Looking Back

From my sophomore year of high school:

I became popular only after showing that I was the strongest kid in the class. I was one of the most athletic, and I always have been. I can;t lie about liking sports. It just feels good to run around, even now. I didn't show my strength in sports, though. I beat people up. I did it for laughs. I did it for FUN. I was awful. I'm sickened by the way I used to torture poor John Moran with his lisp and dyslexia. Damn...But if it hadn't been for a major life change, I probably would still be that way, and I wouldn't be half as wise as I am today. A change in schools doesn;t seem like a big deal for a nine-year-old with no friends. I didn;t think it was at first. I was the same as always. I was quiet, rambunctious in my own respect, and I had short hair. It wasn't a good thing. That hair was probably the worst of things. Children are very superficial, and it is not by their own choosing on most occasions. These children were different. I got such a beating that first week of school. Boys weren't afraid to hit me, and girls would never stick up for me. I looked like a guy. I acted like one. Everyone thought I was nuts. I became severely depressed for the next 3 years, and I gained a lot of weight. It was a lot for me. Part of it was probably puberty, but part may have been the 6 pack of coke and bag of chips I was used to eating every day. I wouldn;t eat sometimes. I'd get sick, and then I'd binge. I'd sleep for almost full days, and I would be constantly absent and late to school. I never wanted to go. I contemplated suicide at ten years old. It's hard to imagine. Nobody understood. I was a little kid. I couldn;t possibly have a true traumatic situation on my hands. I'd get beaten up and taunted all the time. Even my best friend deserted me. I had no one, but I learned. I learned what an awful person I had been. I had done these exact things to other students, even more helpless than I, and the fullness of it hit me like a ton of bricks. It didn;t take long for me to realize my errors. I was always good at that. I was at a different level of thinking, and I was able to comprehend abstract things very well, a skill of which most fourth graders know nothing. In retrospect, I was very smart, but I was also very stupid for believing that I was the only one with that kind of problem. My brother had the same problems. He was older, and he knew it all. But we never got along. I couldn;t trust him. My parents were adults. They weren;t accustomed to the new age problems. I didn't believe they had ever been in these situations before. I was only half right. My dad was a bully. He indirectly admitted that through his years of telling me that it was okay to stand up for yourself when no one else would. He would encourage us to beat sense into people that deserved it.
That was a fatal flaw of his that I can't forget, and he knows that. But I wouldn't change any of it if I had the chance. It's all helped me. That is my past, however remote it may seem now. That story is who I am. Ninety percent of my philosohpy on life, my reason for living, the basis of everything I have ever done and will do has been shaped by the events that occurred in those 3 years. I've learned a lot about myself in my life. I know a lot of things that I have never told anyone. Nobody knows very much about my past, and that is probably in part because I never told anyone much, and it is also in part that I have a hard time distinguishing one event from the next. They all play together in my mind like scenes from a movie. Things seem condensed, but they happened every day. It was a true nightmare, but it was an effective lesson for me. It was probably the only thing that could have shown me reality. I was always one for the hands on experience of things.