The School of Life IV

There are too many dreary tales of woe from my life in school to recount them all. In fact, I’m not sharing any of the real horrors with you (just the fluff) because the descriptors required would be to mindbendingly shocking. I made several attempts to describe them, but without using only the most perverse analogies and offensive descriptors it just doesn’t come remotely close to helping others understand the reality. Once people get to know me better and I reveal a small fragment of the pain inflicted by the depth of weakness of the minds of others they are shocked and they think that I’m telling a horrible sick joke or just insane. But the problem comes from them comparing me as an equal to themselves. They can only comprehend lower level anguish. They think physical torture is worse than mental torture because they are more physical than mental.

Of course, even I can’t comprehend what I went through as a child, partially because I’m not nearly as smart as I was, and partially because when you experience real trauma you can only fully comprehend the pain during the pain. Afterwards, when the pain is just a memory, it softens. But it still makes for great anecdotes.

One of my overall points with this writing about school days is that school never gave me anything real, it just corroded, eroded, shredded and ate away at my soul. It beat me down, plundered my mind and attempted to nullify my worth. In many ways what they were trying to do worked, I could certainly call myself a victim of the school system if I wanted to. But even with all that they ripped away, all the ways that I conformed and foolishly allowed them to control me, I started out with so much substance and worth that even as the shell of the boy I once was, I am a man who is still too cool for school. I am a proud drop-out. I am the purple-heart winner of the war of the mind, I am the Heisman trophy winner of being the only kid in my class who never learned the rules to football, I am the Nobel Peace Prize winner of not being the first kid to shoot everybody in school, and I am the impeached king of compromise. Besides, who really wants to claim to be a victim of something that is weaker than them? That would just be sad.