I know I seem like your average, well-adjusted, creative class SHE-E-O, so it may surprise you to learn that I went to a super weird, artsy high school. I’m talking about the type of hippie dippie private utopia where Pushcart Prize winning writers teach English classes barefoot to students who use Birkin bags as backpacks. An alternative education dream, all for just $60K/year starting in Kindergarten!

When I tell people about my high school, they always get the wrong idea. Many ask if it was like Gossip Girl, but it was nothing like that show. For starters, we didn’t accept scholarship students from such low-income neighborhoods as Dumbo and the Upper West Side. Plus, we didn’t have to wear uniforms, which meant that we could all express ourselves by wearing designer clothing we purchased straight off the runways of either Paris or Milan, depending on where our parents conducted more international business.

People seem to have this idea that everyone in my class was the spawn of a hedge fund billionaire, oil tycoon, or heir to a chocolate dynasty, but that was only true of 78% of the student population. My dad, for example, is a Hollywood power player and my mom is a European princess with a vanity jewelry line. Creativity courses through my blood, as the DNA of multiple U.S. presidents.

In the years since high school, many have suggested my family connections helped me get internships at impressive companies, but I’m proud to say I earned those internships by asking the parents of high school classmates very politely while summering in their seaside mansions. Everyone seems to think that my high school funnels graduates into careers on Wall Street, but that’s simply not true. First of all, most of us don’t ever need to work. Secondly, many of us prefer not to. Thirdly, some of us who don’t need to work but enjoy playing ping pong in an office setting work in tech, which means we’re artists because tech is the new art, and the internet is a modern museum, and capitalism is bohemian now (the clothing brand Reformation, the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival, the Olsen twins etc.).

Even those of my former classmates who pursued conventional careers like inheriting their father’s media conglomerates were total freaks as teens. Creativity came naturally to all of us, and our school fostered that potential with an array of informative and inspiring electives. These included a dance class taught by a (very realistic) Bob Fosse hologram, a specialized acting class with director David Lynch called “Smoking for the Camera,” and a conceptual art and/or/but music class in which Yoko Ono taught us to yelp lucratively.

The truth is not that I went to a rich kid high school, but that I attended an institution full of students whose family wealth allowed them to fully explore, without threat of criticism, every single creative impulse they ever had. This freedom has led us to do wildly artistic things, from starting fashion lines with our trust funds to making documentaries about how our godfathers came to have several pieces in MoMA’s permanent collection to starring in big-budget films as the younger versions of our movie star parents.

As creatives, we’ve tried, we’ve failed, we’ve been so completely insulated from failure that we’ve thought we succeeded, we’ve used our bottomless funds to try again, and we’ve succeeded again, probably!

I’m proud of where I come from (Park Avenue) and where I’ve ended up (a different block of Park Avenue), and that’s why I’m teaching an elective at my alma mater. It’s called Self Defense for the Self-Defensive Creative Who’s Defending Themselves Against Criticism. Today’s lesson: posting a vague but pointed Instagram story and deleting it exactly 45 minutes later!