Junior High

I can't sleep--it's 5:51 and I've been tossing and turning since ~4:30. I awoke from a dream about Trevor Beatty, a junior high bulley that fit the stereotype to a "t". He was tall, chubby enough to appear bumbling, had a wide head with beady eyes, had a stupid laugh, and had an abusive sense of humor. In the dream I had punched him in the face, but then me and some friends had to outsmart him in some sort of weird mechanical, snake-arm twisting game. But throughout the dream, and what has become a common theme in my dreams and daydreams, I knew that punching him in the face wasn't enough to stop him from attacking me again. It is never enough for me to confront my aggressors. Even if I beat them all to bloody pulps, or let them go after having a knife to their necks or a gun to their heads, they will always come back with more henchman and with more resolve to hurt me. I don't think I've ever had a dream where I successfully deterred an attack, permanently. In a way, it's almost as if I'm operating from the mentality that {EEE{} condemns for being unrealistic in Ender's Game: I can't trust an adult or authority figure to protect me. In the real world, I operate pretty well under that assumption, but when it comes to the manias in my mind, I am utterly alone, and solely reliant on my own strength for defense. The scary thing is that I know without authority to protect me, I'm someone's bitch.

Now that I make the comparison, Junior High did feel a lot like prison. No, I never got anal-raped, and if I had I probably would have committed suicide. Fuck. I say that for my little brother's sake who was constantly ridiculed for being gay (he isn't) and for having his friend beat him up. But anyway, in Junior High I was trapped in this hostile place with no one to go to for help. And I was surrounded by these jerks who ruled over things.

Blah. I feel like I'm whining and spewing a bunch of crap that doesn't make sense. Okay, let's try again: I still think about Junior High; I still feel the same kind of terror and isolation; I still feel like I don't belong; I still feel I'm faking when I interact socially--I put on this confident face, "Oh yeah. I feel completely normal and confident talking with you," when I really feel like, "if I leveled with these people they'd see me for the spineless, idiotic, driveling douche bag that I am".

I never ate lunch with anyone throughout Junior High. Thinking this over as I lay in bed this morning, I have a hard time recollecting three years of lunches beyond, 1. eating at a corner table with some other boys (Robert, Brady, and Justin) and hardly talking to them and never sitting directly by them, 2. hanging out in the "blue" with Lance and some other kid whose name I can't remember, but I knew he was a bad kid because he had earrings I think. Thinking about it, I still feel trapped. I was stuck in a room with hundreds of kids, none of whom I thought wanted to eat lunch with me, and I was supposed to sit somewhere or I couldn't eat.

What's really frustrating about this is when I think about talking this out with my wife, I expect to get sympathy but in the form of "yeah that can be really stressful to be in a situation like that." Yeah, I know, and I appreciate that on some level you aren't grinding the shame back in my face, but I am still tormented by this after 15 years. My junior high experience defined my psyche, and I can't seem to redefine it. Even here in graduate school, passing my classes when I'm definitely not at the top of my game, I still feel like an impostor. I feel like I'm just faking like I've been faking since junior high and that eventually I will fail and I can stop faking.

God I'm depressing.