2.2.1.4

Well, I’m back. I feel the need both to create tonight and to destroy.

Where to begin. I summarized my past in somewhat of a poetic allegory in one of my first posts. Allow me to translate.

(I’m warning you, this post is looooooong… over 2000 words. But, it’s pretty much the most pivotal, important story of my life. Grab yourself some coffee and make yourself comfortable… it’s a long, bumpy ride from here on out. Consider yourself lucky too — I’ve only told this to two other people in my life, and never as completely as this. Anonymity is a wonderful thing.)

In elementary school, I was somewhat of a weird child. Just could never quite fit in or really make my own friends. I eventually managed to “befriend” a group of peers by more or less just hanging out with them until they sort of got used to me being there. Before that I had the odd friend here and there… Never really hung out with more than one or two people. It was ok at first… They talked to me every now and then, and I’d talk back. We’d have our fun. Then, as fifth grade turned into sixth, several of us were separated, having been assigned to different teachers. That left me and three of my other friends.

Sixth grade began much as fifth grade had ended. But somewhere between then and winter, something changed in my friends… Or had I changed? Or perhaps none of us really changed… We just realized who we were and who we wanted to spend our time with. My friends became cold and short towards me. I hardly noticed at first. Suddenly, as quickly as snow had begun to blanket the earth, my friends decided they wanted nothing more to do with me. I suppose that the only way they knew how to make me realize this was becoming my enemies. Just as I thought things were going okay, I was cast aside like a broken toy, crushed underfoot.

What could I do? I couldn’t change the way they felt towards me. Thus I began trying to find another group, to find a new set of people I could call friends. I wandered for far too long, a sailboat caught in the doldrums. I quickly learned what everyone thought of me. I was the outcast, the failure, the reject… the weird kid who automatically made you “uncool” by association.

I had nobody.

I interject to tell a story of the last time I cried. As far back as I can remember, my parents were always partial to my younger brother. Call this firstborn syndrome if you will, for I cannot prove otherwise. All I remember is how I felt each time my parents refused to listen to me, to take pride with me in my accomplishments. I remember how quickly I was the one who always needed to be reprimanded. I was always the wrong one, the one whose preferences and whose personality always had to take a backseat to everyone else’s at home. I know, a “textbook example of life as a firstborn child,” right? To that I reply, I have never, to this day, had a single meaningful conversation with either of my parents. I was not allowed to have “bad days,” not allowed to show dislike for anyone, not allowed to differ in opinion. Such was a sin for me in our home.

I hated my brother for the longest time. He was listened to, even catered to. His desires were precedent. Angry words from him were dismissed as “He’s just joking,” or “Well, he just wants some attention.” We were born only a year and a half apart. He was in the grade below me. How were his feelings and words and emotions and personality so different from mine, so special? Why couldn’t I be the one listened to for once?

At eight years old, I confronted my parents in tears. I screamed and shouted and vented and fell to my knees. “You don’t love me, you never have” I yelled. I then looked up to face my parents. What would they say? How would they punish me for acting out like that? “That simply isn’t true,” they said. During this ordeal, my father had left for work and my mother had finished dressing to do the same. “I’ve got to go to work, we’ll talk about this later” she said, before leaving. I waited that night. We never did.

I died that day. At eight years old, I learned to hate. I learned to send the pain below. A thought, turned into a collapsing fortress, had crushed my mind. There was no love to be found here for me. There never was. So that day I died inside, my soul cast into a labyrinth of hate I would not escape for another eight years.

When I realized that these “friendships” I clung to were not more than mirrors and smoke, mirages in the life that had wilted into a desert, I realized that I was truly alone. Hatred took advantage of this new ground and lacked no haste in claiming it.

Sixth grade continued on. Each week was something new, a new nickname, a new insult, a new rumor. Each week loneliness grew, followed by the emptiness of a dying heart, followed by the burning ache of hatred sent to a cage it was never supposed to escape from. It was soon after that I made my retreat, an attempt to escape to a place in the back of my mind, somewhere I was safe from the pain that had consumed me. My hatred had begun to coalesce into a being of its own, a beast with a charming voice and a message as cold as steel, a face that laughed at me each time I closed my eyes. “They’re right about you,” it said. “You really are worthless. Everything here is all your own fault.” Every silence I found in my mind was broken by this accusing, mocking voice.

In this place I lost all sense of self-worth. I was nothing to me. And the part that tore into me the most — the part that still tears into me the most — was never knowing why, and never having anybody to ask. “Stop being so selfish,” my parents often told me, every time I used the word “me” or “my”.

Suicide. Death, to me, seemed like the only real way out. I remember times where I would walk into my kitchen and look at the knives, trying to judge which ones would cut the deepest and fastest, and which ones would hurt the most. I remember wondering what would happen if I were to simply take all these pills I’d find in the cupboard. I remember wondering just how quickly a car accident could kill me. But I felt weak. Were I to take this way out, what would everyone think of me? “Well, I’m not surprised. Always one to take the easy way out…” I determined I would show them that I was better than that.

After what seemed like an eternity, school came to a close, leaving these salt-covered wounds to slowly scar over. The hatred had broken the locks to its cage and had begun to escape. So, I planned another one of my own, this time, physically. Instead of continuing my education in the public school system I would be going to private school that next year. As I disposed of the last textbook, I thought I saw the sun for a minute. I was going to a new place with people who didn’t know my name, who didn’t know who I was. A place where I had no reputation to battle every day, a place I could start over and begin to heal.

But there, they did know my name. They did know who I was, and what it meant to befriend me. My hope was revealed to be yet another mirror and as seventh grade began, I found myself banished to the same corner I had cowered in for the past year of my life, only now with different faces throwing the stones, different voices with different mocking tones. I had been given more friends that would betray me and lie about me and talk about me behind my back. I would lie in bed, anguish in my heart and for hours I would ask the same question, “Why me? Am I so horrible?”

I wanted to die. I prayed for death, for some kind of release, for water on the tip of my parched tongue.

Another year in the fire was my sentence. Seventh grade came to a close, having opened wounds I thought were healing. At that time of my life, the one thing I dreaded the most was the eighth grade. I knew that unless something changed, I wouldn’t be able to take it. I was on the verge of insanity. All the hate and the anger I had pushed to the side wouldn’t fit in its jar anymore. I knew that unless something changed, I would find myself doing something I would regret for the rest of my life, and I was getting closer and closer to apathy.

Eighth grade came around. It was hard at first, but the faces which had once tormented me were gone with the passing of a year. There was still this reputation to break, but I was in the right place at the right time on a few occasions, and managed to make a friend again. For the first time in a long time, I had someone to talk to, a hand I could steady myself with as I staunched these bleeding wounds and allowed them to heal.

Eighth grade, I begun to heal, but the war was far from over. These wounds took years after that to finally mend themselves. Even today I feel some of these wounds — certainly the scars from old wounds.

By the eleventh grade, not long after I had come to terms with the person I was, I had begun to like who I was. I wasn’t afraid to be myself anymore.

And here I am today. Phantom pains and nightmares still haunted me from time to time. They still do. But, I’ve done a lot of growing up since those days and have armed myself with the weapons I’ve needed up until this point. I look back, and think I did good — never attempted suicide, never cut myself, never hurt anyone else. A thousand days in the fire, and I’ve been given my wings. I am confident, and I can stand on my own two feet without falling.

But I still haven’t cried since I was 8… I still don’t know so much about why, why me. I still don’t know what all those people thought they were doing to me back then. I still don’t know why my parents could never — and still don’t ever — listen.

Nonetheless, I thought everything was ok. Then as I was telling this story the other day to this friend I’ve been talking so much about the past few days, I was told the story of this person’s sister, who didn’t fare so well through it, who did cut herself. I went back to my room that night and something snapped inside me. Some of the feelings I had buried so deep resurfaced. I felt so much sorrow, thinking about my friend’s sister, so much anguish and pain that I could relate to.

That’s why I did it. That’s why I cut myself that first time. I felt as though I had to relate on a deeper level. I did it so I could feel like I was worthy to say that I knew what she had gone through. My first cut was made in empathy.

It seems, though, that this cut has shown me that I have more unfinished healing to do beneath the surface. Something’s tearing me up from the inside, though, causing more wounds, not simply opening old ones. I think I’m cutting now for all the pain I once suffered in the past. Making up for lost time, I suppose.

…Going out for that smoke was good for me. I did a lot of thinking. I realize now that I’ve collected so many secrets over the years. I thought I was being myself this whole time, but it seems that “myself” was still buried underneath these ruins I’ve been digging through. Then again, maybe I’m just changing. Maybe this search is just changing me.

Anyway, there you have it. The most important story (to me) that I have to tell.

…I don’t have time to cut tonight. I’ve got a test in the morning I still need to study for.

You’re too complicated for your own good, Jordan.