For most of my life, I thought my childhood was normal.
My parents didn’t believe in traditional school. They believed in something called “unschooling.” The idea wasn’t that kids should never learn. It was almost the opposite. They believed children are naturally curious and that if you let them experience the world, they’d figure out what they needed to know on their own.
If I wanted to learn math, I’d ask. If I wanted to learn history, I’d ask. If I wanted to read better, I’d ask. They believed forcing kids through a school curriculum only made learning worse.
I actually understand why some people find that idea appealing. School isn’t perfect. Plenty of people have bad experiences in school. My mom thought the whole system was flawed and believed there had to be a better way.
The problem is that the theory only works if a child already knows what they’re supposed to be asking.
When you’re six years old, you don’t know that you’re behind in reading. You don’t know you should be learning multiplication, grammar, or science. You don’t know there are things every other kid your age is learning. You just assume your life is normal because it’s the only one you’ve ever known.
That’s exactly what happened to me.
I didn’t spend my childhood asking to learn algebra, writing, or history because I didn’t know those were things I was supposed to be learning in the first place. I wasn’t refusing an education. I didn’t even realize one was missing.
For years, I thought this was just how childhood worked.
It wasn’t until I was around fifteen or sixteen that I started realizing how different my life had been. Oddly enough, the first thing I noticed wasn’t the education.
It was the isolation.
For most of my childhood, it was just me, my brother, and my parents. We might go to the grocery store, but that was about it. I didn’t have classmates, neighborhood friends, sports teams, or clubs. I didn’t even make my first real friend until I was around fifteen.
Looking back, I think that’s what hurt me the most.
School isn’t just where you learn facts. It’s where you learn how to be around other people. You learn how to make friends, work with people you don’t like, deal with arguments, and become comfortable talking to strangers. I missed almost all of that.
The education gaps were real, too.
Reading and writing have always been difficult for me. I think I may have dyslexia, although I’ve never been tested. My dad tried teaching me basic reading when I was younger, but it never really clicked. Today I still use speech-to-text because writing is hard.
The internet ended up teaching me more than my childhood did.
I’d see people talking about things everyone seemed to know, and I’d realize I’d never even heard of them. Sometimes I’d recognize something only because it had become a meme online. I know the mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell because people joke about it on the internet, not because anyone ever taught me biology.
Slowly it hit me that I wasn’t just missing random facts.
I had missed an education.
Things are getting better now. With the help of my therapist, I’ve enrolled in an online school. It’s hard because I’m learning things that most people learned years ago, but at least I’m finally learning them.
I’ve started making friends, I have a supportive boyfriend, and for the first time I feel like I’m building a life instead of just watching one go by.
When people ask what I want in the future, my answer is pretty simple.
I don’t want anything extraordinary.
I just want the normal life I never got the chance to prepare for.