Heading into her junior year at Auburn High School, Kayleen Wilkinson’s personal world was cascading into aToday's commencement What: Wells College graduation ceremony When: 10 a.m. Where: Aurora Inn lakeside lawn, Main Street, Aurora free-fall. She struck rock bottom by the end of that summer. Wilkinson was diagnosed with clinical depression and post-traumatic stress syndrome. She also suffered from...
Kayleen Wilkinson, who graduates today from Wells College, had to overcome a variety of obstacles in high school, before working on a successful career at Wells. Among her achievements is a scholarship to the Newhouse School at Syracuse University, where she will study to become a screenwriter. Heading into her junior year at Auburn High School, Kayleen Wilkinson’s personal world was cascading into aToday's commencement
What: Wells College graduation ceremony
When: 10 a.m.
Where: Aurora Inn lakeside lawn, Main Street, Aurora
free-fall. She struck rock bottom by the end of that summer.
Wilkinson was diagnosed with clinical depression and post-traumatic stress syndrome. She also suffered from an eating disorder much like anorexia, in which she lost 30 pounds over the summer. Basically, she had stopped eating and was down to 80 pounds by the start of school.
“When you have a child who refuses to eat it’s very scary because you can’t make them eat. She was down to skin and bones. There was nothing to her,” her mother Jackie Scanlon recalled this week.
Her family intervened. They nudged Wilkinson into counseling that fall and guided her onto a path of recovery. Today, five years later, Wilkinson, 21, will graduate from Wells College with a bundle of academic and athletic awards she’s won over the last four years. She is heading to graduate school at Syracuse University to become a movie and television screenwriter.
Wilkinson said she wants to draw from her experiences to write about the pains of personal losses laced with an underlying message of hope.
Her message?
“You don’t have to let your losses define you. You can get stronger from them ... . You need to find a middle ground and learn from them,” said Wilkinson, who collects dictionaries and has enjoyed writing for as long as she can remember.
Wells English professor Bruce Bennett said Wilkinson shined in his writing classes and has a bright future as a writer or whatever profession she chooses because she is so focused and disciplined.
“She just really enjoys telling a good story with lots of details and dialogue. One of her real strengths is capturing the reality of a situation ... but a reality with a sense of humor,” Bennett said.
In her sophomore year at Wells, Wilkinson wrote about her eating and personal problems in an essay titled, “Disappearing Act,” which was published in SUNY Upstate University Hospital’s literary magazine “The Healing Muse.”
“When summer began I was already too skinny. I don’t remember the process. I just remember it like a slide show: In this frame, we see the healthy, happy girl. And in the next slide, we see the sickly, gaunt girl,” she wrote in the beginning of her essay.
Wilkinson said most of her problems centered on her failing relationship with her biological father, from whom her mother was divorced when Wilkinson was 2. Her world spiraled downward, she said, as she struggled with making her eventual decision to sever that relationship and become legally adopted by her stepfather. She finally did so in her senior year of high school.
At the same time, she said, her world as a nationally ranked gymnast was collapsing. Wilkinson won fifth place in the overall event at the 2003 Junior Olympic national championship. But she was getting sick of competing because her coaches fought all the time between themselves and her teammates were ruthless and bickered relentlessly, she said.
Her mother and stepfather enrolled her in therapy in the fall of her high school junior year. It took months of counseling, but Wilkinson started eating again. Today, the 5-feet, 4-inch graduating senior weighs 125 pounds and said she learned to take charge of her life and deal with her problems.
She legally declared her emancipation from her biological father and quit competing as a gymnast the day before her high school senior year started in September 2005.
“I learned to rely on myself. I figured out who I was and to make my own decisions and to develop my own personality,” said Wilkinson, who chose to keep her biological father’s last name.
At Wells, she competed on the cross-country team all four years. She captained the team two of those years and made second team all-conference her senior year. She is graduating as a dean’s list student and won a dean’s scholarship to start graduate studies at Syracuse University’s Newhouse School.
Her mother couldn’t be prouder. Jackie Scanlon said teachers at Wells took her daughter under their collective wings and gave her more self-confidence and encouraged her to write.
“She’s overcome so much. It really doesn’t matter how you start in life, it’s how you finish,” Scanlon said.
Contact Scott Rapp at srapp@syracuse.com or 289-4839.