When constructing this series, I have come across some difficulty in organizing events. On the one hand, everything here is based on information that I’ve thought long and hard about. However, I think as you put to paper certain thoughts, you’re finally allowed to think about other things, and thus it becomes difficult to see your life as a straight line. As much as I’m trying to go in chronological order here, I feel like it would be immature to not at least comment on a few tangents that I haven’t really addressed in the previous sections.
The following are things that have happened at different points throughout the late 90s and early 00s. Some of them may even bleed into my middle school section. However, I think that they’re necessary to understand what’s to follow.
This section will begin with a commentary on why I’m personally insecure about a lot of things. As I’ve detailed in the previous section, my insecurity can be tied to social events where my peer group ultimately turned on me or left me to fend for myself. The school system and its many authorities couldn’t stop the problem. It filled me with a skepticism that still exists somewhere and may speak to why I continued to act out for years to come. I would be fine being “vulgar” because we were entering a period of Tom Green, South Park, and Jackass, where it was actively encouraged to make people uncomfortable. Given that I felt that way over more trivial things, I think that I was more willing to engage with that aspect even if I could never be completely amiss. Still, if somebody put me up to a dare, I would do it. Why? Because they would laugh in approval and I would, in return, have a friend.
You see it in Family Guy, where the obese lead character would be so heinous and disrespectful and my peers would laugh. As much as I believed I wasn’t that vulgar, there was still the reality that I would do anything for attention. It was a call for help I later realized, but the adults in my life weren’t exactly being helpful. My dad would still tackle me while I peacefully watched TV. I’d cry for him to stop and he wouldn’t. I was so small that I was helpless and any attempt to end the cycle would cause him to be mad at me and do the gaslight of “I was only trying to have fun.” Because of this physical nature, I think it translated to a discomfort within myself and an uncertainty about how to interact with others.
My father was also the type to throw cats at me for his own amusement. I’d be sitting around and suddenly our pet would be lunged. Sometimes it would end mundanely and there’d just be an uncomfortable thump on my body. There were others where he held their haunches and would pull them back up as they tried to land. As a result, I would get unwanted cat scratches up my arms and legs, even my hands as I tried to separate myself from the situation. When I would have a natural response of flailing arms, he would accuse me of wanting to hurt animals and proceed to kick my legs as reprimand. You couldn’t win with him.
I think it makes sense why I acted out. A lot of the time I would be stuck with him for hours during the week. When I wasn’t in school, I was at Fun Services and was taught how to run what was presumptively the family business. However, for reasons I won’t get into, this would be short-lived and create familial strife. My discourse wasn’t among children but older men who had their own mature language. There was Omar who listened to conservative radio like Sean Hannity. We used to laugh because I found it boring and, thankfully, never retained any of his talking points. These were good men who respected me most of the time, but I do think when you’re a preteen you’re entering an adult world where one employee is making sex jokes during the drives and the other is talking to the radio.
I do believe on some level that my father wanted me to be just like him. I don’t think there’s necessarily anything wrong with it, but I’ve come to realize that you need to allow your child to have an authentic personality outside of yourself at the same time. I cannot be sure when he shifted from being the conservative “religious” dad to something more lenient, but the shift was so sharp by middle school that I think he was almost relieved. Something about shifting from OLOR to St. Cornelius encouraged him to finally adopt a “cool dad” persona and that meant we were listening to KLOS 95.5 and KROQ 106.7 with more regularity. Based on his reaction to the DJs, I was buying into the misogyny and crass nature of the humor. It wasn’t as crude as Howard Stern, but my sister insists that there was a lot of problematic content around objectification and reckless party behavior. To me, it just seemed innocuous, but that was because I saw it didn’t bother my dad. He’s never been great at critical thinking, so it took a long time for me to develop any media literacy to argue against the messaging.
As I’ve developed these early chapters, I’m coming to terms with the theory that a lot of my struggle is as much overcoming the uncomfortable time I had in fifth grade as it is differentiating myself from my father. This isn’t to say that I disliked him, but more that a lot of my conflict was that I felt like I was taught to be more like him than anyone else, and I don’t feel it’s fair to my mother or myself. I had empathy that wasn’t allowed to flourish because I had to be a boy. I had to play baseball and be aggressive. He wanted me to work on cars and enjoy NASCAR. While we’d come to terms with a lot of things, I think growing up in an environment that shunned that behavior meant I was at odds. Do I show compassion to others that my father openly made fun of, or do I just close myself off from appreciating other cultures and ideas? It’s an idea that becomes difficult because my father insists that he was “protecting” me, which has its benefits if you look at the “troubled teen” tropes, but maybe isn’t entirely helpful. A child with skinned knees must learn to walk while wincing.
It also didn’t help that I was very insecure as an individual. I have mentioned that in fifth grade (though maybe earlier), I had begun gaining weight. For some reason, it was a problem that never occurred to me as a problem until way too late. I just loved food and didn’t have the impulse control to stop. In autism, it could be considered executive dysfunction where your body isn’t regulating sensations properly. I’ve noticed it mostly with food because suddenly after dinner I’d be doubled over from the pain of being over-full. By contrast, I think that I came to learn whether independently or through my father that when I was sad I would cease eating altogether as a perceived punishment.
There are definitely things about being fat that set you as an outsider, even if I don’t actively believe that I was noticing them. Outside of the few people who asked “Why are you fat?” in politer language, I didn’t think about my condition until years later when I realized how ugly I was. My face would always seem so full in pictures and the coloration of my face was unpleasant. As a result, I came to hate how I looked and didn’t enjoy photographs. If you took a picture, I didn’t want to see it. If I saw a mirror, I would avoid it unless I wholly needed to. When media was painting as slovenly and lacking impulse control, it was hard to feel welcomed by the sight of skinny people hooking up and having happy endings.
I don’t think it’s important to get into how not having people actively discipline me ultimately impacted my hygiene. I was encouraged to drink two liters of soda in an afternoon and in a growing body, that couldn’t have been good. The acne was the familiar struggle. I was a mess and I’m sure there were ways that people didn’t like hanging around me. The people brave/rude enough to comment on things were the only ways that I was able to begin changing. Of all the strange ways that time has changed me, joining the basketball team in eighth grade gave me enough weight loss that I could touch the center of my chest and feel bone instead of padding. It was a strange point of pride.
But beyond that, I had my own other ways of feeling insecure. As an undiagnosed autistic, I was someone who had issues reacting to my environment in direct ways. I started kindergarten a year late because of poor testing. I also remember having hearing tests where we were told to press buttons when we heard a noise. For someone who would eventually believe they had flies in their brain because of how noisy the powerlines next door were, it was odd that I ever had issues. I think on some level I would hear the noise and wonder if pressing too quickly would cause me to seem like I was cheating. Whatever the case may be, it led to years and years of “ear problems.”
There was so much attention paid to my ears to the point that I still have compulsive behaviors when I stand out of showers. I have to clean them out and make sure there’s not any water in there. While I never understood how even the idea of learning about “water on the brain” bothered me. That’s why I still get self-conscious when my ears ring, or when sound is so quiet that I need to stick my fingers next to my ears and snap to make sure that I haven’t lost my hearing.
Because at the time I would go to the doctor and there’d always be something in there looking for details that made no sense to me. I’m sure, seeing as they were medical professionals, that there was truth in there and that maybe I had a build-up of wax or something, but it still made me uncomfortable. My father would stick a Q-Tip in my ear afterward and do deep cleans that were painful. He’d end by holding them up and saying, “That was in your ear.” We’d apply drops and I guess that was enough to do something. Whatever the case may be, the saga with my ears was storied within itself.
The other significant event that made me insecure as a child (there are others, but they’re more relevant to later years) was my teeth. During one Christmas dinner at my aunt’s house, my sister and I went into the living room and messed around with their pool table. We were still short enough that our heads barely peered over the top. We didn’t think much of it as things were happening. We’d throw one ball down and then pass it back. At some point, my sister tossed hard enough that it bounced up and popped me in the mouth. As blood appeared, it became clear that the worst had happened. One of my front teeth was chipped.
A common opinion among my family is that this was karmic. Because I was an aggressive child, I remember a point where I managed to have my sister hit a chair in such a way that her two teeth were knocked out. When my father saw friends later on, he’d joke that my sister’s favorite song was “All I want for Christmas is my two front teeth.”
But the thing about chipping your tooth at that age is that you can’t get crowns right away. You can be afforded a silver cap until you reach a certain growth stage. After a few years, you can finally get one. However, because of how things went, I inadvertently ruined that crown months or maybe years later by chewing into a Butterfingers bar. I had to convince my friends that I had been beaten up because otherwise, I had this slant in my mouth where air painfully traveled out. Thankfully, the crown that followed has sustained me for over 20 years, though the fear of it popping out has never gone away. I don’t feel comfortable chewing hard food out of the front of my mouth which, as a result, has led to occasional annoyances with side eating. The few times where I chomp down on something hard with my front teeth, I always immediately run a finger over them, hoping for the best.
It's a small reason that I don’t like to smile with a full row of teeth. Nothing looks wrong with them, but the idea of that flaw bothers me. That, and I still feel as a fat person that the way the cheeks move might make my face look pudgy and ugly. I’ve become used to something just shy of a frown going into a smirk. As I grew older, I found people making fun of my eyes and how they sometimes looked hollowed out, so I would do the same thing as Kevin Smith does and try to make them as wide as possible, occasionally looking psychopathic.
For some reason, I think that this helps explain why I would spend most of the next few phases of life disconnected from my peer group. It was as much a disapproval of my appearance as it was the awareness that I was spending a lot of time surrounded by adults who didn’t share my interests. There were colorful characters that I am thankful to have met, but this wasn’t going to friends’ parties. I was spending nights in Paramount going to my father’s Knights of Columbus meetings where I had to help set up or sit by a bar and watch elderly people enter to talk about things that didn’t concern me. I am very familiar with that hall. It’s why I’d eventually just take to sitting in the adjacent stairwell because it was isolated and I didn’t have to deal with people.
Which isn’t to say that I didn’t have childlike memories. I had a Playstation and played Crash Bandicoot and Spyro with regularity. I collected Pokemon cards. I read “Goosebumps” and “Harry Potter” and watched The Simpsons or King of the Hill in the evenings. However, it all had to be filtered through whatever my family deemed acceptable. That’s not a problem nor do I think it held me back from much, but you sometimes felt restricted from certain bonding experiences. By all means, be close to your family, but do know that your children have to be connected to a greater world as well.
That is maybe the biggest issue with all of this. As I’ve grown older, nothing makes me more insecure than the fact that I don’t have “childhood friends.” In theory, I still have people from St. Cornelius that I keep in contact with, but that’s a casual run at that. We have our own adult lives, and we don’t have regular updates.
But that’s beside the point. My bigger issue may stem from what I lost most in fifth grade. I no longer had that connection to my past in quite the same ways. The entire 90s were now up to me to recall and nobody I knew then (family excluded) would be able to fill in the gaps or recognize what parts I was conflating. As I grow older, I recognize how childhood friends symbolize this connection to your past and give you a comforting connection to time as a concept. You can recall the dumb things you did as a child and laugh. I don’t have that as much, or at least can’t without talking about someone who can’t work off of me and suggest a detail that I had forgotten. I desperately want that and it’s too late to get it. At most, I have casual friends now and it pains me that I have nobody of true intimacy. Not so much sexual or romantic relationships, but just platonic intimacy that would support me and make me feel like what I do matters. As of now, I have to support myself and believe in what I want to do. There’s value in that, but when you see people on social media able to have friends help them out, I feel odd admitting that I maybe don’t have that?
I put this interlude here because while I wanted to focus on school, there are a lot of psychological factors that enter the equation going into sixth grade. It was a wonderful time, but one that didn’t come without some issues. I needed to share parts of myself that were vulnerable because I think the students I would see at St. Cornelius saw an entire spectrum of who I was. They saw the happy and friendly side of me. They saw someone who was also unpleasant and burned out of Catholic school very quickly. It was a pointlessly rebellious period but also a very formative one. I’ll stop making excuses and just get into it.
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