(Content Warning: Before you read any further, I just want to say that what follows is a non-fiction retelling of various life experiences that both myself and those I know went through. Because of that, there is, and I don't say this lightly or jokingly, a lot of objectionable material. I have kept things honest and truthful in how they happened in real life, so please bear in mind that over the course of these posts, there will be accurate re-tellings of substantial instances of; racism, homophobia, transphobia, sexism, other forms of bigotry, sexual assault, rape, bullying, violent assault, self-harm, depression, suicide, drug use and abuse, alcohol abuse, hospitalization, and various examples of trauma. Language is rarely censored. Please keep that in mind if you choose to continue. The last thing I want to do is cause any additional pain or discomfort. Starting from the words "Part 1" a few paragraphs down, you are reading what can and does involve all of these warnings. Thank you.)
This is a lengthy blog post, although not anything close to a novel, involving a bit of exercising of demons, of coming to peace with certain things I did, I saw, and I saw others have happen. As all things, you're choosing to read this through the author's lense and then whatever you bring to it, and I've chosen things that I feel contribute to the overall narrative (if one exists). You're left to decide on your own if my selection of experiences and people and moments I choose to share is fair or not. Maybe that's not the point. Maybe there never was.
What follows is mostly a series of anecdotes starting when I was in elementary school and running up until present day. There is no overarching plot, not a lot of recurring characters (other than myself and a few friends), and no narrative framing or devices other than me just confessing. Maybe I missed the heyday of confessional blog posts when they seemed to be all the rage about 10 years ago. But then again, all writing is confessional. Even if you write about elves and orcs and wizards, you are imbuing what you create with your values and interests and desires and then asking the world to pay money to embark on reading it. Maybe we're all egoists. Maybe none of us are. Maybe that's not the point (again).
No matter how much or how little you read of this, whether you love or hate or feel indifferent, I'd like to thank anyone and everyone who has ever come to this very, very tiny corner of the internet. All I can promise about what follows is that it is honest. Names have been changed, and locations are unspecific, and I bumped a grade around a bit here and there for anonymity (a 5th grade story might have really been 4th, etc.), but about 95% of this is portrayed as happened. Whether or not that means anything is up to you.
*****
Part 1:
My school experience in some ways gave me insight into a few intensely different worlds. My first school was a Montessori school. There were about 30 kids combined in 3rd through 5th grade, 30 in 1st and 2nd combined. The demographics weren’t terribly diverse, although there were some students whose families were South Asian or East Asian. Most noticeably, though, the school took a no-tolerance policy of bullying, literally. It existed, at times - it’s hard to stamp out completely. But teachers were immediate and proactive in addressing it and having perpetrators apologize. There was no casual indifference. Class, too, was generally about independence. We were taught activities and things we could do and then mostly allowed to do them as the day went by. In 3rd and 4th grade I was given a set time each day to use the class computers to write fiction stories about whatever I wanted that I then was allowed to read to the class. In kindergarten, a student asked a teacher what a collection of small metal plates with circles cut up into various sizes were. At first, the teacher said they were for 1st graders. Then she must have realized it would be better to address the student's curiosity. So our teacher took our entire kindergarten class, and showed us the plates and how fractions work and what they are (the circles were cut up into various common fractions; halves, thirds, quarters, fifths, etc.). I don’t know how many schools would do something like that, would take the time to award curiosity with something that was normally taught only to older kids. A lot of people - not just schools - would have blown it off and said it’s not for us.
*****
One day while in kindergarten my friend went down a slide, only to have someone distinctly not my friend immediately follow, slide right into him, and knock him over. In my wisdom, I decided to gather up a posse of four other people, and we all took turns shoving the slide perpetrator into the fence, and smacking him on the arms, and stomping on his shoes. When he started to cry, we called him a wuss.
I never saw our teacher as angry as she was in that moment when she found out. I was grounded for a week by my parents, and my Taekwondo instructor forced me to do 100 knuckle pushups.
*****
In 3rd grade a kid named Edward was in our class. He was Korean-American. He was wickedly smart. He read a lot and was quiet and mostly kept to himself. I would pretty incessantly rib him about being a genius. Part of it was awe; I couldn’t really say I wanted to be smarter, because to do so would be to diminish my standing and make me a nerd. Part of it was jealousy. Part of it too played into stereotypes of Asian kids being a model minority smart nerdy type. I didn’t know the latter at the time but it hit me years later when I was in college. But still, once a week, as a kid, I’d joke about him being smarter than the teachers, about knowing everything, about being a genius, about going to Harvard.
One day, at lunch, in the midst of such accusations, he responded. Usually he chuckled. Or just shrugged. He didn’t talk much. But today he did.
“Can you please stop?”
“What?”
“Saying all those things about me. Please stop.”
“Why? Don’t you want to be smart?”
He shook his head. “It’s not that. It just makes me feel weird. I don’t like it. I’m not a genius. I’m just like you.”
Just like you.
A year later, by the time I finished fourth grade, my parents stopped spanking me to discipline me.
*****
In 5th grade I switched to a different private school. The atmosphere was a drastic change. Bullying was not addressed, and instead viewed by teachers as a growing pain to go through to build character. Violence was common. Homophobic and racist language and jokes proliferated. The one black kid in our 5th grade class of 30 transferred out the following summer. He dealt with relentless comments about being unintelligent or unhygienic. The demographics were even more skewed; at least 95% of the population was white. Everything and anything could be a target. I got relentlessly made fun of in 5th grade for reading Star Wars books. A girl got targeted at for having short hair. A boy got targeted at in 6th grade for getting his dyed. Black people and Muslims (none of whom attended the school) were frequent targets of violent, racist jokes. A skinny, unathletic boy with a bit of a lisp was frequently called a “gaydar target.”
*****
A couple years removed from the first school, I understood why Edward didn’t like the pressure. I had gone from the popular brat to the quiet, studious kid. When we’d have math competitions in class - students sparring over flashcards, or called up to the whiteboard to race each other in solving equations - the class would hush when I approached. Each and any time I lost - an audible gasp. Questions were asked. Was I suddenly stupid? Had I fallen from my perch? I began to feel the weight of expectations from everyone that I didn’t feel represented me. One day, in fifth grade, another kid, in a similar situation, looked at me from his desk across from mine. He had just lost a flashcard battle. People were shocked. They asked if he had “lost it.” He simply sighed and sat down. But then he spoke to me.
“I hate it.”
“I know.”
“Everyone thinks I’m a genius, but I am not, and if I make one tiny mistake, the world ends.”
“I know.”
That semester was my first report card. I got all As. For the next 8 years of my primary school life, anything less than all As was failing. My first B+ left me defending myself in my car against my mother, who didn't understand how I could have slipped so much.
The smart kid who sat across from me transferred at the end of the school year. I don’t know what happened to him after that.
The last sentence Edward had told me, “just like you,” wouldn’t dawn on me, however, for some time. My 10 year old self was clueless.
*****
In 5th grade our teacher found a lid with pink, strawberry yogurt on it stuck to the carpet floor in our classroom. He silenced the class. Nobody had picked it up. The class had been binaried and the girls were all in another room, working on a late art project. It was just boys in here at the time.
“Whose lid is this? It’s been sitting here for over 5 minutes. Is nobody going to take responsibility for this?” the teacher said. He seemed tall and threatening then, in a way I hadn’t seen him before.
My friend Brett next to me laughed. “Pink yogurt? Who eats that? That’s gay.” He said it just quiet enough for the teacher to not hear but everyone at our table to hear.
It was my lid, of course. I had the Yoplait to go with my ham and cheese sandwich. But there was no turning back now. At this point, I was in deep, and to admit would bring more pain and stress than trying to coast by on the lie. My friends and peers would rake me over the coals.
The teacher pulled each student aside one by one, looked us in the eye, and asked if the lid was ours.
I shook my head, “no,” I explained, and he let me go. I walked down the hall and towards the playground. I breathed a sigh of relief.
I shook my head, “no,” I explained, and he let me go. I walked down the hall and towards the playground. I breathed a sigh of relief.
At recess after lunch Brett reiterated that a boy eating pink yogurt is gay. Jack, a tall, sturdily built boy who was one of the best in class at basketball, and who was shooting hoops at the time with us, took it a step further.
“Probably a fag.”
I hit the game winning shot right before the teacher called us in.
*****
I was sitting in art class in 5th grade when Drew asked me if I liked rap. Several of his cronies stared at me, waiting for my answer. I had an inkling this was coming. Under their breath during class they’d recite Eminem lyrics. I remember the first day I heard them, I was confused by a chocolate candy also being a rapper. I suppose my parents had been successful, blocking out that little part of white suburbia from my existence.
“Sure,” I said, “some of it.”
Drew’s friend, Austin, sitting to his right, snickered.
“Like who?” Austin asked.
I grimaced inwardly, and quickly tried to give myself time with an unsure pause. “Uhh… hmm… like, Linkin Park?”
“That doesn’t count.”
I shrugged. I didn’t really know anyone else.
“Gayass nerd.”
When class was over, the teacher gave me her origami box because I wasn’t talented enough to make mine. She snuck it to me as I walked towards the exit. When another student found out, he called me the world's worst artist. I laughed. The rest of the day passed as usual.
*****
I don’t know how it started, but I had the distinct knowledge that, sometime in 6th grade, everyone started calling me Chode as a nickname. Chode Scrotum, to be precise. It was started by a guy one grade above me, a short in stature kid who occasionally was made fun of for his looks or lack of athleticism. Before I knew it, most the boys in my class and most of the boys in grade seven were calling me it.
“Nice shot Chode!”
“Chode, you’re such a fucking nerd.”
“When is your voice going to drop, Chode?”
“How come you don’t have any leg hair, Chode?”
“Do you need special condoms, Chode?”
“Do you really have a chode, Chode?”
One evening after school I walked to the park near our house and sat at the base of a tree and cried for almost an hour. When I returned home my parents asked me what’s wrong. I never told them.
Later that year, the kid who came up with the nickname was thrown onto the ground and beaten up at recess by someone twice his size. As his face became progressively bloodier and the two traded blows, he bit off a huge chunk of the larger kid’s right breast. They both ended up in the hospital.
*****
On Halloween that year I went as the grim reaper. We were allowed to wear costumes to schools. At one point, an upperclassmen and son of a teacher started hitting me on the back of the head with a fake axe his costume included. As a teacher's son, everyone knew this kid to be a frequent bully and accoster, but one who got away with everything and was able to weasel his way into good graces. One day, while my friend and I had been walking outside between classes, the teacher's son and his cronies grabbed my friend and took him away. I kept walking to class. I knew there was nothing I could do. My friend showed up late to class in tears, missing his backpack and coat, in the middle of winter, and I got the sense he had been physically assaulted.
The axe hits continued as we walked outside that Halloween. I said nothing, I knew that would only make it worse. The pain was immense, and it kept knocking off my glasses, which I eventually tried to slip into a pocket. Of course, then I couldn't really see.
When I got home that day all of the hair on the back of my head was matted with blood.
The teacher's son graduated with honors, high praise from all the staff, and set the record for most three pointers as an 8th grader in a regional basketball game that year.
*****
One day, running down a flight of stairs to try to catch a class I was almost late for, someone walking up them stuck their foot out to try to trip me and cause me to go tumbling down the cement, outdoor flight. I managed to catch myself, somehow, serious injury a legitimate outcome if I hadn’t. A few weeks later, several kids got together and locked all the stalls in the men’s restrooms throughout the small school, removed all the toilet paper, and put out of order signs on the stall doors and urinals. They then slipped a full bottle of laxatives into a classmate’s bottle of Coke. He drank the whole thing. He ended up having to go home early, and came to school the next day with rolls of toilet paper stuffed in his backpack. Another kid had Head and Shoulders shampoo bottles stuffed into his locker to imply his hair was gross. I saw people choked, punched, bitten, I saw a kid have his head slammed into the pavement, I saw people throw baseball bats, footballs, and basketballs at people’s heads, the one baseball bat that connected left a bloody gash on one person's forehead and required hospitalization. I saw as recess and gym and anything outside of class was a full verbal onslaught of bigotry and hate, and how the teachers would be nearby, hearing it all and never intervening.
In 6th grade a teacher said that he thought that not responding to bullying and just pretending it didn't exist made you a better person in the end.
In 7th grade a teacher told my parents that I was quiet and that the squeaky wheel gets the grease.
*****
That same 7th grade, a popular and bratty kid in our class called over a bunch of us to see a joke he wanted to tell. He had a piece of paper, and on that piece of paper he drew a circle. Inside that circle he drew three triangles whose tips met in the center of the circle.
“What is this?” he asked us.
“A half eaten pizza? Learn to fucking draw,” quickly responded someone.
“Nope. It’s the last thing a black man sees falling down the well.”
*****
Later that day, Edi was walking with me up a flight of stairs outside towards the basketball court for recess. We were discussing what to play. Edi was Indian-American, and his darker skin was enough to conjure the occasional joke.
The kid with the KKK/well joke heard us talking and told us we should play cowboys and 'Indians'. It would be everybody against Edi.
Edi laughed.
*****
I suppose it would be a bit of a surprise to my older relatives that a game colloquially called “Smear the Queer” was still played in school when I attended and did not die out in the 60s and 70s as I think a lot of people assumed. I don’t know if there are any consistent rules or traditions across the country or even regionally, only that it is, in every single way, abhorrent. My 8th grade class decided it involved picking one random boy of about 15 of us at recess, and throwing footballs and basketballs at their head as hard as possible while running around a field, occasional punches and kicks and tackles joining in. To this day, I don’t know how I managed to not be one of the targets, ever. I was filled with anxiety that I would be, my relative lack of status leading me to be an easy target. Maybe it was quietness and general peripheral observation instead of participation that convinced others I wasn’t worth it. Maybe they thought I’d narc.
One day, a kid took a running start and carried his momentum into a punch he delivered to another kid’s stomach. The victim immediately keeled over, collapsed to the ground, and puked up the entirety of their just eaten lunch. The orange slices they ate hadn’t even been digested yet. They sat amidst the pile of orange and tan chunks in the grass.
By the end of the day, everyone was convinced it was the puking kid's fault for participating in the game and bringing it on himself in the first place.
By the end of the day, everyone was convinced it was the puking kid's fault for participating in the game and bringing it on himself in the first place.
*****
The day of graduation from 8th grade, a classmate gave a speech that cited Watergate. All the parents laughed. Most of the students did too. None of us knew what Watergate was. I didn't laugh, because if it was something sexual, like the Clinton scandal, my parents might see, and then I'd get in trouble. So there I was, the only one amongst my friends -who didn't know what it was either - not laughing, while they laughed away. I guess in the end, it worked out in a way, because fake laughter is dishonest, and because honestly, fuck Nixon.
*****
Part 2:
I went to a public high school, as well as for two years an aggressively difficult math and science center. The latter featured, once again, a largely non-diverse and arrogant student body. They weren’t violent, but many of them were dipshits when they went to their normal public high school for the 2nd half of the day (the math and science center was first half), picking intellectual ‘fights’ with teachers and classmates and wasting no opportunity to show off and act better than everyone else.
Not everyone at the public high school was middle class or above like my first two schools. Not everyone was white ( 45% of the population was). I saw violence. Some of it bad. I saw a massive brawl break out at a pep rally, with kids rushing to join the fight, one who fell on the stairs and was trampled over by others clamoring for action. I saw a huge chunk of hair get ripped right from the scalp on a Friday brawl at the cafeteria (Friday was fight day, essentially). I saw blood litter the hallway floor. But through it all, on a per capita basis, the violence and bigotry of a school of 1400 students was much less than the previous private school. Expand the latter to this size and it would have been a warzone. At the end of the day, the people I met in high school were nicer than those I carried over from earlier grades, for the most part. That tends to surprise some people. I think we all know why.
*****
In 9th grade on the school bus I sat next to a guy. It was a guy I had known for some time, prone to bombast and dishonesty to make him sound like he had acquired the kind of status most dudes want in school. I suppose we all did. The rigor of high school’s social gauntlet made delusions of grandeur an established mental reality, just not a physical one.
“I ate my girlfriend out last night,” he said to me, as I blankly stared out the window. A thin layer of frost curved along the bottom of it. Winter was approaching.
“Uh huh.”
“It didn’t taste like fish.”
“Uh huh.”
“Tasted fruity.”
“I didn’t know.”
“I know you didn’t. You should try it some time. Or are you queer?”
I kept looking out the window.
Four years later, he emailed me to tell me they never even kissed.
*****
It was me, Nat, Shane, Cory, and Eric. We sat a the lunch table as freshman in the high school cafeteria. Shane was partaking in the Day of Silence. He had the shirt on and hadn’t said a word all day long, to anyone. The rest of us prattled on about football and drama and Cory’s love life. Someone we didn’t recognize approached the table. We all looked up. He was tall, easily over 6 feet, and toned. He looked at Shane and pointed at him.
“You one of those queer boys?”
Everyone at the table went silent.
“Queer lover? Why you stick up for gay fags?”
Nobody said anything. Cory took a bite of his burrito.
“Gay ass fags.” He laughed, then spit on the floor, and walked away.
As quickly as it started, it was over, and the verbal assailant disappeared into a crowd at the far end of the cafeteria. We all looked at each other. Ten seconds later, we were discussing Daunte Culpepper’s latest performance. Nobody ever addressed what happened. If nothing else, given the size of our group, we should have stood up to the individual.
*****
A kid in high school I used to know and even at one time might have called a friend incessantly bullied people, often women, snapping at them and calling them names. I was too timid to stand up to him, and he often had supporters, other men, who would follow in his stead. He would boss around women and then complain when men were portrayed as stupid and fat by mass media. He would call women sluts and then complain when they didn’t sleep with them.
One day in English class he snapped his fingers at some women who had taken the couch for sustained silent reading, telling them to leave so he could sit there. When they talked back to him, another guy joined in, also snapping his fingers, and following the first man's lead. The women eventually vacated the furniture. The two guys ended up nodding off after about ten minutes.
Two months into our sophomore year, the man who snapped at women tried to hang himself from his parent's rafters. They found him right before it was too late. Years later I’d grapple with what I should think about it all, what revenge and justice and violence and sexism and punishment all can and do mean. But to my 15 year old self, all I could do was picture his body, limp, dangling from a rope, and wonder if one day, that would be me.
*****
Laura’s mother had committed suicide. That was all that the teacher had said about our fellow classmate. But these things have a way of clarifying themselves amidst the rumor mill of teens. My bombastic friend; the one who bragged about oral, was talking to me at lunch.
“She was raped.”
“Huh? I asked, looking up from my soggy pizza and three day old milk I had acquired from the cafeteria. The grease had ripped a hole in the crust. The milk was room temperature.
“Laura’s mother. She was raped. A few weeks ago.”
“How do you know?”
“I heard it.”
He - the guy I was sitting with - was a liar. I knew that. He lied about everything. Grades, athletic performance, sex life, social life, money. Every day he’d be caught in one and he’d wiggle his way out and he’d continue. It was like it was all he knew. It had been so comfortable. He saw someone get stabbed once. He scored 40 points in a high school basketball game. He won $10k on a scratch lottery card. I chalked this story up as another lie, another grandiose claim, another story that was already bad enough that he had to make worse. It reminded me of the time the year before when the PE teacher had disappeared from school for a week. My same friend claimed that the teacher had been showing the girl’s basketball team how to box out for a rebound, and at one point, grabbed a student and pulled her butt to his crotch to “demonstrate” how to get physical. He apparently held her there for awhile, talking as if nothing was happening. Like the story of Laura’s mother, like my friend always did, I had, at the time, assumed these stories of sexual harassment were all lies.
It was years later I’d realize - walking campus in August, seeing orientation groups, hearing guides tell women to avoid the pond area at night for safety; like they had told our group back years ago, an even larger smattering of police call boxes at seemingly every lamp post - it was the only time he had ever told the truth.
*****
Over the course of the first couple years of high school the friend who lied would repeatedly choke people (including me), grab people’s backpacks and yank them to the ground (including me), shove people as hard as possible (including me), and lambaste anyone whose sense of fashion was not his (including me).
One day, in history class, he was going on and on about how a girl called him last night to ask him out but he had to turn her down because he was "balls deep" in his current girlfriend. I think he could tell I wasn’t listening. So he changed the subject.
“Are you French?”
“Huh?” I replied, still somewhat absentmindedly, trying to focus on the class work our teacher had given to us. She was sitting at the table in front, helping some student with their assignment, back to us and leaning over their paper.
“English, motherfucker. Are you French?”
There was a psuedo-irony amidst asking if I was French and spoke English in the same sentence, but I simply told him “no. I’m not French.”
“Let’s find out,” he said. And then before I could assume what that meant, he punched me, as hard as he possibly could, walloping me in my upper arm, catching me completely by surprise. The pain was instantaneous. I had never been punched like that before in my life, and here was a high school athlete punching me as hard as they possibly could, all for some shitty joke about French people. But I knew a reaction would be fatal. I could feel tears welling up, could feel my arm screaming out, could hear my mind telling me to just leave, get up, and walk out, but I sat there, silently, absentmindedly, and then went back to writing on my classwork.
“Well you’re not crying, so I guess you’re not French.”
The bruise on my upper arm would be green and purple for the next two weeks.
My friend's mother was 2nd generation French-American.
*****
Around 9th grade or so I stopped swimming. I loved swimming. My dad wanted me badly to join the team. I was good at it, I could outrace several of the high school swimmers. I felt at home in the water. But over the years I had developed a phobia of being shirtless. I replayed 5th and 6th grade incidents of being made fun of for having small breasts, or a crooked spine (scoliosis), of being made fun of for being pale and hairless and all that. And then I went farther and convinced myself I was just horrendously ugly, and nobody would want to see me shirtless, and in fact to subject others to that would be cruel, and I didn't want to be shirtless at all really, and that was that. So I stopped. Completely. Occasionally I'd drive by a pool in summer and see people smiling and laughing and splashing and I'd wish I could, if only for a second, jump in and forget everything I had drilled into my brain. To do laps one more time. To feel the water on my hair. To feel free.
*****
Probably one of the most common jokes I heard in high school was an old one line setup and one line punchline that men traded around. Its repeated existence drove the humor.
"Wanna hear a joke?"
"What?"
"Women's rights."
It wasn't uncommon to hear other attempts at not actually subversive, but obviously sexist humor throughout the day.
"You can't rape the willing."
"It's not rape, it's surprise sex."
One of my biggest regrets was a moment in high school at lunch, when our table of about six boys and one girl was embroiled in self-imposed high school relationship drama, the kind that you look back on and wonder why anyone stressed over it.
I didn't particularly like the woman who sat with us. She said one day that even if I grew my hair out more (it was very short at the time), I still would always be ugly. My friend, sitting next to her, had asked her if I could ever look good. He nodded his head and agreed.
"Yeah there's not much he can do there," he said, about me.
So one day amidst the drama and loud talking and barbed words, I asked her to be quiet for a second.
"Hey, Jordan, can you stop talking for a sec?"
"Huh?"
"Just for a sec."
She obliged. I sighed. "And that's the peaceful sound of you shutting the fuck up."
She shook her head, rolled her eyes, and sighed.
She didn't sit with us again.
*****
My parents would often call my friend's house when I was over at them to make sure I was there. It was just a thing they did to keep tabs on me. It was nerve-wracking because T and M rated games and R rated movies were prohibitively banned in our household - until I moved out to college when I wasn't in their household anyways - so I always played or watched them at friend's houses, and I worried my parents would hear the game or movie audio in the background as I told them everything was fine on the phone.
I was at one friend's house on a pleasant but cloudy fall day when he suggested we go to the neighborhood tennis courts and hit some balls around. Neither of us could really play, but it was nice out and our Madden game had finished and it sounded fun, so we hopped in my car and drove down the street, around the bend, and another block over. We could have walked, I suppose, but we were worried it might start raining soon.
After about an hour of clumsy forehands and backhands and laughing at our ineptitude, we called it a day. I drove back home.
The first warning sign was as pre-eminent as they come. My parents were both sitting at the kitchen table near the garage door I had walked in from, already eyes locked on me. I knew, internally, something was wrong.
“Where were you?” my dad asked, calmly but sternly.
“Huh?”
“We called his house. Nobody picked up. Where were you two?”
I exhaled. Well this was easy. I was just at the tennis courts. I’d tell them and they’d relax and everything would be fine. My alibi was crystal clear and we were just 2-3 blocks away and in a residential area the entire time.
“We went to play tennis,” I said, “at the courts nearby.”
I thought that would clear the air. But it didn’t. I had miscalculated.
“We give you a lot of freedom,” my dad said, “and we can take it away very easily. It wouldn’t be hard for us to tell you you can no longer drive. You don’t just get to up and leave somewhere without us knowing. You understand? We will talk more later.”
I nodded.
“Good. Now wash up and get ready for dinner.”
I headed to my room, dumbfounded. I couldn’t even conceptualize what I did wrong. We played tennis. That was it. I, who as a senior in high school, had never once skipped, been suspended, stuck in detention, done any drugs or alcohol or anything, was on the verge of having what little freedom I had taken away, all over a stupid fucking hour of sloppily hitting tennis balls.
A few years later, my therapist would tell me that kids who aren’t allowed to express themselves, explore on their own, make mistakes, and form their own identity, suffer from depression and anxiety at much higher rates.
*****
*****
*****
The math and science center I went to would send a letter to your house if you had anything less than an 80% grade in any single class, with full documentation of your homework and test performance. I would lie awake in bed until 4am every day dreading those letters, knowing it'd mean yelling and anger and punishment. One day, before driving up north to see my grandparents, one came. My dad pulled it out of the mail box and set it aside, and the whole family drove in silence up to lunch, both father and mother well aware of what it means. I tried to engross myself in a book but found my mind wandering frequently. My appetite was suppressed by anxiety and I kept my head down and did little socializing with my extended family. The drive back home, all 1 hour and 45 minutes of it, was silent too. I went upstairs and sat down and continue to try to read my book. After a few minutes, I heard my mother's footsteps and knew the time had come. She came into the room, tossed the letter on my lap, and began. "You are going to ruin your future with these grades and all you're doing is reading a god damn Star Wars book!" she yelled, as she proceeded to grab the book out of my hands and throw it against the wall at full throttle. It was years later someone pointed out that in the context of a relationship, I'd probably view this as threatening, abusive behavior. Nobody is perfect.
*****
One morning my dad opened my bedroom door at 8am, and without saying anything, used his pointer finger to gesture I follow him. I followed him to the living room. There, in the middle of the room, sat my backpack and my mom. My dad went over to the backpack, unzipped it, dumped the entire thing out on the floor, and told me that we're going to go through each piece of paper one by one, and that I would have to explain each and every one. A few months later, they'd do the same with my nightstand, and while they couldn't dump it out, they took everything out, put it in a trash bag, and then dumped that out, and when I got home from a basketball game, the entire project of going through each piece of paper and giving its entire life story began.
*****
After two years of being forced to take band all year, I won. It was the first time I ever won. Granted, it wasn't my doing. We had an apathetic band teacher who had let the program dip from 80 students to 30, who didn't have us wear uniforms, who oftentimes would come in and just tell us to take the day off and not practice or do anything but play cards. So, after weeks and weeks of pleading my case to my mother, I was allowed to drop it.
Band was 3rd block. Our school had block scheduling, which meant 4 blocks a day, each block was one class that was 90 minutes long.
I could finally take the short story and poetry class I wanted to take, and I could finally join the school newspaper (3rd block).
Looking back, if our band teacher had been adequate, I would have never been able to drop, and never been able to take a writing class, and my love of writing that had been in hibernation for a few years might have never returned.
Then again, maybe that would have been for the better.
*****
On the way home from an “Asian Bistro” family dinner, my mother and sibling got to talking about dating and race. I’m not entirely sure how the subject was brought up, I just remember my sibling, myself, and even my dad being blindsided when my mom said never to date a black man, because that’s how she was raised and that’s how she would raise my sibling. After some awkward silence, the three of us in the car tried to explain, all at once, how grossly racist that was, how presumptively bigoted, and, if nothing else, how controlling it was to tell your own kid that millions of people are off limits for love.
*****
Sometime during the Bush administration, I sat in the living room as my dad yelled at the TV for someone suggesting that gay couples should be allowed to adopt.
"Well why don't we just let anyone adopt children then? Get your friends together and adopt away!"
I wondered if, in his anger, how he would have backtracked if my sibling or myself came out, right then and there, and if he would have realized the harm his words would have had. About five years later, he said he was in favor of gay marriage.
*****
The first time I sent an email to someone that expressed a serious claim about wanting to kill myself was my freshman year of high school. My grades were mediocre, my parents were pissed, I was being bullied, and I spent night after night awake until past 4am due to stress and anxiety, only to get up 2 hours later and try to maintain enough energy to get through school. I wrote angsty song lyrics on sheets of paper I kept in a nightstand drawer, under a stack of books, all of the verses and choruses horrifically mopey and expressing feelings of despair and hopelessness.
I sent the email the day before my birthday, when my parents came in to school to talk to all my teachers and I compounded the situation, physically, by falling down some stairs.
Almost exactly three years later, shortly after I turned 18 in my senior year of high school, I started self harming. I got home from an evening shift at McDonalds after school and put on some sad music and closed my bedroom door. I took scissors and shoved them into my arm and ran them across my skin, drawing blood quickly. Over and over.
I did it not to feel good but to punish myself. I was worthless, shit, pointless, completely devoid of any good qualities or abilities. I deserved the pain. I deserved the blood.
I’d continue doing that off and on for awhile. When my parents first spotted the wounds, I said they were work related, from having to reach into an ice machine over and over and scraping my arm on the side. They bought it.
Even after the truth came out, I was able to pick up again when I moved out. And the thing was, it started as punishment, but it ended up feeling good. It felt good to hurt myself. To condemn myself. To see the blood and the wounds and know I had utilized that power.
*****
If you ever want to know if sports are stupid, I can confirm. One day before class I stood in front of a set of shelves, math homework perched on one of them, as I furiously scribbled some last second attempts at answers down. Over the weekend, MLB playoffs had gone my way and none of my friends' way. The team I was cheering for was up in a series 3-1, so it felt like it was over, and the team everyone but myself hated would advance.
Out of my peripheral vision, I saw Alex coming down the hall towards our group of baseball talking and homework copying friends. I didn't think much of it, and realized I had just a few minutes before the bell rang and my last answers had to be done.
I probably should have thought more of it, because next thing I know my face was slammed into the shelves, and blood started coming out of my nose. I turned around.
"What the fuck?" I said, as I attempted a weak, ineffectual shove of Alex into the lockers behind him. Blood was now dripping down my shirt. I turned around and went to the bathroom. I ended up late for class. My homework never got turned in.
The team I was cheering for lost the next three games in a row and was eliminated. Sports are stupid.
*****
Of all the anecdotes I've ever told, this is the one people always question me like it didn't happen, or like they can't believe it, or that I am exaggerating. In the scheme of things, I'm not even sure it's nearly as ridiculous as many of the others. It doesn't really have a point in context with the rest of the ones here. But it makes for a good ice breaker. Too bad we're a third of the way in.
It happened my sophomore year of high school. We were sitting in history class doing class work with a substitute teacher that day. Adam, who was one four-person table over from me, said there was a bomb threat etched into the table surface. He repeatedly asked the teacher to let him out and go to security, but she refused, every single time. Finally, he just went up and left the room.
Twenty seconds later, two cops came in, and a polaroid photo of the threat was taken. As we were escorted out of them room, I asked Adam what it said.
"It says there will be a bomb in the B wing at 2 o'clock."
It was about 1:30, and we were about as far from the B wing as possible.
For about 45 minutes, the entire school was evacuated to stand outside and away from the large campus, bomb sniffing dogs were called in, and a veritable army of law enforcement descended on the school. It was the perfect cap to a year in which our school made the front page of our local newspaper for fights and weapons and all kinds of stuff; halfway through the year a special needs educational institution had been shut down due to budget costs, and the students were all dumped into this school mid semester, new teachers, large class sizes (some of them 40+ because we were understaffed to work with kids with behavioral difficulties) and little to fall back in. Surprise, surprise, it exacerbated an already violent year. I suppose anyone would be willing to throw a punch if your only food of the day, the paltry free lunch the school provided, featured expired milk and soggy crust. That's a joke. But I think it illuminates the striking culture around schooling. That we choose not to preemptively address poverty and stratification and under funding, and then when problems strike, we throw our hands up and decide we need to... cut even more, because clearly it isn't working.
About a year later, in my mom's car, I heard on the radio that the perpetrator had been immediately identified via handwriting, and would spend many years behind bars for committing a severe felony offense. I sometimes wonder what they’re up to now.
*****
I took a sociology class in high school as an upperclassman. My teacher asked us all one day to write our religious beliefs on a piece of paper and turn them in. She said we didn't have to. She said she was mostly curious.
"I don't care if you're atheist, Muslim, Jewish, whatever, no judging."
I wrote atheist on my small sheet and turned it in. I never heard anything.
A few weeks later, two former drug users were brought in to talk to the class. The 2nd person ended their speech with a religious conclusion.
"If you don't have God, don't have Jesus in your life, you are nobody, you are worthless, sorry but that's the truth. I was nothing without God. You will be too."
I know I couldn't have been the only one in that room who was targeted, there had to be a multiplicity of beliefs in that classroom; people who didn’t believe, people who did believe but not in Jesus like the speaker did.
I'd like to remind everyone, again, that this was a public high school.
*****
The summer before my senior year of high school, my parents usurped me and made me go on a trip to Australia as a student ambassador via the People-2-People program. I pleaded not to. But they made me. It would have been my first time in a foreign country other than Canada, and first time without family.
On day three on the trip, on a warm summer evening in Darwin, I called my parent's and left them a voicemail that explained how I was, truthfully, having the time of my life. Later that night, our group watched a sunset over a west facing beach of the Pacific Ocean. It was the most beautiful thing I've ever seen in my life.
I've since been all over the US, to Europe twice, SE Asia, and Canada many more times. I am blessed to have the opportunity to have traveled. To have enough physical health and job flexibility and money to do so. And I am thankful my parents made me take that first trip. They were absolutely right that it was the best thing for me. Without Australia, I probably never would have gone overseas, never made the friends I did, never had the memories I have.
I also could travel because of what happened in college. One year of school is a lot cheaper than four. But more on that later.
*****
Later that summer in the car with my sibling and mother, my sibling said a friend of theirs had changed their name and was identifying as a boy. My mother asked my sibling if the friend, who had spoken about doing so before, would ever make up his mind, or just flip between boy and girl "depending on the day of the week." She said she could just call him "it." My sibling told her not to. It didn't exactly stop the commentary.
*****
By the time my senior year of high school started, I was the only person amongst hundreds in the cafeteria eating at a table alone. The fear of being an easy target swallowed me. I was paranoid. I had no backup.
But nobody ever came for me, or made fun of me, or anything. Instead, I internalized the reality that out of the dozens and dozens of tables and booths, I was the only one where just one chair was being used.
I started skipping lunch and going to the library to hide instead. It ended up being good practice for college.
*****
One day in the library at lunch, another student sat next to me. We began chatting a bit about football, once they saw I was browsing ESPN. We wallowed in sorrow at how awful the Detroit Lions were.
About five minutes later, a group of four students came in. One of them threw a crinkled up piece of paper at the two of us. They sat down next to my football chatting friend.
About five minutes later, a group of four students came in. One of them threw a crinkled up piece of paper at the two of us. They sat down next to my football chatting friend.
My football chatting friend had a speech disability. When the group of four started talking to them, it was picked up immediately.
"What are you, some kind of retard?" one of them said, and the other three laughed.
"You shouldn't use that word," my football pal responded.
"Oh look, the retard speaks up for himself." They laughed again. One of the other four leaned back in their chair and looked at me.
"You a retard too?"
I didn't respond. I tried to focus on my computer. Another crinkled up piece of paper was thrown at me, hitting me on the side of my face.
"Deaf and mute retard?"
I continued to not say anything, neither did the other person. We sat, staring at our monitors.
"Come on," one of the four finally said, "let the retards do retard things."
It's hard to come to terms with odds of violence in school situations. You look back on things and wonder if speaking up would have gone well or not. All four of the people who came in that day were at least my height, and they all were larger and clearly stronger. It's easy to justify things out of a fear of violence, and then you grapple with whether that's accurate or not or whether dissenting from it or not is victim blaming, or whether you have a responsibility in the end to do something. I wonder about everyone that day in the library from time to time. I never saw anyone involved, perpetrators or victim, ever again.
*****
There was a high school pep rally where graduating seniors, which I was finally, each approached a single junior, and touched a "lit" (they were electronic) candle to the junior's unlit candle, who then turned it on. Passing the torch, fire safety style, on the basketball court, while every senior and junior's name was called out.
In the lead up to the event, people had gone around the school taking pictures of seniors. All these pictures would be projected on a giant screen in the gym during the pep rally, where popular students would be cheered and unpopular students would get quiet, polite applause. Or worse. I had seen and heard almost silence for a few students, the awkwardness of realizing that nobody knew who that was clearly apparent.
My picture had been snapped one day while working on the school newspaper. I got to take a peek at it. My hair was a mess, one eyebrow was higher than the other, and my loose fitting shirt made my twig arms look even more flimsy than they already did.
And then I knew, after a year of eating alone and hiding in the library for lunch, of a friend circle nearly completely gone, I would be one of those awkward silences when my picture got displayed for the entire school to see.
So as we all walked to the gym that day, I carefully slipped down an empty hall, a flight of stairs, an exit, walked across the parking lot to my car, drove to a Meijer parking lot, and watched the first season of The Office on my iPod, trying not to let the fear of being outside of school when I wasn't supposed to be (it was the only day I ever skipped) fully spark the panic attack I could feel building. In my terror, I imagined police descending on my car, or a call home from the principal, or something that would cause my life to unravel even more. For people to know what I was doing would have made things even worse; it would make the avoidance meaningless if people learned, and in the end, the resultant attention would have defeated its purpose. It’s easy, in retrospect, to realize how ridiculous this all is. Nobody is going to come knocking on a random car parked at a supermarket, nobody calls roll at a fucking rally involving the entire school in the gym. But what starts as a small fear begins to very rapidly escalate and feed itself until it engulfs all thought.
Nothing ever happened.
I went home that night and cried myself to sleep.
*****
Part 3:
I hated everyone and everything, including, most importantly and extremely, myself. I said that everybody lies. Everybody is stupid. The world is bullshit, and I was the crystal clear example of it all; an aimless, skill-less, passionless, friendless nobody, ugly and self-harming and thinking about suicide entirely, truly, nearly every second of every day. I had convinced myself that every single thing about the world was rotten, and that so I was, and I deserved no longer to be a part of it. That I had no value, and that the energy I consumed was better spent on someone else. That I would never change, and that everything was hopeless.
I somehow decided to try to double major in college. I don't know why I thought it world work. Maybe I was just noncommittal. But before I knew it, I was planning to graduate with degrees in English and Political Science. That goal lasted about 5 months before it went up in flames.
*****
My parents bought me my first smartphone before I went to college, a full keyboard Blackberry with Sprint from Best Buy. The phone became my best friend. I never used it. Instead, I pretended to talk on it whenever I ate in the cafeteria alone.
I always ate in the cafeteria alone.
I got better overtime at pretend phone conversations, at fake chuckles, at smiling and acting like I was normal and had friends they just couldn't make it because they're, you know, in class right now. I swear.
On weekends our dorm's cafeteria was closed and I would have to go to another building to eat. I was nervous about where it was on campus, what the layout would be, what the food would be, or having to experience a new eating environment entirely, so I never went, and instead mostly just never ate on weekends. I'd like to say I got used to it. I never really did.
*****
My college roommate was an anti-Semitic Jewish anarchist. At the time, he was majoring in biochemistry and minoring in Japanese language. He claimed he wanted to be the world's best drug dealer. After a few weeks, I decided he wasn't joking. He stridently believed Jews were behind 9/11, and had an obsession with Nazi regalia. He wore steel toed boots and would walk down the hallways of our dorm kicking everyone's door as hard as he could, in the hopes he would catch one right as someone was opening it and "bust their fucking face open." He kept high powered airsoft guns in our room (illegal) and would shoot them from our third story window at passerby's below. He burnt incense in our room (against school policy), kept beer in our room (illegal), and weed (illegal), which he smoked with his friends inside our bathroom, the only thing separating us from the RA being our shared wall (they were the neighboring room).
I was morally opposed to narcing on someone for drugs, and he was popular amongst our entire dorm as a minor dealer and habitual user, so I always made up an excuse to leave the room while he smoked. I didn't really have an excuse, so I ended up driving around town aimlessly, or buying greasy fast food to stress eat with. In winter I'd often drive to a Meijer parking lot and slowly watch the snow fall and melt on my windshield, water droplets racing on their way down.
On a random Saturday I drove him to Best Buy, where he spent thousands of dollars on video games and a fancy speaker system. A few days later, he called his mother and yelled at her, telling her she had to up the limit on the credit card she had given him, right away. She agreed. His family was well-off.
One night in the middle of winter he came into the room shirtless, barging in and waking me up at 4am. He and his friends had dropped acid, robbed a convenience store, then ran 1.5 miles back to the dorm in the snow and without any tops. I told him I had an 8am class.
Later that winter he got into a situation with a suitemate. The suitemate was a Magic: The Gathering player, and had an extensive collection in his room. My roommate hated that, and thought it made him a "fucking nerd cunt." So he stole them all. For weeks he claimed he had no idea what happened to them, but we all knew. I don't know if he ever returned them.
Later in the year someone in the cafeteria, as I walked with a tray of salad drowned in dressing towards an empty table, called out my name. At first, it didn't register what happened, so I kept walking. Then it hit me. Someone actually said my name, in an attempt to get my attention. Audrey, who knew my roommate and occasionally smoked weed with him, invited me over. I joined apprehensively.
She was talkative, in a good way, trying to put things at ease. I had never really spoken with her before, other than once when she popped in our room and asked me to explain some scholarship stuff that my roommate had told her I might know. When she learned I had a car she asked how I drove, and I told her like an old person, since I never would speed, and she said that was cool if for nothing else that it's probably harder to drive safe than not given the pressure at our age not to. She asked what else I did like that that was off the norm, and I said I didn't really know, so she asked if I jerked off to kink porn. That was a no.
Near the end of dinner, she expressed that she had no idea how I lived in the same room with my roommate, and that she could never do it herself, because, he was, I quote "intense as fuck and batshit crazy."
Language used aside, I couldn't really live with him either. But my bed was made. Actually, I hadn't made my bed in a long time. That was a good reminder to wash my sheets.
*****
The first time I checked into therapy for depression was my first semester of college. My social anxiety was so bad that I was often skipping class to hide in the farthest, most empty corner of the library. I didn't want to be seen by anyone. The idea of being surrounded by classmates scared me. I would often be unable to eat breakfast in the morning because of an anxiety-induced gag reflex. I didn't feel safe at all in my room, perpetually fearful of my roommate being caught with drugs or alcohol or weapons, which would promptly get me booted from school along with him. I stressed over grades and choices and money and my isolation from anyone and everyone. I wanted to die, perpetually, and I was self-harming even more.
After filling out a questionnaire and getting an appointment, I went into a room with a student therapist. They gave me the option of either just talking or answering a list of questions they had. I chose questions, knowing that being cajoled into talking would be easier for me than trying to do everything myself.
The first thing the therapist did was ask me to show where I had self harmed, since I had noted that on the questionnaire. I showed them my left arm, and they scribbled something down.
Question number two involved how I felt when I saw myself naked in the mirror. The therapist chuckled sheepishly and was clearly embarrassed by having to ask it.
Question number three was if I ever felt like I would hurt someone else at school.
*****
Around that time I began to strongly hate the idea of masculinity. I hated body hair. In college, I went to a store and bought the cheapest manual razor I could find, and then, every day in the shower, I shaved everything. Face, neck, arms, legs, underarms, chest, stomach, groin. I did it without shaving cream. It was like taking a steak knife to my body. But I wanted it gone. I wanted manliness gone. Hair gone. I wanted to be more feminine and less whatever I was now, hairy and deep voice occupying a gangly, nerdy 6'2" 150 pound frame.
After about a year I stopped. I was less adamant about it all, and nobody ever saw me, and if nobody ever saw my stomach or underarms or groin, why did I really want to take the time and razor burn to shave it?
Eight years later, someone online I knew as a friend would tell me it's super shitty and inconsiderate to not shave your privates.
*****
I stopped wearing, entirely, shorts, or short-sleeve shirts. I wanted as much as myself covered as possible. For years and years I'd wear long-sleeve shirts on 90+ degree days. And when the think pieces started hitting about how men should absolutely never wear shorts, well, I felt validated (I should have sent an email to the authors asking them who the fuck cares, but at the time I just wanted to feel better about my choice).
In winter I agonized over my coat. I had a light coat and a super heavy, overstuffed one. I worried I would get made fun of in the light one for being stupid and not bundling up, and I worried the big one would take up too much space on the back of my chair in class and make me look ridiculous and get me made fun of.
In the end, I bundled up. Nobody ever said anything. One day, my coat fell off my chair, and into a pile of water from melted snow. I took it back to my dorm and hung it up to dry. That was one of the last classes I went to. I never wore the coat again.
*****
Jokes and phrases about rape and women continued to be common and followed me all the way into said college, but instead of from other people, it was the online sphere. My social network traded in shitty jokes like this, and I sometimes told someone, if I beat them badly in the multiplayer online component of Smash Bros Brawl (a game in which you fight other people with cute Nintendo characters), that I had "raped them." It was the aughts, and phrases like "make me a sandwich" were catching on. 4chan was exploding in popularity, and in my depressed, internet addled state, I would sometimes browse for 10+ hours a day, telling people on the message boards who disagreed with me to kill themselves, and laughing at the pernicious, detestable humor that abounded. At work at McDonalds, someone who also used the website asked if I did, seeing as how I was a scrawny, pale-skinned computer user, and we traded in shitty, awkward memes when nobody was looking.
Finally, sometime around 2010, I realized how horrible the website was, how horrible some of the language I had used was, and that I needed to correct it.
In embarrassment, I tried to go back and remove all the shitty rape references, usage of the word "normalfag" and similar things from forum posts I had littered across untold numbers of websites. But it was an overwhelming undertaking, so I quickly gave up and simply vowed to make sure it would never happen again. And while I fully expected such things to hurt me if I ever ran for office (who could seriously be elected after saying such disparaging things, after all?) I had no interest in doing so, would never be a public figure, and assumed it would never really hurt me, other than knowing I had probably hurt others. I changed a lot over the years, and to this day, said change is one of the only things I can be remotely proud of.
*****
I don’t know what turned me back on a cool May day. I was ready. I stopped attending all my classes in February. When the semester was over, and my first year of college "done," I moved back home. On Mother's Day, I gifted my mom a carefully MS Paint edited report card I spent an hour making that showed I got a 3.25 GPA that semester. In reality, I had failed everything. About a week later, I wrote a short note thanking my family for everything, left it on my bedroom desk, and drove to the 6th floor of a parking ramp downtown, where there was no roof above me, parked my car, got out, and walked to the outside wall. I climbed up and sat on it, legs dangling over the edge, asphalt sidewalk dozens of feet below me. It’d be so easy, to just roll off, head first, fall down, smack the ground, and have it all end, right then and there. But something took hold of me, and before I knew it, I was back in my car, driving to the beach. I watched the sun set, then parked at a Walmart and tried to sleep in my car, even though the May night air was still cold. I tossed and turned awake all night on my reclined seat.
The next day, I went to the nearby movie theater, and went to watch an afternoon matinée. It was the 2nd Narnia movie. Something about trees coming alive to fight was always amusing to me, Lord of the Rings or Narnia. About two thirds of the way through the movie, someone started walking down my aisle. I inwardly grimaced. Five other people in the theater and they choose my aisle. And why this late into the movie? I tried to focus on the screen, but the figure kept getting closer and closer. They sat down next to me. Then I realized. My dad had found me. I felt my stomach drop as he put a hand on my knee. To this day I don't know how he did it, what lead him here. I wasn't far but I wasn't in town, and while we had spent time here as family when I was young, I hadn't been here in years.
On the 45 minute drive home I did everything I could not to jump out of his car as he flew down the 2 lane highway at 70 miles per hour. It called to me, the sensation of falling out, hitting the pavement, and having my skin shredded by the impact, uncontrollably rolling along until unceremoniously stopped by friction and gravity. Hopefully a car would hit me as I did.
My parents ended up taking me to the ER, where a nurse asked me what medications I had been on recently. When I answered “Accutane” they nodded and made an offhand comment about how it was horrible for my liver. I didn’t know how to feel about that comment at the time. I showed the staff all the cuts on my arm from self-harming, where old scars mixed with new scars. One nurse said “oh my god” and shook their head. The way they said it didn’t sound sincere.
In my room, I was told to give a urine sample. Twice a nurse walked in on me when I was trying to pee, cup in my right hand, cold left hand trying to maintain my aim, then I’d switch hands, not sure which would be easiest, unable to pee because of anxiety. A curtain was the only thing offering my small space with a bed and TV any privacy. Sometime late at night, a formally dressed person came by and asked if I was attending church. She was not dressed like any of the hospital staff. When I told her I wasn’t, she said I should get involved in that kind of thing, as it helped, and that Jesus could save me.
I was eventually taken by ambulance to a mental hospital, the stretcher leaving marks and bruises that the two men who took me inside noticed when they told me to disrobe so they could jot down any physical problems and check for any smuggled goods. They immediately asked if it was the stretcher, and when I said yes, they said everyone gets them. I didn’t say anything, but I wondered if the stretchers would ever get replaced.
The first night there I got into bed by about 2am. I lied awake. At 4am, finally starting to drift off, a blood curdling scream ripped through the building. Someone was yelling, in a high pitched terror that I had never heard before in my life. I heard footsteps. A voice on a speaker system saying “code orange.” A gruff voice, not over the speaker, but somewhere in the lobby outside, asked for something to sedate the patient with. And still the screams came, they weren’t English, or human, or anything, just piercing, endless yelling and tears and increasingly raspy exclamations. Suddenly, they stopped, replaced by quiet sobs. “There, there,” another voice said, “now let’s lie you down.” I didn’t sleep the rest of the night.
I wish I could say that one late night screamer was all. But no, on day four, much like day one, I was woken up sometime around 4am again to a different person, a different voice, a different tone. But the feel was the same. Endless, hopeless, helpless screams. At one point, they started yelling about their dog, who would take care of them, they were outside, they lived alone, someone needed to check on them. And then, code orange, and sedation, and whimpers and tears.
The next day in group the new patient sat at the table with puffy red eyes, fighting back tears. When it came time for them to share their arts and craft project, they didn’t say a word.
*****
I was designated enough of a risk to myself in the hospital that a male security guard had to be in the bathroom with me while I showered. The bathroom was shaped like a “U” with the top left the shower, the top right the toilet, and a floor-to-ceiling wall in the middle. The door to the bathroom was at the base of the U. My guard would sit on the right side of the wall, so he didn’t actually observe me as I showered, he just was in the room. It was awkward, having to ask permission just to shower, having to wait, sometimes 36+ hours, for a male identifying guard to be available to do so.
I was in the middle of rinsing out my hair when the room got significantly darker. I didn’t think much of it. The lighting was shitty, frequently flickering fluorescent, and the whole facility screamed of old age and poor maintenance. I assumed a light had gone out. I rinsed out the front of my hair, then ran water down my face to get anything away from my eyes, and ran my hands back through my hair to slick it back. I turned around to rinse out the back.
I convinced myself for the next several days that I was seeing things. That I had hallucinated, that in my paranoid, depressive, suicidal state, I had imagined something out of thin air. But I had to trust myself. He moved fast. Really fast. He was about four inches taller than me and 100 pounds heavier and he darted back to his seat like a professional athlete.
The room had gotten darker earlier because the security guard moved to watch me, and in so doing, blocked the light from reaching the shower stall. I didn’t say anything about it to him or staff the rest of my time there. I didn't know that it would matter. It was my word against a staff veteran. I was depressed. Maybe nothing mattered.
I washed off as best I could with the sink of the bathroom in my own room for the rest of my time in the hospital. I didn’t feel clean until I got home, many days later. I regret never telling anyone about the issue. I wonder how many vulnerable people that guard has spied on to this day.
*****
The worst part about the hospital was the food. It was gross, tasteless, sloppy garbage that resembled nothing, and by day 3, had worn out its welcome. They checked how much we ate after every meal, and I started to be concerned that my half eaten food would trigger some sort of stricter supervision or investigation into my well being.
On day 5 I told my assigned psychiatrist I was considering smashing the mirror in the bathroom and slitting my wrists with it. She threatened to have me followed by a guard 24/7.
Day 6, however, something else was on my mind; family visitations. For one hour, I’d see my parents and sibling. All of us patients sat in the room, with at least one other person, except a single solitary patient. He had no family visiting. He wandered outside the room, occasionally peaking in, clearly upset he had nobody show up for him. After about 20 minutes, he started yelling. He started yelling about how everyone there was trying to kill him. Over and over. He was escorted away. A staff member closed the doors to the room.
In the far corner of the room Bob sat. Bob had long, unwashed red hair, a goatee, and stood about my height, maybe a bit shorter. Bob was fucked. Not out of anything Bob did, but out of how the system was set up. Bob couldn’t talk, and he couldn’t understand talking, so staff never made him go to the required group sessions. He’d wander around the hospital, making some sounds with his mouth, picking up stray objects. Occasionally he’d walk down the halls without pants on, once he even peed on the hallway floor. But everyone liked him, particularly the staff. Because he was deemed low risk, he was basically shuttled to and from all the different hospitals in southern Michigan, his stays at each capped by law at 90 days, a familiar presence from Battle Creek to Kalamazoo to Grand Rapids to Muskegon to Lansing and more. That was why Bob was fucked. Because apparently his life was that of having to relocate every 3 months into a different facility where people would be polite to him but fundamentally ignore him all the same.
On the day of visitations two people visited him, and I gathered over time that one was his mother and one was a sister. They doted upon him and ran their hands through his hair and talked to him in simple sentences, trying to get words out of him, but they didn’t have any luck.
Before I knew it the hour was up. Family members started to say goodbye. My eyes drifted over to Bob. His sister gave him a hug, a big, warm, arms fully around kind of hug that you give someone when you want to make them feel safe and loved.
And then Bob smiled.
I had never seen Bob smile before. I had never seen him laugh. I had never seen him grimace, or cry, or crease his brow, or anything. But right there, he smiled. It was a big, arching smile that showed off beautiful white teeth. After eating nothing but shit for almost a week, after having spent two nights with limited sleep because of blood-curdling screams, after never having seen sun or felt fresh air on my skin in all that time, that smile said there was more to life than cinder blocks and tile floors and creepy security guards and depression and suicide and everything I felt around me there. It said that there could be genuine joy.
His mother cried in that moment.
*****
I got out of the hospital not long before my sibling's birthday. I remember reading the emails my mother had sent me when I had left home to kill myself. She asked me to come home and help her setup a printer, with lots of LOL and PLEASE. She had freaked out.
My dad told me that when she found the note she collapsed, and my sibling hadn't gone to school, just sat in their bedroom, alone, crying all day.
A few weeks later, I saw the bills for my hospital time in the back of my dad's car. The thought of expenses never crossed my mind. I had no idea how any of it worked, I figured they couldn't have been on the hook for everything.
Secretly going through the stack of bills and invoices, I realized my decision in an ER room late at night to check in somewhere cost my parents 15000 dollars. I convinced myself if nothing else, I couldn't go again and do that to them.
Later that summer, my mom and I tried to buy health insurance for me. Not a single company in Michigan would insure me until it had been a longer period of time since I had been in the hospital. If I had to go again, it'd be another 5 digit bill.
*****
Near the end of that summer after I got out of the hospital, my mom started bawling her eyes out when she saw me carrying a duffel bag out of the house to a film session. It was packed with clothes, because the director wanted me to have several outfits to try on to see what he thought looked best. It reminded her of me leaving. I told her I'd be back that night. I was.
I don't know how they ever got over it all. Maybe they didn't. Maybe that's why they threatened me with a hospital stay 4 months later after I had dropped out of college again, pulling me from my bed to therapy in blizzard-like conditions. They were so scared to lose me they'd do anything. I was freaked out. I didn't want to go back to the hospital at all. But they were angry, and if I didn't get up and dressed, I feared I would end up there.
A couple years later I'd realize that as a legal adult, they were completely unable to compel me into a voluntary mental hospital. The only way the state would have taken me was if I was an immediate and impending threat to myself or others. At the time, I was neither. Their threat was an empty threat. I didn't know how that made me feel.
For the next decade they'd do their best to know everything I ever did and everyone I ever hung out with, and every detail about it all. I guess I messed up pretty bad.
*****
I tried to kill myself within about 24 months of getting out. I raided my parent's medicine cabinet and placed well over 100 pills and capsules into a large bottle of warm water, shook it up until everything was either melted or powdered, and started drinking. About a quarter of the way through, I thought I should talk to someone. I called a suicide hotline. They asked what I had done. I told them. They said they couldn't hear me.
Of course. I had forgotten that, for one reason or another, Sprint had shit coverage in our neighborhood.
I repeated again. They still didn't quite get it.
What followed was about 10 minutes of the person on the other end getting progressively more annoyed and impatient, telling me to speak more clearly, that they couldn't help if I wouldn't talk better, and sounding entirely fed up with this conversation. At one point, they did tell me to dump out my bottle, and I did. So there's that. And as much as I know they can help, I find it hard nowadays to recommend calling when all I got was confusing communication and rudeness.
I woke up the next morning with a terrible headache.
*****
I moved out in my early 20s. It was badly needed. I was losing patience with constant parental guardianship and guidelines. And it gave me the freedom to self-harm in ways I hadn't before. I bought a razorblade. I researched the sharpest one available by reading reviews all over Amazon, then ordered it with next day shipping. It was empowering. I could cut deeper and bloodier with way less pressure. A massive gaping wound opened up one night, and blood streamed out onto my bed and sheets and even onto the floor.
And then I panicked a bit. It was a lot of blood. It wasn’t a cut, it was a gash. I texted a friend asking for advice. After they instructed me to rinse and cover it up, I went to bed.
The next day my arm hurt. And as the months and years went on, none of the scars ever went away. They sit there, still, reflective, discolored skin. On a summer day on a subway in New York city, someone saw the largest one and asked me if I got into a fight. I shook my head and chuckled.
“No, just some stupid shit.”
“Like what?”
“Just messing around.”
“I’m just bored man. Just curious.”
I made sure to cover them up better after that.
*****
Derek had died. The news story broke onto my Twitter feed one day. I hadn’t seen him since high school. He had talked about joining the military at the time, as his grades weren’t that good, but I don’t really know what happened. I don’t think he joined the military or went to college.
He died while on a vacation with friends. His Facebook profile is still up. Occasionally, someone comments on it that they miss him. His last photo was posted 48 hours before he died. In it, he is smiling, arm around a friend, sun setting over Lake Michigan behind them.
*****
I had started working at my 2nd job ever in January 2009. I hated every second of it. I figured it'd be temporary while I got me feet under me.
I worked there for the next nine years. I'm still there, to the day of this writing.
*****
Part 4:
I remember being mad at times at people who took pride in being lonely, and then wrote all about it on new media sites like Buzzfeed or Blogger or Tumblr or whatever about having had 6 relationships, 3 roommates, Friday night pub crawls with friends, and all that. And then I felt mad that I was mad because I was making it into a pissing contest I was mad they made it into. They could still feel lonely - everyone does and can no matter how well networked - and I wasn’t here to call that invalid. But I did take umbrage to their ability to make themselves seem like a true loser, and like it was funny, and nobody else was the same or as bad, and that it made them edgy and introverted-ly rebellious and all that and was a source of pride and how nobody else was as isolated as them and they alone had it rough. If they want to enjoy whatever they have, cool. If they feel lonely, not cool, and I hope they get it fixed. By why is it a dick measuring contest? Loneliness is brutal. There is nothing endearing or fun about it. I suppose wearing it as a badge of honor to try to defang its cruelty is something, and maybe in our darkest throes we do that to not admit it’s as bad as we know it is. But it is. It is getting home one day from work and realizing you said the phrase “good morning” a few times and are now locked in your room for the evening and that’s the only vocalization you will use, as you fear your already mediocre social skills will atrophy in your lack of regular use. Loneliness is going years without hanging out with anyone in your hometown because you know nobody in your hometown, can’t even summon up anyone’s first name outside of family and co-workers, and have no contacts or friends or anyone you can talk to at all, and when your mom asks if you do you tell her you don’t and she doesn’t know what to say about that. It’s your teachers in high school telling your parents at P/T conferences that you’re a loner. It’s your dad asking you if you feel lonely or if you make porn (lol) or are gay because something is wrong and you never hang out with anyone or talk to anyone and you can go hours at a time without saying a single word. It’s deciding to track your language use, find out in one week you spoke an average of 220.8571 words a day, and realizing afterwards upon looking it up online that the average for men a day is 7000 (and 20k for women). It’s taking your phone in for an upgrade at Sprint, having them transfer your contacts, and then the employee, when showing you your contacts on your new phone says, “and here are all- wait, there’s only a few, they can’t have all transferred over, I’ll fix that,” and then having to respond no, that is correct, those are my contacts, and realize again that of the six, three are immediate family and one is work. And then walking out of Sprint sullen because that person just figured nobody could be this unpopular. It is when you finally get to meet someone or socialize with someone or date someone and every time they ask you if you’re free to hang out you say of course you are because they’re the only people you hang out with and have no other social life. But if you tell them that, the weight of your experiences becomes entirely what they do with you and that’s too much pressure for some people. So you just hope they never ask why you can always drop what you’re doing to give them a ride or answer their texts.
*****
When I was 26 I getting ready to meet at someone’s apartment to watch Netflix and maybe do other stuff. We had matched on Tinder, exchanged messages, texts, and even talked a few times over the phone. She invited me over to watch movies and have pizza in the evening on a Saturday. That morning, she called me on the phone to talk and ask how my weekend was going. She was pretty, funny, seemed sincere and forthcoming. I supposed for the very first date of my life I could have done a lot worse. After about five minutes of conversation, she apparently decided to not wait to play truth or dare when I got there and instead do it over the phone.
“Truth or dare?”
I didn’t really hesitate. I knew she was rambunctious. I also knew my limits. The truth was way easier. I had nothing to hide, no truly embarrassing or shameful stories other than ones that mocked my own ineptitude.
“Truth.”
“Are you a virgin?”
“Yeah.”
“No way,” she chuckled, “you’re joking.”
“I’m not.”
She paused. “...really?”
“Yeah.”
She paused again. “Whyyyyyy? You’re the second nice guy I’ve met who is a virgin in the last few months! I’m sorry, this won't work. I don’t date virgins, they’re clingy.”
“...Ok. Thank you for being up front.”
“I still want to be friends, though,” she said, her voice more sullen, “so text me later tonight. If that’s ok.”
“Yeah,” I replied, “I’ll do that.”
I texted her that evening and again a few days latter. She never responded to either.
*****
One day at work there was nobody else but one co-worker there. A plumber came in who often did work for people at the office. The two of them were loud, brash, opinionated people, wholly white and stupendously right wing, the co-worker browsed Drudge Report and complained about marijuana users and "welfare queens" and anyone and everyone who wasn't like him.
The two of them somehow got to a story about how some black teens were making noise outside my coworker's house one night. The conversation went something like this:
"I almost grabbed my gun and shot me some n******."
"Nothin' like huntin' n******, is there."
"Not when n****** are no good."
I got up and went to the back of the office where even their loud speech patterns wouldn't reach. I tried to find something to do.
The co-worker was my manager.
A year later the plumber died in horrendous agony from cancer. A year after that, my manager died from cardiac arrest. Everyone loved him, and a party was thrown in his honor, and the holiday charity drive he piloted is still done in his name. A Latinx client of his cried the weekend he died, profusely. Everyone I know who knew him still speaks of him well.
*****
I went to Miami to meet my closest friend face-to-face one year. My hostel was not far from South Beach, a surprisingly upscale one with a full service bar (with excellent cocktails) and a large swimming pool.
For a long time I eyed that pool. I had packed a swimsuit and a black t-shirt to wear. I hadn't been swimming, now, in well over a decade. I wondered how I would do. I wondered how it would feel.
I ordered a cocktail. And then a second. And then a third. I went back to my room and changed. I was now in, effectively, shorts and a t-shirt. I walked back down to the pool. I was the only one whose chest was fully covered, and I mean that in some manner for everyone (it's Miami. Random people in my room wore nothing but thongs). I stepped into the pool.
And then I swam. I swam freestyle. I swam breaststroke. I swam backstroke. I floated on the water. I dove in the water. I swam laps. And it all came back. The feeling of freedom of movement, of less weight, of fluidity, of athletic strokes and the pure wetness of everything on my skin and for two hours, even when a thunderstorm broke over head and everyone left the water, I did nothing but swim like nobody was watching.
That was the end of September. When I came back to Michigan, every swimming area was closed for the season. It's been several years. I haven't gone swimming since.
*****
My best friend reminded me frequently and repeatedly throughout the entirety of my 20s that I needed to get laid or smoke some weed. She said it could help with the stress, or the worry, or the self-aimed anger. I don't know if I ever communicated well how impossible achieving either result was for so long for someone like me. At one point she offered to mail me some weed knowing I couldn't get it any other way. At one point she suggested a sex worker. She was probably on to something like she usually was. I tried to have the drugs I had be enough.
When I was in my early 20s I started to realize I wanted to cut my penis off. Not out of what I figured was any dysphoria, depersonalization, or anything like that, but because, I think, I was rejecting the idea of what being a man was, I was tired of dudes as a whole and what they had done to me, but probably most simply because I hated it, like I hated the rest of my body. It didn’t get any use, and seeing as how so much of modern society was a constant bombardment of SEX and YOU NEED TO SEX and LOOK I’M SEX and HOLY FUCK IT’S SEEEEEEEEEEEEX I felt like cutting it off would both relieve me of the pressure of having to live up the expectation, maybe completely fuck my libido, and, if nothing else, be a horrendous sort of middle finger to social expectations.
In many ways, it was just a natural extension of self-hate. I had removed every mirror in my residence except the one in the bathroom that people needed in the morning as they got ready. But my bedroom? Gone. Basement laundry room? Gone. Sometimes I’d even slouch while driving just to make the angle to see my face or even the top of my head in my rearview mirror impossible.
And then there was sex itself, which was just one way I could make myself pass out. There are multiple ways, to this day. If I start reading Wikipedia articles about drugs and their effects and how they work and what they do, I can pass out. STIs? Same thing. The way things can affect my body is a constant source of queasy, nauseating angst. It took me multiple, multiple attempts just to read up on what the Lexapro, Zyprexa, Effexor, Abilify, Wellbutrin, Xanax I took would or could do to me. And sex was the same. Over the course of life, you are more like to get an STI than not. Do not sign me up for this.
And then three was the admittance. It became hard to admit “yes, I want human intimacy. I wanted hugs and kisses and sex and body parts bumping and whatever.” To admit it felt like an admission of both failure - because it was just another thing I wanted and wouldn’t have - and also an acquiescence to societal and peer pressure that had been telling me since about 8th grade that if I wasn’t banging someone (someone being a conventionally attractive cis woman), then, well, I was a pussy or something. I mean, if I gave it more time maybe I wouldn’t want to have sex. My horny late teens early 20s libido was depressed pretty greatly by the Effexor I took for years and years, and even when I got off it never recovered. I was well into my 20s now. Maybe if I waited a bit longer I wouldn’t have to lie to myself about wanting sex and I just genuinely wouldn’t want it.
But in many ways it became a weird unknown. I convinced myself it would suck. My friend told me it would help and reminded me to try getting laid about once a month (along with smoking weed). And she was really smart, so I went with the assumption that she was right. My psychiatrist at one point, around age 23 or 24, told me to get laid to help my confidence. Even SHE was in on it. So it became this thing I wanted to do but everyone was telling me to do which made it seem even-more-important-than-it-really-was-and-completely-warped-my-expectations-probably-of-what-it-could-be-and-in-the-end-it-probably-wouldn’t-happen-so-let’s-all-just-spend-Friday-alone-combining-alcohol-and-Xanax. But little old me started to miss things. Things I once had (shit talking on someone’s couch while playing them in Smash Bros) to things I hadn’t ever had (human contact, touch, relationship intimacy, etc.). And yeah, fucking. Sure.
I was 25 when I signed up for Tinder and OkCupid. I found 80% of the latter’s profile questions petty (why do I give a shit what people’s income, education, sense of fashion, spelling, religious belief, sex history, drug history is? Just dear lord don’t give me someone who will be an asshole or a bigot or judge me for my total lack of everything involving social networking and relationships. The rest is negotiable). For about a year I did barely anything on either. I sent out maybe 5 messages. My first match on Tinder I got to talking with and got to know was the previously mentioned “I don’t date virgins.” At age 27, I had my first real date, in Vietnam, and in fact had two on the same day. The early one involved a Filipino woman living in Vietnam who said drug users don’t deserve to live. I didn’t know then if that included me. The second date lasted for over 5 hours and we’re still in touch, with them asking me to come back to Vietnam fairly frequently. We spent an entire night riding around town on her bike, drinking beer in a park as a light rain fell, and eating spicy frog soup. She says she misses me almost every day.
I was 28 when I had my first kiss. We started lying down in my bed, naked, and cuddling. I shook uncontrollably with anxiety for about 20 minutes. They thought I was cold, and kept throwing blankets on me. I was actually just horrifically nervous. After about 20 minutes, I had acclimated to being naked in bed with someone to the point where I could enjoy it. With my arm around her waist, she rolled over and shifted her body so that my hand fell right over her crotch. I got the message. What happened next was me trying to act like I knew what I was doing while not knowing what I was doing, by disguising every missed attempt at penetration as a rub. I guess I sort of faked it well enough, as I fingered them twice to orgasm eventually. They then said they wanted to have sex, I grabbed a condom, and then, summarily, freaked. They went down on me and tried to get me hard but it wasn’t meant to be. They asked me if I would cry about it later. I laughed and said no, which was honest. I’ve had way worse things in life to cry over. She kissed me and said we’d try again next time. I drove her to her place and she kissed me again as she left. I never saw her again. She broke up with me on Snapchat a few weeks later. She had fallen in love with someone else.
It took a couple more tries. Time number two was weird. I was in a bed, I don’t know if it was hers or one of her roommate’s, as she lived with multiple other people, although I believe they were out of town at the time. I had drank a lot and taken a lot of Xanax earlier. She wasn’t wearing anything as she crawled on top of me. I know we had done some aggressive cuddling and groping and R-rated touching earlier in the living room. I don't really remember going to the bedroom. She was groaning and rubbing herself. I quickly felt along her chest and squeezed her breasts, then slid my hands back down to her butt. I told her I was too drunk to be of much use, as we (her? me?) took off my pants. What I said was true and after a bit of poor penetration in which I made a fool out of myself, she ended up on her back and I somehow ended up giving oral. Some time after - the exact time was impossible to ascertain in my state - she lit a cigarette and told me she’d brag to her friends that she got a guy to go down on her without asking. I don’t remember anything about the night after that. But a couple days later, I did remember that nobody ever put on a condom.
It was my first time ever having penetrative sex. I think about this quite a bit. It doesn't bother me. I would have gone along with it all if sober, too. I just wish it hadn’t been so awkward and that we could talk about it all now. In some sense, my drunken state was all that prevented me from freaking out again and not being able to do anything. Instead, I subbed out anxiety for alcohol ineffectualness. The next morning I took a tally. I had drank 6 bottles of beer that were 10% alcohol, along with four Xanax pills I took right when I arrived. Whoops. It does make for a really weird “how’d you lose your virginity ice breaker.” “Well, you see, I was drunk and Xanax’d to the point of puking in the bathroom and stumbling down the hall and destroying any hope of a boner. I joked about it, and went along with it anyways, so yeah, my first time was interesting!” I shouldn't make light of it. I'll make a mental note of that.
Time number three was a failed attempt at another place with someone else, and I was mildly buzzed from a less gratuitous combination of Xanax and very strong beer, although it had mostly worn off by the time we got back to their place, and after lots of making out and fondling I told them I wanted them and they said they wanted me and I guess it involved full penetration, if briefly, so there’s that.
Time number four I think both parties involved actually enjoyed it and got off. My success rate was, in effect, surprisingly close to my college GPA.
I didn’t know how to feel afterwards. I hoped it’d get easier but it didn’t. I was a ball of anxiety, performance anxiety, overthinking, worrying, psyching myself out. Sex was a 50/50 bet at best, no matter who it was with, and as much as I liked it, I worried about hurting someone’s feelings or disappointing someone because we had to stop, when it had nothing to do with them, and everything to do with my weird headspace. And yet I feared explaining it would cause someone to not initiate it to try to protect me or prevent awkwardness. So I just accepted that sometimes it wouldn’t work and I’d have to try to say why each time. Usually it was a similar problem; overthinking. One time it was a Charlie horse though. I still find that funny.
*****
Sometime in my 20s I became academically obsessed with certain drugs. I spent hours trawling Wikipedia and Erowid. I knew how the anti-depressants I was taking worked by inhibiting the reuptake of serotonin and dopamine and norepinephrine, and I decided that I needed more to try to fuck my brain into actually feeling pleasure for once in my life. There were lots of legal drugs that were more potent, and lots of illegal ones even more so. Cocaine inhibits the reuptake of all three to a massive extent. Heroin didn’t have the same pharmacology but was euphoric inducing and anxiety removing. If you combined the two, you could get the best of both stimulants and depressants while hopefully cancelling out the negatives (say, anxiousness in the former, cocaine, and tiredness in the latter, heroin). Meth also worked on all three as well as monoamine, but then you start messing with combinations of monoamine enhancers and things can get bad for your health in a hurry. Methylphenidate (Ritalin) was even legal and showed little evidence of long term damage (unlike, say, meth or cocaine). That worked well on dopamine, and a massive 2015 meta-analysis of a variety of high quality studies showed it even had some capacity to increase cognitive performance and memory, and I had spent the last 20+ years of my life wanting to be smarter.
I read about how recurrent usage of the harder drugs caused reward pathways and responses to increased dopamine and the like to become warped and needing more to the point where you body eventually couldn’t feel much pleasure at all. That didn’t sound so bad though, since I was already there.
But I was realistic. I had no contacts, no way of accruing anything illegal or prescription, none whatsoever. And I would never be able to summon the courage to inject myself, use a needle, snort something, or put something harder than, say, weed or maybe LSD in my body. Hell, the first time I drank alcohol I worried I’d be the one dipshit who died on the 1 ounce bottle of vodka a friend sent me in an envelope (it took me 3 hours to drink. I was at least 21 and maybe older). I almost had a panic attack. And the first time I got drunk, at least a full year later, I worried the same.
At times I tried merely what I already had available to me. Skip a day of anti-depressants, then double or triple them the next day. The fatigue was already so high that, while this made it worse, it wouldn't perniciously do so. But it didn't really change things. Maybe at first there was a placebo effect but after a shitty day at work following a tripled Effexor dose I realized that was pointless.
At times I tried merely what I already had available to me. Skip a day of anti-depressants, then double or triple them the next day. The fatigue was already so high that, while this made it worse, it wouldn't perniciously do so. But it didn't really change things. Maybe at first there was a placebo effect but after a shitty day at work following a tripled Effexor dose I realized that was pointless.
So, I decided to take a slightly more complex step. I did research, and didn’t take my meds for a few days while I tried other stuff. In the early and mid 2010s it was still easy to find legal drugs online, so I bought Kratom and Kava and poppers and even some mushroom powder. Kratom was a great high that made me feel warm and tingly and serene when it worked but I’d have to make and take 60, 70, 80 pills to get the effect and half the time I got nothing other than throat fatigue from swallowing so many goddamn homemade capsules. Kava did jack shit. Poppers didn’t really do much to relax me and I tried jerking off while on them as suggested but didn’t notice anything different. Although I derived humor from the fact that you could very easily purchase them on Amazon.com, of all places. Once a week I smoked a cigarette in the garage and that was a fantastic high that left me feeling calm and confident and at peace, but it wasn’t worth going outside in winter, or the regular smell of it on my tongue and clothing, and I wanted to protect that high. E-cigs were pointless, I bought the strongest nicotine laced juice I could find and pumped myself full of it but they did nothing. I eventually did chewing tobacco to try to replicate cigarettes inside. The high wasn’t quite as strong but after work it became my routine, a good way to relax and listen to music or play video games. But after 8 months of using it daily multiple times, a dentist catching scarring, and countless occasions of spilled spit all over the carpet and my books and mousepad, and long grains of the stuff embedded in my floor, I quit cold turkey. Remarkably, I never had an irritability or cravings. It was just done, over, and I moved on.
In the end, the money and time I spent didn’t justify the inconsistency of highs and the work it took. And it didn’t change my day-to-day existence.
So much for the DARE program in 3rd grade working though.
*****
I started getting drunk twice a month, always Fridays, to have time to recover. I’d either end up playing video games or watching old episodes of Whose Line is it Anyways? in order to laugh. Things are funny when you’re drunk. At least for awhile.
I started to incorporate small doses of Xanax into it. It made it so I didn’t need to drink as much alcohol to get drunk. It was economical. And it was a powerful combo that destroyed anxiety and stress.
One Friday after a particularly stressful day at work I took the max amount of Xanax and just started drinking a fifth of scotch. 20% gone. 40%. 60%. 80%. The bottle became increasingly empty.
I didn’t remember at the time, but months and months later, digging through old emails, I realized that I sent one to a friend that night, very late, when I must have been well into the bottle of booze and about ready to pass out. It was a simple, one line email. I have corrected typos for ease of comprehension:
“im going to die”
The next day was the first and only day I have ever called in sick because of not being sick, but because of something else. I stood up that morning when I woke up and promptly fell over into a bookshelf, and onto the floor. My head screamed at me in pain, and I was so disoriented I felt like I was going to either puke or pass out. I spent the day on the couch, lying down, trying to imagine a world in which no noise and no movement existed.
I still feel awful about telling my friend I was going to die. Especially because, in retrospect, I was probably somewhat close.
By my late 20s I had mostly stopped drinking other than socially or if I was gifted beer. Life was more economical without it, and I was about to embark on trying to lose weight by starving myself on a daily basis. Again.
*****
Out of boredom one day I signed up for an adult cam site, bought about 50 dollars worth of tokens, and then lurked around for a bit. To say it was intimidating would be an understatement. Live chatting, even via text, is hard, no time really to contemplate what everyone is saying. It took me weeks, usually, to get comfortable with new people on a chat server for a video game, but when you threw in the sex element, well, my nerves were fried. Chat was generally within the realms of polite discourse, with most of the issues coming when someone jumped in a room and started tossing around "sweetie" or "honey" or "show boob" willy nilly, but the overall discourse was surprisingly more cordial than some video game chat rooms I had randomly jumped in over the years.
After about an hour of lurking I realized there was a private show option, and I thought that might be less stressful than chatting with 50 other people, so I started one.
It was fine for about two minutes, until the woman stripping for me on cam asked me to turn my cam on.
I certainly know I could have rejected, but that alone seemed hard to process. Is that rude? Weird? Creepy? What would I say? I have an old webcam. The mic doesn't work but the camera does. But wait, actually put my face on screen? I never do that, not the few times I used Skype, not on social media with real life pictures or selfies, never.
So I did what any scared person with access to benzos does; I took a bunch. I then plugged in my cam and turned it on. After a few seconds, the website notified me that the performer was watching me.
And then she laughed. She laughed, really, really, really hard. And she kept laughing. And as she did, I started to freak out. Did I mess up? Is there something wrong with my face? Is this all a trick? A trap? Am I about to be blackmailed?
Finally, after what seemed an eternity, she had calmed down a bit. Her face was flushed and she took the mask off she was wearing to conceal her identity.
"did i miss a joke?" I typed in chat.
"nooooooooo. i just expected some old grandpa penis. ur actually young and cute."
I kind of assumed she was lying. I mean, she might have expected grandpa penis, the users of these sites skew older, but I doubted my weak ass cam let her really see me, and I doubt she was doing much more than butter me up.
"thanks"
At that point, she grabbed a blanket and covered herself up.
"sorry. im embarrassed to do this now in front of someone who is cute."
"it's ok"
And she started laughing again. Her head titled back, uproarious sound drowning out the censored version of Eminem's "Superman" she had playing in the background, and so then, I did something I didn't think I would do.
I laughed too.
Not as extravagantly, not as animated, but I laughed, and rubbed my face with my hands, and smiled at how weird this all was.
"sorry can we do this again some time?"
"yeah that's fine."
"thank u though. i needed that."
She signed off.
To this day I am pretty sure she was mostly trying to make me feel good. That's your role, really. If you told your paying customers they weren't cute, you'd be out of them very quickly. And certainly it was a two way street, with people in chat telling a cam performer they were smart or funny or whatever 5 seconds in, as if they could genuinely know. People want to feel good doing this, I suppose, and animosity doesn't provide that, but white lies can. Still, I was struck by one thing I think to this day that she said which was unequivocally true.
"I needed that."
I never saw her again.
*****
In 2017 I finally weaned myself off of the veritable collection of pills I was taking. Effexor, Zyprexa, Lexapro. It wasn't at my doctor's recommendation. It was at my own. For years I had been tired, the drowsiness and fatigue causing me to crash in bed by 8 some nights, barely able to stay awake some mornings at work, a general weariness and lethargy around me every single day. I had also put on weight, and felt perpetually hungry.
By week two off, I felt noticeably better. I was less tired, and needed much less sleep to function. I wasn't nearly as hungry. My libido never did bounce back at all but fuck it, I could stay up until 1am no sweat, and that was even better.
May 2018 will have been four years since the last time I self harmed. In scrolling through old Tweets, I realized how often I wanted to in 2017, how on my worst days, I longed for a razor's blade on my skin.
I will live with the shadow of 10 years of meds, a hospital stay, two attempts, and years of self harm for the rest of my life, always wondering when, not if, it will all come back. I've thought I was better before in my life, only to fall back in. I treat it as only a matter of time. Maybe true happiness is when I no longer do.
*****
I did a lot of research over the years. On calories, on waist lines, fat. It became pretty remarkable to see how simple the idea behind weight loss generally is. Through all the fads and phases, most people who actually study dietary health would tell you to cut calories and fat, increase protein and fiber and veggies, and take some walks. I don't think most people realize diet explains the vast majority of wanting to change your weight (up or down). Exercise burns a small part of the calories you'll probably consume on a daily basis.
I also knew I wasn't going to work out. That was too much work. I would go for walks in summer but winter was too cold. So it had to be almost entirely consumption driven. I was driven by a fear of needing new clothes, of society hating anyone who isn't slim, of my already ugly, non-conventional looks being complicated by love handles or a round belly or whatever, and then you read confessional stories where people recoil in disgust at weight or jiggle or hair and it all becomes apparent to me that I have to be skinny.
I started with 1500 calories a day as an aim. By the end of 2017, I was consuming 1300-1400 calories a day and waking up in the morning starving, only to convince myself to make it until lunch when I had a break at work anyways. Many days, I ate just one meal and a handful of granola as a snack, foregoing breakfast and dinner entirely.
*****
There were 14 of us gathered around multiple conjoined tables in a dining room that was way too small, people squeezed by chairs and corners and back to their seats, a one bathroom house this afternoon for all of us, like every Thanksgiving and Christmas Eve. It was your standard white, rural, Christian family, all niceties and genuine interest in each other and please and thank you and hugs and too much food for 24 people much less 14. Grace was said - not by me, I neither knew the words nor felt comfortable saying then. I was a non-believer although nobody knew, that would go poorly with a lot of people and I can recall the only time my grandma ever being stern with me in my entire life was when I said something about how we all came from stardust at age 11 or so and I was corrected with an admonishment and statement that we all came from Jesus Christ. I didn’t even realize at the time I was stepping on anyone’s toes. It was just a factoid on a set of Bill Nye playing cards I had.
I was older now, late 20s and accustomed to astringent racism at our family meals, all but one other member of my family firmly ensconced in the jokes and bigotry and casualness of disparaging remarks about black people. What began as a story about a kid from the Muskegon Heights - a poor, largely black section of Muskegon, about 30 minutes south from my grandparent’s rural house - quickly devolved. I sat, chewing on cheesy hash browns and polish sausage when the comments began their escape.
“You can take the black out of Muskegon Heights, but you can’t take the Muskegon Heights out of black.”
Everyone nodded along, or chuckled, because of course. It made sense to them. Black people were thugs and there was no changing that. The teens and 20 year olds at the table nodded along. It was a depressingly cruel moment. Of course we know there are millions of racist millennials and post-millennials, but there is hope to be had and it was crushing to see the own youth in my family going along with it, accepting the statement as pure fact, believing it, encouraging it.
The discussion ended up on a fast food restaurant in the same area that was doing well, when one uncle joked about opening a “chicken and watermelon” place if there was that much money to be made there.
I excused myself from the table, picking up the card that each of us had tucked next to our plate. On that card we were all to write down what we were thankful for, which we would later share. I took it with me to the couch then hastily scribbled some corny, passive-aggressive statement about being thankful for the diversity of backgrounds and viewpoints I had experienced over the years. We never ended up sharing them, as dinner had dragged and everyone had to get home.
Weeks later I’d tell my mother how racist it was and she said she wasn’t paying attention to any of it, and that the world was not as black and white as my protestations about racism made it appear, but shame on me for not saying anything. She was right about one of those things.
*****
If I could go back in time I supposed I would. Half a lifetime (of my age 28 self) basically wasted in isolation and depression, time lost I could have been making memories or meeting people or creating networks and getting out of my comfort zone. There were so many things in life I missed while I was still young and able to do them.
Then again, not everyone has been to multiple continents and a dozen different foreign countries. So who knows. We define ourselves by what we don't have, longing for affirmation, for fame, for money, for sex, for drugs, for promotions, for attention, for respect, for comfort.
A friend of mine once had a musical artist she loved follow her on Tumblr, and she said it was the highlight of her life. This was music she had grown up on, wished she could create, wished she could somehow utilize herself to connect with a crowd, receive praise, feel emotionally available, find hot groupies, whatever. But she didn't. So she took pleasure in this mere inconsequential thing, how he would never reblog her, or contact her otherwise, but maybe, just maybe, he knew of her very existence, and that alone was worth celebrating.
Six months later, he was kicked off the band after multiple allegations of sexual assault. He posted an apology on Tumblr. I don't know if my friend ever read it.
*****
I met more amazing people in 2017 than I had in years. I spent holidays and birthdays with some. I spent more money on gifts and drives to Grand Rapids and nights out at brewpubs. I spent many nights cuddling in bed and talking about books or movies or music or shared trauma or holy shit did you see that hilarious Twitter post? I tried tobacco products for three days to counteract stress then stopped again. I received some of the most thoughtful gifts of my life. I took a selfie for the first time in 10 years, Fall of 2007 being the last, still uncomfortable with the thought but not so disgusted that I couldn't even turn the camera on me.
I spent the first full weekend of 2018 driving aimlessly around town while a party happened at my house, too nervous to return and have to deal with the people and the noise, too annoyed with there being nowhere to park, not having eaten a single thing all day. For six hours, I took in the sights and sounds of a cold winter night in January. It felt like I was back in college again, leaving where I lived because I felt uncomfortable there, letting anxiety eat me alive as I tried to not look too threatening wandering around book stores and Walgreens.
I bought a pack of cigarettes that night. I never smoked them. Maybe some things really do never change. For now though, I refuse to believe that.
*****
I sometimes wonder what would have happened if I never grew up. I was a white cis dude libertarian who trafficked in 4chan jokes and misanthropy. And while I was never, I suppose, the worst, my existence was that of someone who didn't realize - or didn't care enough - that certain things I said and did were bad. And it would have been easy to maintain; I was completely socially isolated for so long, not dealing with any financial stressors outside of a single student loan, as most of my college was covered by scholarships. And my interests - sports, video games, anime, - encompassed some of the three most toxic communities in the world. My few online friends were almost all white dudes with the same interests. Some of them remain friends to this day. Some of them are genuinely amazing people.
Where would I be if I was still browsing 4chan, if I was still talking about raping someone in a video game, or still posting suicide jokes and memes and laughing at tragic news stories, browsing Liveleak looking for humanity's worst, just to confirm that everyone, like myself, was total shit?
I'm not perfect, far from it. I fucked up a lot and will continue to do so. But I was protected by my love of learning and reading and understanding. Before I knew it, I was exploring more, reading things others outside my experiences had written, and seeing all the ways in which things I said and the communities I was in were broken, how for someone who hated being judged for being scrawny, or nerdy, or introverted, or not conventionally good looking, I had nothing to say about the prevalent power structures in society that consistently and almost always harmed people of color, women, LGBTQ, disabled, the poor.
It all stopped pretty suddenly. My libertarian trolling days lasted from about age 17/18 to about age 22 or so. Five-ish years of mistakes strewn across websites and comment sections and social media. The things I said still bother me and if I could have them back I would. But I learned, and I like to think I've grown and become better now. Maybe I haven't. But I've tried. I've tried to learn and listen and understand and be good. I suppose that's all I can ask of anyone, really.
*****
Final Part:
I don't know what the purpose of all this was. Maybe there was one at some point. After a year of struggling to write anything sci-fi or fiction like I usually do, I found my incomplete stories leaning more and more into being about people and places I knew, until I decided to lean into it fully and just write about myself. My life has not been all negative, and I struggle with whether I was cruel in what I chose to commit to this project or not. I have met some wonderful people. I have family members who are amazing people. My travel buddy is a wonderful dude who I never have to worry about being rude, or obnoxious, or sexist when we get drunk, or culturally insensitive, nor do I have to worry about drama or anything over the entirety of a long trip. I met my best friend via an anime blog, of all things, whose warmth and intelligence and empathy amaze me to this day. We have been in touch almost every single day for years now. I have met people even in my hometown now, people who are kind, caring, honest, funny, smart, good, some of whom have even made out with me, others who have beat my ass in card games at a bubble tea café. My parents, through all their faults, the times they yelled at me, spanked me, controlled me, whatever, have only ever wanted me to be happy. My dad even once gave the ol' speech about "if being a garbage truck driver is what makes you happy, then be a garbage truck driver." They've given me opportunities - like the trip to Australia - most kids can't even dream of. We all grapple with goodness and badness, if a hero does something bad, or a bad person does something good, or if you do something bad how bad it is and how long you owe penance and what it means, and that doesn't even get into our lack of focus on victims of so many of these bad things, or the conditions that allow them to fester. We appear to have a lot of work to do.
I guess I am curious more than anything. I'm not a particularly tough person, prone to panic when criticism or disagreement comes. I don't think my spine - my metaphorical one, not my ungainly crooked one, - is terribly sturdy. I'm sure many saw and heard worse than I did. But I want to know; is this truly what we all go through? Because if this is a consistent level of violence, and bigotry, and hate we all see, I don't know if I should be crushingly depressed about it or amazed we manage to hold some semblance of societal order together. I like to think the 2nd private school I went to was an outlier, a place of well-off white people self-stratified into self-immolation, fed by teacher apathy, full of the violence and hate and bigotry that other schools and their more socioeconomically and ethnically diverse bodies have no room for. I'd like to think that... because I hope nobody has to try to come out of that and how the people there followed me for years after I left, and the damage it did. I like to think that a violent college roommate is not the norm. But I don't know. We talk about bullying and racism and homophobia and sexism in generalities, as things that are sort of "bad" in the sense that large scale things are bad, not the hyper-localized, individual trauma they often entail. Maybe that is the norm, and I am just not strong. I'm sure millions of kids, targeted for their skin color, their gender identity, their religion in ways I never have been went home wondering if they had a place in this country, in this world. Some of them were condemned for it. Others came out of it like a badass fusion of Beyoncé and Luke Skywalker. So I don't know. Maybe that's the key purpose of all this. I know nothing.
I'm sure some of the people in this story have grown up and repented, have gone on to do good things for their friends or family and community, and look back on their behavior, like I look back on some of mine, in disgust. We all deserve a chance to grow and change, especially given as how rapid and dramatically we do, medically speaking, until we turn 30, brains still forming and growing, communities and peers constantly morphing and growing and shrinking as we navigate new classrooms and the social slaughterhouse school can entail, along with first jobs and first residences. But we're all left picking up from it.
A lot of days I still feel the tug of loneliness. I see my friend count on Facebook and how it’s 500, 1000 people smaller than everyone else. And I shouldn’t let that bother me. I have friends who went to shows or parties or have popular Tumblrs or Twitters or Instagrams or hang out every week or bum around the beach and I have a much more succinct social life and then look at my blog and realize, when subtracting bots, I have maybe 4-5 actual readers, at best, on any given day. I shouldn’t define it like that but it’s hard. Numbers are brutal and honest and horrifying.
I don't mean to suggest that any of one thing causes everything. Our genetics play a roll. The money we're born into does. The community and makeup of the people in our early lives do. But maybe that's why I chose this title. Because in the end, we are all the genes, the dollars, the roof, the food, the gay, the bitch, the retard, the n word, the f bomb, the punches, the spanks, the chokes, the drugs, the self-harm, the yelling, the screaming, the fasting, the hate and love and despair and hope we all absorb in bits in pieces from one another.
We are all what everyone has ever done to us.
Thank you for reading.
Thank you for writing. I know you're not looking for pity or anything. But you damn sure deserved (and deserve) better. The pieces had better fall into place, because it is time.
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