Learning to swim

Transferring into a new high school part-way through your secondary schooling career (a career more lofty for some than for others) is perilous, above and away the usual trauma of life-relocation that usually happens in tandem with it.

Picture yourself as a goldfish that has been scooped out of the pet-store tank (which may have been manky, but was at least familiar) and placed into a temporary plastic bag - a bag through which you can view the entire world that now swings fleetingly before you. You do not know when you will leave your isolated plastic bag, and you do not know what location you are being taken to. This bag-bubble, while comfortable and full of possibility, is unnerving precisely because you do not know when it will all disappear and you will be expected to assimilate again.

Picture now, your plastic bag approaching a new aquarium full of new ornaments and a sleek host of strangers. The current inhabitants of the aquarium you are being dropped into are bigger, more confident,and much more capable of either excluding or eliminating trespassers in their patch of the ocean.

Now swim.