and jots down what the six-year-old had said, verbatim.

He looks down at the scrap of paper that just saved him. It’s a contact card so the restaurant can send e-mails about its latest specials. He’ll file it later that night, but this card will be of more use to him than a 2-for-1 deal. It could be used for a story.

“Pretty much anything anyone says,” Goldman said. “If not directly used in a story, can have something to do with getting an idea for one.”

***

“Watching the birth of new muscle is like watching the growth of a vine in fast motion. It blooms from the seed and wraps, wraps about the bone, forms a coiled spiral.” –Muscle, short story by Goldman

Observing, recording, thinking—Goldman constantly searches for elements he can use in his writing. Whether he’s actively writing or just taking a walk to solidify his ideas, writing is always on his mind. Even amidst failure and rejection, he is wholly committed to his passion. Goldman has written three novels and is currently writing a fourth.

During November of his freshman, sophomore, and junior years, Goldman participated in National Novel Writing Month. This competition challenges writers to complete a “Catcher in the Rye” length narrative during the allotted time. 50,000 words over the course of 30 days. That’s 12,500 words a week. 1,666 words a day.

If you finish on time, you win. In the 2008 competition, that honor went to 17 percent of participants.

In eighth grade, Goldman attempted to write a novel on his own. He got through 60 pages of single-space, point 12 Times New Roman before abandoning it. Goldman was determined to win the competition, steadily writing each day.

“I’m going to do this,” he told himself. “I’m going to do this.”

When he finished by the deadline, he titled his first novel “Reaper.” The rest of his portfolio is filled with short stories and “short-shorts,” stories under 500 words. Goldman is quick to push away the misnomer that a short story is a quick read—in fact, short stories can be up to 40 pages. He even wrote a Frequent Friday for his friend senior Kaevan Tavakolinia called “In the Aeroplane Over the Sea,” based on the album by Neutral Milk Hotel with the same name.

He chose eight of his best pieces and compiled them into a “Senior General Writing Portfolio” that he later submitted to the Scholastic Writing Awards.

“My purpose in writing is simply to use words to illuminate truth,” he wrote at the beginning of his Statement of Purpose, outlining how he came to write each piece. He hoped to change his readers with his writing.

The national competition judges the portfolios of creativity, technique, and originality. Goldman’s won the “Silver Key Award,” equitable to second place, at the Missouri regional awards. Though he won’t go onto the national competition, it is always gratifying when Goldman receives recognition from an outside source.

“Someone had to read your work and score it high enough,” Goldman said. “In a field that is very much known for not giving acknowledgement except from the people close to you.”

In spite of these honors, he gets back a lot of stock rejection letters from the publications where he submitted a piece. A three by two slip of paper, saying “Thank you for submitting, but it doesn’t fit our magazine.” He’s not too offended by its generic nature; he knows that it would take exorbitant amounts of money to hire enough people to write personal letters to all people who submit stories. He’s just disappointed. He still tries though, sending in as much as he can, to as many publications as he can.

“You’re probably going to get a hundred rejections before you get an acceptance,” Goldman said. “So you might as well fill up those rejections first.”

***

“Damon was something intriguing, an onion with all its layers hidden by the skin. The detective in July longed to peel it back, peel them all back, examine the pulsing alien core within.” –Grief Counseling, short story by Goldman

Goldman doesn’t remember when he started creating works of fiction. His parents tell him that when he first started to talk, he would get them or a babysitter to write down the stories he would dictate. Later, he would scribble illustrations to match the stories.

Sometimes he would play a game—“Action Stories,” he called it. Grabbing a handful of action figures, Goldman would direct a play with his parents, his sister, and whoever else he could find. Recreating his favorite movies, Goldman would have them act out scenes under his instruction. Sometimes “Aladdin” would have the traditional three wishes, Genie, and magic carpet, but it was always up for change. New characters and plot twists could appear at any time.

When he was eight-years-old, Goldman began a series. The first story was twenty pages of computer paper stapled together with illustrations and one sentence per page. It chronicled the stories of Godzilla, Power Rangers, and Goosebumps through an angel in heaven. The climax? Said angel getting hit with a nuclear missile. He didn’t really know what a nuclear missile was, but it sounded pretty awesome.

Alien races, sci-fi sagas, fantasy epics—anything was up for a story. The real fun for the young Goldman was in creating these worlds, while the process of getting the words down on paper wasn’t as enjoyable. Afterwards, once he was finished with his initial writing, he liked reading them over, editing them, making them really good.

Then, in high school English, there came a love for books without dragons and aliens. “Catcher in the Rye,” “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” “The Grapes of Wrath.” Everything from the themes to the descriptions inspired him to dig deeper into writing.

Now, as a senior, Goldman enjoys the writing process. He usually handwrites his stories at first, then later types and finishes them on the computer. He doesn’t need to map out the entire plot before starting anymore. He dives right in, sees where it goes, and if something gets confusing, so be it. Working himself out of a hole is fun.

“I think that most of the stories I like best that I’ve written, I started without having any idea where they were going,” Goldman said.

After he finishes a story, he’ll hand it over to his girlfriend senior Charlie Kline even before he’s read it over himself. Kline has been reading and critiquing his work since eighth grade. At first, she tried to “sandwich” her comments, making sure that before a bad one there was always a good one.

“I started thinking that was really stupid,” Kline said. “If I was thinking that ‘this whole paragraph sucked,’ why don’t I just ex it all out?”

Goldman appreciates both her positive comments and criticism. This is a quality he values in anyone who reads his work. Hearing “this is great!” is nice, but not exactly helpful.

“You’re free to disagree with your critic,” Goldman said.

Sitting down and reading his stories is one of Kline’s favorite things to do. She can spot the evolution in Goldman’s writing in the five years she’s been editing his work, and she thinks he has developed as an individual writer.

“At first you could tell what authors he’d been reading,” Kline said. “I could pick a paragraph and say ‘that totally sounds like Douglass Adams!’… Now, it’s like he’s found his own style.”

Last year, Goldman was accepted into the Iowa Young Writer’s Studio, a camp put on by the Iowa Writer’ Workshop, one of the most prestigious writing programs in college. He worked in a class that was part literature seminar, part writing workshop. Students analyzed what makes up fiction, looking at characters, plot, point of view, and other plot devices.

Goldman often e-mails his stories to his teacher from the Studio, Marjorie Celona. She’ll send back her thoughts on the pieces, looking at what works and what doesn’t.

“Nathan’s stories are edgy, subversive, funny, and bold—he isn’t afraid to experiment or explore taboo subject matter—and yet he is just as capable of writing in a traditionalist vein,” Celona said. “[He has] a firm grasp of the craft of writing…but also a willingness and eagerness as a writer to stretch his boundaries, to try on new voices and new ideas, and ultimately find his own voice on the page.”

***

“…[T]hey’ve forgotten that this is not nature at all – nature is primordial and ugly.” –Aspirations, short story by Goldman

Goldman sits at his computer, scrolling through an Excel document. The entries date back to 2007. “Elijah,” submitted to “Analog Science Fiction & Fact” and “Apex Digest.” Rejected.

His database is filled with information about different magazines, where each story is going, what ended up happening to it. He’s got 20 manuscripts circulating, and he’s gotten about 20 rejection letters.

Even Celona is brutally honest when talking about the likelihood of making it in the fiction industry. Despite her unfaltering support and belief in Goldman’s talents, she calls the chances of success, “Near impossible, but not impossible.”

Regardless of these set-backs, Goldman is still adamant about having a career in writing—not only that, but a thriving career. When someone asks him what he wants to do, he gives an easy answer: writing. They’ll retort, “What’s your back-up plan, how are you going to make money?” His reply is just as easy as the first.

“I don’t have one,” Goldman said. “I’m pretty confident that I’ll be able to do this…however long it takes before it’ll be successful.”

Writing fiction is his passion, but he’s not limiting himself to just that. Right now, he’s searching for other avenues to get into writing. He writes reviews for the Web site Webcuts Music, unpaid, but he gets free CDs. He also writes for Tangent Online reviewing sci-fi and fantasy stories from magazines.

“Someday someone could read a review I write and send me a letter and then I end up getting a book deal out of it,” Goldman said. “You never know, so I’m trying to make as many connections as possible.”

Next year Goldman is planning on heading to St. John’s College, which has campuses in both Sante Fe and Annapolis. At St. John’s, students read the “great books,” like the “Iliad” and “Aenied”, in chronological order. For math, you start by reading Euclid’s “Elements of Geometry.” There are no tests, just 15 person group discussions.

At first Goldman worried about attending St. John’s, since he couldn’t major in creative writing. But he hopes reading these classics will be more beneficial than being forced to write papers. He’ll keep up with writing on his own time, finding ideas at a restaurant, on campus, wherever. Despite those three by two letters, he says he’ll keep observing, keep recording, keep thinking one thing:

“I plan on making it.”

***

It’s 7 a.m. on the day that I have to take the SAT. I turn the music on in my silver Volvo 240 and head towards Rockhurst High School. The song is “Charlie” by the Red Hot Chili Peppers. Once inside, the test goes pretty much as planned: four-and-a-half hours filled with bubbling and erasing. A few kids break out the string cheese and Nutri Grain bars as brain food during the intermissions. I just sip the metallic water from the drinking fountain and try not to stare at the hands of the clock.

“I have to get out of here,” I think to myself. I glance up across the room lit by cheap fluorescent lights, the walls the color of sour milk. Ten minutes to go and my head is an aching jumble of useless rewording, reasoning and reading. The midpoint formula and the volume of a cube jumble together with passages about everything from nature to an explanation of earthquakes.

After slopping down a halfhearted essay on Machiavellian ethics I stuff my two dulled Ticonderoga pencils in my jean pocket and walk out into the hall. I’m planning on a nice, relaxing day of TV, a chicken burrito with everything but beans from Chipotle and maybe a party that night. Then I hear the words that make that impossible.
“Duncan, do you know anything about Bryan?” A girl from my school asks with a concerned look on her face.
“No, what happened? Is he in trouble?” I say, thinking that Bryan probably got busted at a party, or maybe broke an ankle while heelflipping a ten stair on his skateboard.
“I got a text from Erika,” she says, “saying ‘my friend Bryan is in the hospital in a coma. Pray for him’.”
I can’t manage any words. My thoughts skitter away in 1,000 different directions. Bryan in a coma? Did he fall while skating? Was he in a car with a drunk driver? I call my friend and Bryan’s best friend Adam as soon as I leave the building. He answers with a distant hello, like I’m talking to him through an intercom and he’s miles underground.

“Adam, did something happen to Bryan?” I ask. “What’s going on?”

There’s a pause and Adam’s voice quivers. “Let me call you back.”

***

I feel dazed as I climb into my boxy Volvo again. I back out in the midst of a couple hundred exhausted and relieved teenagers and my phone dings. It’s a text message from Adam. I stop abruptly in the middle of the parking lot, blocking the traffic. The words appear on my phone screen and drown out the car horns.

-Bryan is gone. He hit a tree last night.
I had just shown my mom a video of him skating with his new team the night before. He had that nollie heelflip on lock. He used to joke about being sponsored by a skate shop, only to tell me later that he was just messing with me. But I knew that he wanted it to be true, and that he was good enough for it to happen someday. He had just gotten sponsored by Studio Skate Supply two weeks ago. How could he be gone right after that?

Not Bryan, the guy who always greeted me with a cheerful yell of my name from Spanish class, “Domingoooo!” then cocked his arm back past his head for our middle school handshake. Not Bryan, the one who knew I liked a girl at a party in seventh grade and dared her to kiss me because I was too nervous to make a move. Not Bryan, my friend who stayed up late and watched “Saw” with me, then kept me up until four in the morning asking,

“Could that ever actually happen?”

Over and over again.

***

I eat a chicken sandwich and waffle fries at Chic-fil-A with my friend Jordan and his dad after the SAT. Why doesn’t anything feel different? If Bryan were really gone, people wouldn’t be laughing and buying chocolate shakes. There’s no way I’d be having a mechanized conversation about college applications over lunch. Then the words light up on my phone screen and drown everything out again.

-We’re all meeting at Ellie’s. Come if you can.
I stop by my house to change. I tell my mom about the SAT, then about Bryan and I drop down into the black leather chair in our living room. She starts sobbing immediately and asks if I’m sure, not believing that it’s true. I wonder what’s wrong with me. My stomach and legs feel empty and thin, but I can’t cry. I drive to Ellie’s alone with no music playing.

When I get there, Ellie greets me with a feeble smile and a hug. I can tell she’s been crying by the red veins and puffy spots around her eyes. We climb the white carpeted stairs and I see a group of over 20 kids sitting, crying and hugging. I sit down on top of a wooden desk by a computer where an image of Ellie grabbing Bryan’s chin and smiling is already the screensaver. I try to let out the sadness but I can’t. I’m afraid that it doesn’t seem like I care. That I’m not as sad as everyone else. Then Ellie tells the story, her voice laden with rattling deep breaths as she struggles to remain composed.

“Bryan was going too fast down Ward Parkway,” she says. “He took his eyes off the road and hit a tree, and then his car swung into another tree. They think he was brain dead instantly.”

People all around break into gasping sobs. I see the twin football players Kris and Kevin Hertel bawling into their royal blue KU basketball T-shirts. I’ve never seen them cry, and the tears begin sliding down my face. Why did it have to be Bryan? His potential seemed limitless, he could have ridden that piece of plywood on aluminum and urethane until he was famous. People in the skateboard community were calling him “the next big thing out of KC.” And he had just gotten sponsored two weeks before.

Then the stories start.

“Remember when Bryan dressed up as Elvis for Halloween?”

“Or the time we played hot tub Olympics and filmed it? Bryan almost broke his leg jumping into that hot tub.”

“What about the time we played hide and seek and Bryan stayed hidden for so long that he crapped his pants?”

Through the tears and sadness everyone starts laughing. We start talking about a foundation to help kids get sponsored for skateboarding who really want and deserve it. We start planning a candle light vigil.

I look around the room and realize that the people here aren’t just from our grade, and most of them rarely see each other outside of school. There’s a senior with a stubbly black beard, a striped shirt filled with holes and a beanie next to the two twin football players. A preppy guy in a lime green Polo shirt is hugging Bryan’s best friend Adam the blues guitar player. I realize that’s the kind of kid Bryan was. Kind to everyone and always confident in himself. Fitting in everywhere.

As we all get up to leave after close to four hours of remembering I give Adam a hug, too. I tell him that I love him and we all walk back down the white-carpeted stairs. I get back into my car and the tears start flowing again. I’m glad that I can let it out, even though it’s still impossible to understand why Bryan had to leave us at age 17, and my grandpa remains confined to his wheelchair. I turn my car on and head towards home, this time with the music playing. The song is “Could You Be Loved” by Bob Marley. It reminds me of Bryan.

The Harbinger Online staff was also noted as a finalist for the online Pacemaker award. The award is presented by the National Scholastic Press Association or NSPA to the best publication websites in the country. The winner of the award will be announced at the Spring High School Journalism Convention April 15-18 in Portland Oregon.

In addition to these awards, the Harbinger staff is proud to boast two of the top three high school journalists in Kansas. On March 8, the Kansas Scholastic Press Association announced that our very own Co-Editor and Chief Tim Shedor was named as the Kansas High School Journalist of the year. Shedor will go to Lawrence May 1 to be recognized for his hard work.

After winning the high school journalist of the year for Kansas, Shedor’s portfolio goest on to the NSPA where he could become the third winner in five years of national high school journalist of the year.

The Harbinger’s other Co-Editor and Chief, Phoebe Unterman brought home third place in the competition.

Soundslide by Lindsey Hartnett and Anna Marken.

***

For Alyssa, drawing is an escape. When things make her upset or sad, she draws. She can control her art, can control the surroundings and actions of the characters in her art. Her lines are precise, and her colors and shading are laboriously and perfectly complete. The art is hers, and it swings with her mood. Life is in Alyssa’s control when she is drawing on her tablet, and that’s the way she wants it to be.
***
Alyssa had doodled as a child, but her art career started when she was 8. She had seen a Wacom Tablet, which is a pad that transfers drawings to the computer, at Micro Center on a trip with her dad Charles Jolitz. She wanted it. She wasn’t even sure why, but she just wanted it. One day, her dad came home with it.
She began to fall in love with drawing. By the time she was 11, she started to recreate anime cartoons. She made up her own full-length comics with characters in the same style she had seen. She liked to make up back-stories for the characters she created.
Art was a way for her to express herself. She is “incredibly shy” by her own account; in this interview she preferred to write down her answer to most questions. Her sister Kelsey, who was 14 months older and, in childhood, inseparable from Alyssa, often spoke for her.
Her doodles often created discussion without her having to speak. One of her favorite art moments came while she was doodling on loose pieces of paper at a seafood restaurant with her family. Kansas City weatherman Bryan Busby walked up to her and picked up a few of her drawings. He raved about her art, told her how good she was, how she really was going to be something someday. She remembered that feeling of impressing someone. It felt good.
Margaret remembers another moment at the Prairie Art Show that revealed a lot about Alyssa’s skills.
“The parents said ‘Well, that’s not artwork. That’s just stuff that’s printed out.’” Margaret said. “The kids said ‘No, you don’t understand. Alyssa draws that.’”
Under the name “Neko Sama,” Alyssa started uploading art at 2draw.net, an online art community. She received a lot of positive support there, too. With new fans, Alyssa was encouraged to produce a lot of art; she wore down the nib of her hard plastic tablet pen quickly.
As she grew up, the type of art she drew changed with what was happening in her life. She fell in love with the movie The Lion King around the time she entered middle school. The flow and beauty of the images hooked her in. She watched it at least 50 times.
“During that time that’s probably when I started considering animation to be a career instead of being just a ‘drawer,’” Alyssa said.
She knew the names of the animators; professionals such as Glen Keane and Preston Blair inspired her. People that didn’t know her would tease her, call her “Simba Girl” at school. She didn’t care. They didn’t understand.
She moved to Deviantart.com, another online art community, and began her Lion King recreations under the name “SnowTigerCub.” She would draw the same character, but in her own style—called “fan art.” She began getting more views and positive comments than usual, and that encouraged her to draw even more.
“The people whom I show my artwork to, either online or off, are very supportive,” Alyssa said. “All the friends I have made from my various galleries are always willing to help me out if I need anything, even if it’s not art-related.”
Moving through middle school, Alyssa spent a lot of time drawing, watching cartoons, or playing video games. She was shy, and enjoyed time alone. She played a lot of video games. She especially loved video games where the characters looked like cartoons.
These games often translated into art she would upload. She would sit down in front of the T.V., pull the game out of the Nintendo 64, and draw the frame that froze in front of her—whatever it was when she pulled the game out, in full detail.
When Alyssa was 13, her mom brought her to the Kansas City TeenStar. She did illustrations to accompany the articles. She was invited in middle school, the only middle schooler on the high school staff. She was too shy to hardly ever say anything. She just drew what they asked her to.
But Alyssa wanted somewhere where she could control what type of art she did. Online, the fans begged for more recreations of other people’s art, and for the TeenStar, she had little control.
She wanted to be able to choose what her characters looked like, what the scenario was, where they were, everything. It was her art, and she wanted to be shaped by her influences—not the influences of what people wanted. She was tired of mimicking the professionals. Alyssa was willing to potentially lose her fans that loved her renditions more than her original work.
Since October of 2007, Alyssa has been known as “dodgyrommer,” an artist with a style that describes as a mix of ‘30s and ‘40s cartoons with a little of the ‘90s cartoons she grew up with.
It isn’t as popular as the fan art, but Alyssa doesn’t mind. The new style is hers, and she had control of it when she had control over little else.
***
When Alyssa was 11, she joined Alateen, a group that helps teens deal with having a family member or friend that has a drinking problem. Her dad was an alcoholic. He would hide it from her, and he would try and cover it up. She knew anyways.
Alyssa also fell back on art in the process of her parents’ divorce. She would shut herself in her room and try to drown out their fighting by drawing. It gave her something to do while she waited for the fights to stop. She would draw comics about her having to deal with the fights and her dad’s alcoholism.
Alyssa’s mom remembers that lots of different things came together at once and pushed Alyssa to draw to get away from it.
“I think there was so much going on at that time…her sister was at an age where she was going her own way and they were separating from each other,” Margaret said. “For so long, they were the same person.”
In the drawings, she transformed her parents into cats. She drew herself as a kitten, one that didn’t understand the problem but was always trying to build up the courage to intervene. The fights confused her. The drawings helped. It also gave her a chance to escape to her room.
Counselors tried to provide help. They gave her prescriptions for antidepressants, but she did not take them regularly. She didn’t like people trying to control her emotions. Again, she preferred to control them on her own.
“I was on antidepressants for about a year or so and usually lied about taking them,” Alyssa said. “Usually I would throw them away because I didn’t like the way they made me feel.”
Her father’s health had always been a reoccurring issue. When she was 5, he had his first back surgery. Then another, and another, and another—five total. Then neck surgery. When she was 9, he had to have both hips replaced. They often dislocated.
She didn’t understand the seriousness of her dad’s condition until she was 9, and then it worried her. Charles had been diagnosed with a severe muscle and bone degeneration disease. He lost the muscles in his calves, then his left forearm and hand.