Childhood's_End
New Here
Hi. Um...this is long. Even for me. It also scarcely scratches the surface.
So for the short version: I am twenty-and-a-half years old. I was never popular but generally quite happy until a traumatic incident, which I developed PTSD a year later in response to, then out of shame tried to deny the worst part of the trauma while working through the rest of it, seemed okay for a few years as therapy terminated, then ended up having a career crisis and needing to stop lying to myself about the worst part of it, then deciding that instead of pursuing a degree in physics, I needed to follow a career in music (preferably the writing of musical theatre).
A longer version:
Throughout life I tried to overachieve, since my family is poor and I have always had impressive academic skills. I was always a loner, but there were kids I got along with, usually other artistic or nerdy types like me. I got diagnosed as autistic at age nine-and-a-half about, though I almost certainly had a depressive disorder as well (I've had a pessimistic bent toward how I look at life, at least when it comes to abstract things such as politics and philosophizing, but had a relatively happy childhood due to the love of my family and friends). The gifted classes in drama, visual arts, and chess club contributed heavily to the buoying of my social connectivity and high spirits as an elementary-age child, particularly given that I'm absolutely rubbish at sports (I could never get a soccer ball off the ground, instead tripping over them due to co-ordination problems so significant that when playing sports as a class and picking teams, in order to spare my classmates the trouble I would vote MYSELF off the team by opting out of playing to instead run the track alone before they could agonize over who would pick me, and I was overweight as well).
At age 13, first year of junior high, while barred from entering band class to instead act as teacher aid to a guidance counselor (she tried to use flattery as justification, but that didn't work long - I wanted either music or visual arts, and they cancelled the music appreciation class). So I ended up entering visual art I in the second semester, since I had no prior experience playing a band instrument (despite our economic situation, I had the good fortune to get a clarinet cheap from my mom's wealthy boss). I could never play it then, but that clarinet gave me such a world-lifting joy - seeing how those keys would move and visualizing the airflow, hearing the tone go up and down...as awful as I sounded, it gave me a thrill to hear it, to hear the possibilities of what could come of it.
Unfortunately, by this time in the year, I had a routine of merciless bullying, resulting in frequent absenteeism, which is why I tried to negotiate either skipping a grade or homeschooling. Yeah, I wanted to go to school to learn clarinet (I squeaked and sounded horrible when I first tried to play, but at the time I thought I sounded awesome, primarily due to the wonderment I had to possess and behold and exude the timbre of this instrument). Unfortunately, my mom, when I asked later, said she thought I wanted to stay in school because of how homeschooling could look to colleges, when in fact that was her contribution to the subject, while I made the counter-argument. Sometimes, it is difficult to remain calm.
I had rumors floating around for some time surrounding my sexuality, people saying I was gay and stuff like that. Stuff that I never paid attention to, since even kids who are best friends say stuff like, "Haha, you're gay!" and "That's so gay!" Even when they were seriously trying to intimidate me, I didn't want to draw any more attention to it than necessary (and sometimes when they tried to intimidate me, they were downright pathetic about it). Unfortunately they (at least some of them) were serious, and furthermore, that I actually did like boys as well as girls.
So I attended art class, maintained a major obsession with the cartoon Invader Zim and science fiction in general (at the time I chose to read for school books such as The Martian Chronicles, Dune, and Childhood's End, my namesake). They would physically harass me, verbally insult me, and generally make all manner of lewd comments intending to humiliate and demean me. Rather than "ignore" them as the counselor suggested, and since the teacher failed to punish their more serious offenses (and we moved around often to get supplies, so moving desk wouldn't help), I refined my keen sarcastic wit. I had the capability to develop witty rejoinders already, but typically my response time of minutes to hours would prohibit the usefulness of my wit in acting as any kind of barrier to the onslaught, to show any kind of defense. During those few months, however, my usual difficulties in getting thoughts to turn to speech quickly enough broke through, and I made so many snappy comments that even their friends, also sitting at the table, would laugh at the way I had subtly-yet-not-too-subtly slighted him. This way I kept drawing, and kept my sanity.
Oh, and then there's the girl in art class who followed me around harassing me because I didn't attend church. I didn't even tell her I was an atheist, for though I didn't believe in God, my parents did, and my dad is spiritual and believes in Jesus, so I identified as a non-church-going Christian since that's what my parents were, essentially. She told me about how I was going to hell and blah blah blah. I told her, nearly word-for-word, that "I thank you for your condescending concern, but I am quite aware of the many people and groups who think I'm going to suffer an eternity in hellfire for various reasons, but art class is the inappropriate venue to voice your views. Could you schedule another date? I hear Sunday is lovely for discussing this type of thing." An example of the way I'd talk during that time. I also kept unusual hours late at night, during which I often spent pontificating on life, the universe, and everything (pretty much). This stress during day and the pressure of my writing translated to a hurried manner of speaking, words flowing out rapidly and remarkably coherently considering the circumstances.
Oh, yeah, and I had a brother. Meaning, that's the year I met my brother. I knew about him long before from the time my dad cried on the steps of the elementary school amphitheater to tell about how he'd last seen him, the first time of my recollection I'd truly seen my dad break down crying in a public space. My mom had a terrible yet good-hearted overly-optimistic Hollywood-esque idea of how to reunite them, by driving over to meet my dad after his shift ended at Petsmart, where he stocks dog and cat food on the shelves, or at least he did. There's a picture out there somewhere, printed out a poor-quality printer from an old digital camera, glare a bit in the eyes, of me standing there in my silver trench coat and big glasses frames, smiling wide, happy to see my brother for the first time (I had always wanted to have a brother; two older sisters can be a pain growing up sometimes - then again, an older brother can too, grass always being greener and all that), yet sensing the pain to my dad that he meets his son again under these circumstances, for I know he counts himself a failure in life, as he, too, dreamt of becoming a published author.
So he lived at our house for awhile. Meanwhile, the bullying grew more intense, and while I had the good fortune that my teachers were (almost) universally great, apart from the counselor (and the art teacher, while she could teach art, couldn't handle severe bullying). I developed the habit of running to each class, even when I had plenty of time. On the day it happened, it felt like 85 degrees Fahrenheit, maximum. In actuality, it exceeded 105 degrees Fahrenheit.
I had this friend. We were great friends, in sixth grade anyway. At age 10, I was friends with a geeky guy in my accelerated math class. We would go and shoot hoops, talk and stuff. One of the first real friendships I had that extended beyond orchestrating engineering projects in the sandbox. Then he started to act funny. He'd look away, get nervous, and wouldn't talk to me much anymore. Then he started to make fun of me, acted like I had to be joking to suggest we were friends. There were rumors back then, too. I told my dad about all this, and he said that maybe he thinks you like him. I said, "What? That's ridiculous!" At age ten I thought it was ridiculous to go on dates. He said, "Who knows? Maybe he even likes you and doesn't want the other boys to know."
That same boy, two years later, when I had a new best (and really, only) friend, kept saying, "Have you heard the horrible, terrible news?" and when he finally spat it out, said that my friend had a crush on me. Unfortunately, I acted less than admirably, and shunned my new friend the way my old friend had shunned me in hopes of avoiding getting lower on the unpopularity ladder. In the following year, however, we reconciled. I told him I wouldn't blame him if he hated me, but he said he understood.
The bullies frequently broke into my lockers, stealing or destroying my work, nothing new. One day, I put the wrong notebook in my locker instead of the one I keep on my person. That notebook had notes for stories, my personal rants and ramblings about injustice and the events of the day, notes on physics (I was reading also a physics textbook in my spare time), as well as...some of my poetry and other personal info. This is the kind of stuff the counselor used to blame me (apart from my typical countenance of weird, my seizures and my poverty), but when one is living in this environment, and gets a refuge in a life science class or a lunch period spent alone in the front office or psychologist's office ("safe spaces" they provided for when I got anxious from meltdowns, which they abused as a place to send me whenever I got overly anxious from the bullying and got a chance to slip out of the classroom, teacher aware or unaware - ironically, the counselor accused me of abusing the "safe spaces" thing to get out of class, even though I expressly told her that I meant to report incidents of bullying and would only return to the classroom when the school dealt with the issue according to the provisions of California State Law and Educational Code, which did cover sexual orientation and gender identity expression at the time of the offenses, and the parts of which I highlighted in my school planner, as well as all the school rules I could see that the bullies broke).
Some of my entries referred explicitly to my same-sex attraction (no, not in a pornographic sense), and while I typically ripped out the fiction/non-fiction that could incriminate me on the playground to either store in a folder at home or to burn (my parents are actually fairly open-minded and accepting, but one of my sisters could say harsh things, and if she knew it could get around the high school where I'd soon go - I also got a little paranoid towards the end of that year, for somewhat valid reasons).
Oh, yeah, one time I got beaten up badly enough that I could hardly walk around for a week. Nothing serious, nothing like an emergency trip needed, but enough that it put me through agony to walk around the table, my back extremely stiff for a month, particularly in pain that week, but I forced myself to attend school a full week following that attack to show them they couldn't intimidate me, despite the thirty-five minute walk to school. My dad always walked to school and back with me, though, so even though he had to slow down considerably, having someone to keep pace with so I wouldn't give up. I guess I can see why they say I have high endurance, despite my pitiful co-ordination and lackluster abilities in sports (that's why they put me in Adaptive P.E. at age ten, because I still tripped over soccer balls and couldn't get it in the air, or more than a few feet across the field, still playing tee ball - unfortunately, in junior high, they stopped separating the Adaptive P.E. students from regular P.E. students, and so I just got walloped by the other kids, including those on my team). Meanwhile my sister complained that she needed to see a chiropractor because doing the dishes put such a terrible strain on her back.
The counselor blamed this all on me whenever I went to report things, and she wouldn't let me file an official report. What a sight to freshly thirteen-year-old eyes, just denied a means to even record, however much it is merely done for show, the events of beatings that knock you out of unconsciousness, perpetrated by multiple people and observed laughingly by multiple bystanders, yet before you let go of that same breath, you see the group of popular girls getting busted by police, no less, for smoking marijuana in the bathroom. How could my cynicism do anything but deepen after seeing that this counselor, who had moments ago used my autistic existence, my parental income, my clothing choices, general weirdness, and medical conditions to justify physical violence against me, provoked at the very most by some sarcastic dig at my attackers' intellect, was now treating this infringement of the legal and school codes as a serious crime? Either they're both crimes or neither are (unless it were legal to smoke, but still not on a school campus, and that is irrelevant anyway). Egregious errors of justice abounded, and this is my primary memory of that time. The beatings, the insults, the rushing from class to class, the competitions - that is all background noise.
Then there's the day of the substitute. I think this is why summer is my least favorite season. Summer has never appealed to me, but now I dread it. After a series of events I won't care to go into, I decided to escape the class again, as I usually did. That is one lucky aspect, that I got the chance to escape, even if the place I escaped to ended up being a place where I got berated and blamed for supposedly causing the bullying, and why didn't I just ignore it? Um, yeah, kind of hard to ignore someone who's punching you in the face. I'll keep that in mind, though.
Although my psychologist had very asinine ideas (just because I wrote a depressing poem for the county poetry contest she thinks I am really depressed and in need of therapy - it's called voice, idiot, do you really think that every time you hear a song on the radio that the songwriter felt those exact emotions, or had those same events happen to them? It's called creativity! It's called ART! She went on to write in one of my reports that "creative writing is an emotional outlet" - gee, you're just the kind of person we writers "love" to encounter! The kind who reduce our entire art to -ahem- *clears throat to adopt silly, helium-induced voice* "emoootional OUTLET"!) I didn't go to sleep until about 7 a.m. last night (weird sleep pattern), and I looked at that page of my 504 plan, just ranting about the insanely stupid things on there. "responds to clear, concise, and calm interactions" - uh "No, I respond to confusing, rambling, angry interactions, thank you very much." Honestly, anyone in the professions working with children or adolescents (or anyone, really) who thinks clear and calm are the less effective methods (and concise often is better, depending on what you're doing)...this isn't the military, for Pete's sake! Even there, at least two out of three are common sense no-brainers, for what little I know about the military.
So because one person went on a school trip, one of the bullies who typically sat farther away sat closer, but I asked the substitute to leave the class. She wouldn't let me, and she was unfamiliar with the policy in place. I tried to convince her without letting on too well to the bullies what I was up to. She wouldn't let me go unless I convinced her I was really anxious. Yeah, right, like I'm going to induce a panic attack on purpose in front of everyone just to get away from the bullying that she can't control? Right. That couldn't backfire at all. So I ended up sitting in my seat, thinking up a way I could get out of there and maybe get this to end. I could wait it out for the year, which only had about two weeks left to it.
My academics were in the toilet already, though I had salvaged my math grade by doing a few months of make-up work in a night. My teacher wouldn't ordinarily accept it, but he knew I was bright, so I went from an F (22 or 29%) to a B (I forget B- or B+, but it was a B) - my parents and the counselor told me to focus on making up my literature grade, which was around 49-54%, but I focused on the math one, which counted more dearly to me. It pained me to think that they thought I shirked my subjects, though I still retained an A in life science by some miracle of chance. I got a C (I forget whether C- or C+) in art class, FYI. I almost failed due to incompletion of the final project, but I finished it.
So some people finally started to take notice in the actions of the bullies, who grew increasingly bold due to the absence of the regular teacher (I still know their names, the substitute and everyone, burned into my mind, the exact spelling). The guy next to me, let's call him Drew, then the other guys, let's call them Eric and Brent, so Drew shoved my face down to Eric's dick and they made jokes about me, saying I wanted to suck them and have orgies and crap like that (when one is so afraid of a gay person making a pass at them that they'll go to such lengths to harm them, such harassment seems to defeat the purpose - not that there is a purpose to such violence) and one girl noticed what was going on and said, "That's sexual harassment." I thought, 'Hey, if these other, regular students are taking notice, maybe they can act as witnesses and finally some kind of justice happen - after all, it isn't just me. They can't claim I'm just being an overly sensitive autistic kid, if even non-outcast, straight, religious, conservative students not only see what's wrong here, but pick up on it on their own, without anyone saying, "Look! Look how wrong this is! Don't you agree?" then maybe they would agree to act as witnesses, and I could get a formal report after all.
I broke away from them at some point, made a snide remark about how I sure as hell didn't want them, but from the looks of it, he seemed to want me pretty bad. At that point, I left the classroom to go to the office, unbeknownst to the teacher, determined that this time, I wouldn't just demand to report it, I would demand a telephone directory so that I could contact the police straight away, since obviously the school had proven themselves incompetent, and that should the school refuse, I would describe their woeful handling of the bullying leading up to the incident, thus ruining my preservation of their reputation. As I planned my speech, walking toward the office, I noticed the people who had left the classroom were more than just a girl leaving with a bathroom pass and a smirk, but also the boys from art class. They got behind me and got my throat, my feet off-balance drag-pulling me as I struggled to get away, them hitting me and pulling into the bathroom, where they slammed my head against the sink a few times and raped me.
I have a near-flawless memory of my life leading up to that moment. Until very recently, I could only remember the details of that actual incident through dreams and vivid flashbacks, which is why I would freak out at the drinking fountains in eighth and ninth grades. From that point on, my memory of my life is extremely patchy. Which is sorry to say, considering that apart from my infancy and early childhood, that's the best time of my life so far. I can't even remember girls I was with. The years melt together, difficult to distinguish whether a moment belongs to one year or another era of my life. Ordinarily this wouldn't bother me, since I look forward to a life that I plan to fill with many more Crowning Moments of Awesome than the one I achieved at the age of 14 in my national writing award, but what does bother me is that I can remember the insignificant and the painful in such vivid detail, but the happiest years are clouded in obscurity.
So, long story short, the counselor (who also dangled the science and tech magnet school as incentive to go back into the classroom, saying it's a problem of my attendance rather than of her refusing to address discipline under the sorry guise of "zero tolerance" that punishes victims and innocents in a pretense as it does nothing to address violence, merely perpetuating it in a sick lie of promise to the students who attend a country they think is a free America) exploited my dire need of praise, brought me to shame myself, convincing me that I can't do a horrible thing like shaming my parents by letting them find out what happened. I want to tell them just to spite her, but all that would accomplish is demonstrating what a fool I am for sitting on this information until it's too late, letting it corrode me from the inside.
For eighth grade, I had to attend the same school. In my history class I even sat across the room from one of them. I didn't get PTSD symptoms until my ninth grade year, though.
When in eighth grade one morning ranting about the way they treated my reporting of the case while walking to that very same institution, my dad said, "They didn’t - rape you, did they?"
I looked to the gutter. "...No. No, nothing like that." Too late. Were I to tell him at that late date, he’d think I’m a weak and foolish person.
When at age 15, in ninth grade, I flashed back to the events, my dad said, "Come on - you weren't in Vietnam." It helps to know that he was unaware of the full extent of what happened. While that is a less than helpful response regardless what happened, it hurts less.
By the way, I did apply to the science magnet high school. I didn't get in. I guess my straight B grades the first semester of eighth grade (not to mention the atrocious grades from the year before) weren't good enough for them, despite my excellent test scores and writing sample. I did, however, gain admittance to a top-notch arts high school, where I quickly made long-lasting friendships and learned more about art than I had dreamed I would.
Since the traumatic memories surfaced in flashbacks during ninth grade, got labelled panic attacks by the school principal or someone, I got referred to a psychologist. I ended up attending sessions for a few years, but in that time could never admit the full extent of what happened. I got myself to function well enough that I earned about 30 credits of college during high school (would've had more but three apply to my high school transcript since I failed US History; strange considering that I aced it in community college and the year before I got a B in AP European History, corroborated by a 4 on the AP examination - complicated situation involving teacher animosity and the special education teachers).
Then I still had the pressure to succeed financially for this family, so I ended up trying to get accepted to MIT a year early, but then getting overwhelmed and breaking down in the spring, missing loads of class, having to drop AP Calculus and AP Chemistry, my two best classes (getting an A and a B, respectively), in order to pull up my worst class (US History), except that didn't even work and I still failed history, obviously didn't get into MIT or Caltech, not that I even wanted to despite my capability to succeed there. So I ended up going to a small aternative liberal arts college, just to go to a four-year college and say I could do it, but both years I tried I failed (first time I had a successful first try, getting good scores in physics and math, but had to leave for physical and mental health reasons - second time, my career crisis came to a head, my neighbors were extremely loud and annoying, the school didn't have the program I wanted, so I made a rash decision and left - I wish I had stayed the rest of the year, since I couldn't actually get my money back like I thought).
So I'm going to attend community college in the fall, then after about a year transfer, maybe to NYU or Oberlin or Ithaca. That's the plan, or it was. Turns out I'm flat broke, and my parents are poor factory workers, and I'll need extensive training to do a job. I've applied for disability in hopes that I can move out (I only ever see my parents, occasionally my grandma, day in, day out - we live in an isolated rural town, and I miss meeting going out places on my own, which I can't do here since there are no bus stops, so learning the area is pretty much impossible). I want to move to a city where public transportation and maps are much more reliable methods for learning my way around, then get involved in the community, develop my musical skills (particularly on keyboard and clarinet, as well as general theory, composition, and aural skills). Fortunately, while in college I learned to eat on the cheap, making simple meals myself rather than buying food out, as well as some simple home maintenance realities. I want to develop my music and my job skills first before diving into college. I want to have the ability to maintain a secure job and to have developed my musical talent further before going back to college.
So for the short version: I am twenty-and-a-half years old. I was never popular but generally quite happy until a traumatic incident, which I developed PTSD a year later in response to, then out of shame tried to deny the worst part of the trauma while working through the rest of it, seemed okay for a few years as therapy terminated, then ended up having a career crisis and needing to stop lying to myself about the worst part of it, then deciding that instead of pursuing a degree in physics, I needed to follow a career in music (preferably the writing of musical theatre).
A longer version:
Throughout life I tried to overachieve, since my family is poor and I have always had impressive academic skills. I was always a loner, but there were kids I got along with, usually other artistic or nerdy types like me. I got diagnosed as autistic at age nine-and-a-half about, though I almost certainly had a depressive disorder as well (I've had a pessimistic bent toward how I look at life, at least when it comes to abstract things such as politics and philosophizing, but had a relatively happy childhood due to the love of my family and friends). The gifted classes in drama, visual arts, and chess club contributed heavily to the buoying of my social connectivity and high spirits as an elementary-age child, particularly given that I'm absolutely rubbish at sports (I could never get a soccer ball off the ground, instead tripping over them due to co-ordination problems so significant that when playing sports as a class and picking teams, in order to spare my classmates the trouble I would vote MYSELF off the team by opting out of playing to instead run the track alone before they could agonize over who would pick me, and I was overweight as well).
At age 13, first year of junior high, while barred from entering band class to instead act as teacher aid to a guidance counselor (she tried to use flattery as justification, but that didn't work long - I wanted either music or visual arts, and they cancelled the music appreciation class). So I ended up entering visual art I in the second semester, since I had no prior experience playing a band instrument (despite our economic situation, I had the good fortune to get a clarinet cheap from my mom's wealthy boss). I could never play it then, but that clarinet gave me such a world-lifting joy - seeing how those keys would move and visualizing the airflow, hearing the tone go up and down...as awful as I sounded, it gave me a thrill to hear it, to hear the possibilities of what could come of it.
Unfortunately, by this time in the year, I had a routine of merciless bullying, resulting in frequent absenteeism, which is why I tried to negotiate either skipping a grade or homeschooling. Yeah, I wanted to go to school to learn clarinet (I squeaked and sounded horrible when I first tried to play, but at the time I thought I sounded awesome, primarily due to the wonderment I had to possess and behold and exude the timbre of this instrument). Unfortunately, my mom, when I asked later, said she thought I wanted to stay in school because of how homeschooling could look to colleges, when in fact that was her contribution to the subject, while I made the counter-argument. Sometimes, it is difficult to remain calm.
I had rumors floating around for some time surrounding my sexuality, people saying I was gay and stuff like that. Stuff that I never paid attention to, since even kids who are best friends say stuff like, "Haha, you're gay!" and "That's so gay!" Even when they were seriously trying to intimidate me, I didn't want to draw any more attention to it than necessary (and sometimes when they tried to intimidate me, they were downright pathetic about it). Unfortunately they (at least some of them) were serious, and furthermore, that I actually did like boys as well as girls.
So I attended art class, maintained a major obsession with the cartoon Invader Zim and science fiction in general (at the time I chose to read for school books such as The Martian Chronicles, Dune, and Childhood's End, my namesake). They would physically harass me, verbally insult me, and generally make all manner of lewd comments intending to humiliate and demean me. Rather than "ignore" them as the counselor suggested, and since the teacher failed to punish their more serious offenses (and we moved around often to get supplies, so moving desk wouldn't help), I refined my keen sarcastic wit. I had the capability to develop witty rejoinders already, but typically my response time of minutes to hours would prohibit the usefulness of my wit in acting as any kind of barrier to the onslaught, to show any kind of defense. During those few months, however, my usual difficulties in getting thoughts to turn to speech quickly enough broke through, and I made so many snappy comments that even their friends, also sitting at the table, would laugh at the way I had subtly-yet-not-too-subtly slighted him. This way I kept drawing, and kept my sanity.
Oh, and then there's the girl in art class who followed me around harassing me because I didn't attend church. I didn't even tell her I was an atheist, for though I didn't believe in God, my parents did, and my dad is spiritual and believes in Jesus, so I identified as a non-church-going Christian since that's what my parents were, essentially. She told me about how I was going to hell and blah blah blah. I told her, nearly word-for-word, that "I thank you for your condescending concern, but I am quite aware of the many people and groups who think I'm going to suffer an eternity in hellfire for various reasons, but art class is the inappropriate venue to voice your views. Could you schedule another date? I hear Sunday is lovely for discussing this type of thing." An example of the way I'd talk during that time. I also kept unusual hours late at night, during which I often spent pontificating on life, the universe, and everything (pretty much). This stress during day and the pressure of my writing translated to a hurried manner of speaking, words flowing out rapidly and remarkably coherently considering the circumstances.
Oh, yeah, and I had a brother. Meaning, that's the year I met my brother. I knew about him long before from the time my dad cried on the steps of the elementary school amphitheater to tell about how he'd last seen him, the first time of my recollection I'd truly seen my dad break down crying in a public space. My mom had a terrible yet good-hearted overly-optimistic Hollywood-esque idea of how to reunite them, by driving over to meet my dad after his shift ended at Petsmart, where he stocks dog and cat food on the shelves, or at least he did. There's a picture out there somewhere, printed out a poor-quality printer from an old digital camera, glare a bit in the eyes, of me standing there in my silver trench coat and big glasses frames, smiling wide, happy to see my brother for the first time (I had always wanted to have a brother; two older sisters can be a pain growing up sometimes - then again, an older brother can too, grass always being greener and all that), yet sensing the pain to my dad that he meets his son again under these circumstances, for I know he counts himself a failure in life, as he, too, dreamt of becoming a published author.
So he lived at our house for awhile. Meanwhile, the bullying grew more intense, and while I had the good fortune that my teachers were (almost) universally great, apart from the counselor (and the art teacher, while she could teach art, couldn't handle severe bullying). I developed the habit of running to each class, even when I had plenty of time. On the day it happened, it felt like 85 degrees Fahrenheit, maximum. In actuality, it exceeded 105 degrees Fahrenheit.
I had this friend. We were great friends, in sixth grade anyway. At age 10, I was friends with a geeky guy in my accelerated math class. We would go and shoot hoops, talk and stuff. One of the first real friendships I had that extended beyond orchestrating engineering projects in the sandbox. Then he started to act funny. He'd look away, get nervous, and wouldn't talk to me much anymore. Then he started to make fun of me, acted like I had to be joking to suggest we were friends. There were rumors back then, too. I told my dad about all this, and he said that maybe he thinks you like him. I said, "What? That's ridiculous!" At age ten I thought it was ridiculous to go on dates. He said, "Who knows? Maybe he even likes you and doesn't want the other boys to know."
That same boy, two years later, when I had a new best (and really, only) friend, kept saying, "Have you heard the horrible, terrible news?" and when he finally spat it out, said that my friend had a crush on me. Unfortunately, I acted less than admirably, and shunned my new friend the way my old friend had shunned me in hopes of avoiding getting lower on the unpopularity ladder. In the following year, however, we reconciled. I told him I wouldn't blame him if he hated me, but he said he understood.
The bullies frequently broke into my lockers, stealing or destroying my work, nothing new. One day, I put the wrong notebook in my locker instead of the one I keep on my person. That notebook had notes for stories, my personal rants and ramblings about injustice and the events of the day, notes on physics (I was reading also a physics textbook in my spare time), as well as...some of my poetry and other personal info. This is the kind of stuff the counselor used to blame me (apart from my typical countenance of weird, my seizures and my poverty), but when one is living in this environment, and gets a refuge in a life science class or a lunch period spent alone in the front office or psychologist's office ("safe spaces" they provided for when I got anxious from meltdowns, which they abused as a place to send me whenever I got overly anxious from the bullying and got a chance to slip out of the classroom, teacher aware or unaware - ironically, the counselor accused me of abusing the "safe spaces" thing to get out of class, even though I expressly told her that I meant to report incidents of bullying and would only return to the classroom when the school dealt with the issue according to the provisions of California State Law and Educational Code, which did cover sexual orientation and gender identity expression at the time of the offenses, and the parts of which I highlighted in my school planner, as well as all the school rules I could see that the bullies broke).
Some of my entries referred explicitly to my same-sex attraction (no, not in a pornographic sense), and while I typically ripped out the fiction/non-fiction that could incriminate me on the playground to either store in a folder at home or to burn (my parents are actually fairly open-minded and accepting, but one of my sisters could say harsh things, and if she knew it could get around the high school where I'd soon go - I also got a little paranoid towards the end of that year, for somewhat valid reasons).
Oh, yeah, one time I got beaten up badly enough that I could hardly walk around for a week. Nothing serious, nothing like an emergency trip needed, but enough that it put me through agony to walk around the table, my back extremely stiff for a month, particularly in pain that week, but I forced myself to attend school a full week following that attack to show them they couldn't intimidate me, despite the thirty-five minute walk to school. My dad always walked to school and back with me, though, so even though he had to slow down considerably, having someone to keep pace with so I wouldn't give up. I guess I can see why they say I have high endurance, despite my pitiful co-ordination and lackluster abilities in sports (that's why they put me in Adaptive P.E. at age ten, because I still tripped over soccer balls and couldn't get it in the air, or more than a few feet across the field, still playing tee ball - unfortunately, in junior high, they stopped separating the Adaptive P.E. students from regular P.E. students, and so I just got walloped by the other kids, including those on my team). Meanwhile my sister complained that she needed to see a chiropractor because doing the dishes put such a terrible strain on her back.
The counselor blamed this all on me whenever I went to report things, and she wouldn't let me file an official report. What a sight to freshly thirteen-year-old eyes, just denied a means to even record, however much it is merely done for show, the events of beatings that knock you out of unconsciousness, perpetrated by multiple people and observed laughingly by multiple bystanders, yet before you let go of that same breath, you see the group of popular girls getting busted by police, no less, for smoking marijuana in the bathroom. How could my cynicism do anything but deepen after seeing that this counselor, who had moments ago used my autistic existence, my parental income, my clothing choices, general weirdness, and medical conditions to justify physical violence against me, provoked at the very most by some sarcastic dig at my attackers' intellect, was now treating this infringement of the legal and school codes as a serious crime? Either they're both crimes or neither are (unless it were legal to smoke, but still not on a school campus, and that is irrelevant anyway). Egregious errors of justice abounded, and this is my primary memory of that time. The beatings, the insults, the rushing from class to class, the competitions - that is all background noise.
Then there's the day of the substitute. I think this is why summer is my least favorite season. Summer has never appealed to me, but now I dread it. After a series of events I won't care to go into, I decided to escape the class again, as I usually did. That is one lucky aspect, that I got the chance to escape, even if the place I escaped to ended up being a place where I got berated and blamed for supposedly causing the bullying, and why didn't I just ignore it? Um, yeah, kind of hard to ignore someone who's punching you in the face. I'll keep that in mind, though.
Although my psychologist had very asinine ideas (just because I wrote a depressing poem for the county poetry contest she thinks I am really depressed and in need of therapy - it's called voice, idiot, do you really think that every time you hear a song on the radio that the songwriter felt those exact emotions, or had those same events happen to them? It's called creativity! It's called ART! She went on to write in one of my reports that "creative writing is an emotional outlet" - gee, you're just the kind of person we writers "love" to encounter! The kind who reduce our entire art to -ahem- *clears throat to adopt silly, helium-induced voice* "emoootional OUTLET"!) I didn't go to sleep until about 7 a.m. last night (weird sleep pattern), and I looked at that page of my 504 plan, just ranting about the insanely stupid things on there. "responds to clear, concise, and calm interactions" - uh "No, I respond to confusing, rambling, angry interactions, thank you very much." Honestly, anyone in the professions working with children or adolescents (or anyone, really) who thinks clear and calm are the less effective methods (and concise often is better, depending on what you're doing)...this isn't the military, for Pete's sake! Even there, at least two out of three are common sense no-brainers, for what little I know about the military.
So because one person went on a school trip, one of the bullies who typically sat farther away sat closer, but I asked the substitute to leave the class. She wouldn't let me, and she was unfamiliar with the policy in place. I tried to convince her without letting on too well to the bullies what I was up to. She wouldn't let me go unless I convinced her I was really anxious. Yeah, right, like I'm going to induce a panic attack on purpose in front of everyone just to get away from the bullying that she can't control? Right. That couldn't backfire at all. So I ended up sitting in my seat, thinking up a way I could get out of there and maybe get this to end. I could wait it out for the year, which only had about two weeks left to it.
My academics were in the toilet already, though I had salvaged my math grade by doing a few months of make-up work in a night. My teacher wouldn't ordinarily accept it, but he knew I was bright, so I went from an F (22 or 29%) to a B (I forget B- or B+, but it was a B) - my parents and the counselor told me to focus on making up my literature grade, which was around 49-54%, but I focused on the math one, which counted more dearly to me. It pained me to think that they thought I shirked my subjects, though I still retained an A in life science by some miracle of chance. I got a C (I forget whether C- or C+) in art class, FYI. I almost failed due to incompletion of the final project, but I finished it.
So some people finally started to take notice in the actions of the bullies, who grew increasingly bold due to the absence of the regular teacher (I still know their names, the substitute and everyone, burned into my mind, the exact spelling). The guy next to me, let's call him Drew, then the other guys, let's call them Eric and Brent, so Drew shoved my face down to Eric's dick and they made jokes about me, saying I wanted to suck them and have orgies and crap like that (when one is so afraid of a gay person making a pass at them that they'll go to such lengths to harm them, such harassment seems to defeat the purpose - not that there is a purpose to such violence) and one girl noticed what was going on and said, "That's sexual harassment." I thought, 'Hey, if these other, regular students are taking notice, maybe they can act as witnesses and finally some kind of justice happen - after all, it isn't just me. They can't claim I'm just being an overly sensitive autistic kid, if even non-outcast, straight, religious, conservative students not only see what's wrong here, but pick up on it on their own, without anyone saying, "Look! Look how wrong this is! Don't you agree?" then maybe they would agree to act as witnesses, and I could get a formal report after all.
I broke away from them at some point, made a snide remark about how I sure as hell didn't want them, but from the looks of it, he seemed to want me pretty bad. At that point, I left the classroom to go to the office, unbeknownst to the teacher, determined that this time, I wouldn't just demand to report it, I would demand a telephone directory so that I could contact the police straight away, since obviously the school had proven themselves incompetent, and that should the school refuse, I would describe their woeful handling of the bullying leading up to the incident, thus ruining my preservation of their reputation. As I planned my speech, walking toward the office, I noticed the people who had left the classroom were more than just a girl leaving with a bathroom pass and a smirk, but also the boys from art class. They got behind me and got my throat, my feet off-balance drag-pulling me as I struggled to get away, them hitting me and pulling into the bathroom, where they slammed my head against the sink a few times and raped me.
I have a near-flawless memory of my life leading up to that moment. Until very recently, I could only remember the details of that actual incident through dreams and vivid flashbacks, which is why I would freak out at the drinking fountains in eighth and ninth grades. From that point on, my memory of my life is extremely patchy. Which is sorry to say, considering that apart from my infancy and early childhood, that's the best time of my life so far. I can't even remember girls I was with. The years melt together, difficult to distinguish whether a moment belongs to one year or another era of my life. Ordinarily this wouldn't bother me, since I look forward to a life that I plan to fill with many more Crowning Moments of Awesome than the one I achieved at the age of 14 in my national writing award, but what does bother me is that I can remember the insignificant and the painful in such vivid detail, but the happiest years are clouded in obscurity.
So, long story short, the counselor (who also dangled the science and tech magnet school as incentive to go back into the classroom, saying it's a problem of my attendance rather than of her refusing to address discipline under the sorry guise of "zero tolerance" that punishes victims and innocents in a pretense as it does nothing to address violence, merely perpetuating it in a sick lie of promise to the students who attend a country they think is a free America) exploited my dire need of praise, brought me to shame myself, convincing me that I can't do a horrible thing like shaming my parents by letting them find out what happened. I want to tell them just to spite her, but all that would accomplish is demonstrating what a fool I am for sitting on this information until it's too late, letting it corrode me from the inside.
For eighth grade, I had to attend the same school. In my history class I even sat across the room from one of them. I didn't get PTSD symptoms until my ninth grade year, though.
When in eighth grade one morning ranting about the way they treated my reporting of the case while walking to that very same institution, my dad said, "They didn’t - rape you, did they?"
I looked to the gutter. "...No. No, nothing like that." Too late. Were I to tell him at that late date, he’d think I’m a weak and foolish person.
When at age 15, in ninth grade, I flashed back to the events, my dad said, "Come on - you weren't in Vietnam." It helps to know that he was unaware of the full extent of what happened. While that is a less than helpful response regardless what happened, it hurts less.
By the way, I did apply to the science magnet high school. I didn't get in. I guess my straight B grades the first semester of eighth grade (not to mention the atrocious grades from the year before) weren't good enough for them, despite my excellent test scores and writing sample. I did, however, gain admittance to a top-notch arts high school, where I quickly made long-lasting friendships and learned more about art than I had dreamed I would.
Since the traumatic memories surfaced in flashbacks during ninth grade, got labelled panic attacks by the school principal or someone, I got referred to a psychologist. I ended up attending sessions for a few years, but in that time could never admit the full extent of what happened. I got myself to function well enough that I earned about 30 credits of college during high school (would've had more but three apply to my high school transcript since I failed US History; strange considering that I aced it in community college and the year before I got a B in AP European History, corroborated by a 4 on the AP examination - complicated situation involving teacher animosity and the special education teachers).
Then I still had the pressure to succeed financially for this family, so I ended up trying to get accepted to MIT a year early, but then getting overwhelmed and breaking down in the spring, missing loads of class, having to drop AP Calculus and AP Chemistry, my two best classes (getting an A and a B, respectively), in order to pull up my worst class (US History), except that didn't even work and I still failed history, obviously didn't get into MIT or Caltech, not that I even wanted to despite my capability to succeed there. So I ended up going to a small aternative liberal arts college, just to go to a four-year college and say I could do it, but both years I tried I failed (first time I had a successful first try, getting good scores in physics and math, but had to leave for physical and mental health reasons - second time, my career crisis came to a head, my neighbors were extremely loud and annoying, the school didn't have the program I wanted, so I made a rash decision and left - I wish I had stayed the rest of the year, since I couldn't actually get my money back like I thought).
So I'm going to attend community college in the fall, then after about a year transfer, maybe to NYU or Oberlin or Ithaca. That's the plan, or it was. Turns out I'm flat broke, and my parents are poor factory workers, and I'll need extensive training to do a job. I've applied for disability in hopes that I can move out (I only ever see my parents, occasionally my grandma, day in, day out - we live in an isolated rural town, and I miss meeting going out places on my own, which I can't do here since there are no bus stops, so learning the area is pretty much impossible). I want to move to a city where public transportation and maps are much more reliable methods for learning my way around, then get involved in the community, develop my musical skills (particularly on keyboard and clarinet, as well as general theory, composition, and aural skills). Fortunately, while in college I learned to eat on the cheap, making simple meals myself rather than buying food out, as well as some simple home maintenance realities. I want to develop my music and my job skills first before diving into college. I want to have the ability to maintain a secure job and to have developed my musical talent further before going back to college.