I’m going to draw a line between ages 15 and 16. At 16, as you’ll read later, I started some new, grown up, bad behaviors that I didn’t have at 15. Through junior high and the first grades of senior high I was a sick puppy. I tend to think that I was an alcoholic who hadn’t found the drink yet. I was mentally ill, no doubt about that. I’ve heard some say that adolescents are mentally ill by definition. I know I wasn’t alone in going crazy and going bad during those years.
After I turned 12 or 13, and went to the doctor for a yearly physical, I had gained substantial weight and not really grown. I wasn’t over weight at all, not till I was probably 40. But my body type was pretty set at short and small boned. I had first needed a bra at nine years old, the first one in my fourth grade class. That was not nice. As a result I really thought I had an overly big chest for many, many years. I really don’t, though on someone as short as I am, an average amount goes a long way.
My knee issues were pretty much resolved. I had big scars and lumpy knees, but they stayed in place and I was only really restricted from a few activities like skiing and kneeling. My allergies had moderated. I was still an only child, though more of my peers were fatherless by that time. I had fallen behind in school to the point that I was on the slow track for math and science by ninth grade. I redeemed myself and got back with the regular kids for those subjects, and the smart kids for English. I had no friends. I wasn’t despised or picked on, I just didn’t have friends. I had no one to sit with at lunch. When I sat with someone, they would let me sit there and talk to me. But that was it. They weren’t my friends.
One friend I do need to mention is Isabel (not her real name). I met her when we moved to the house in the suburbs when I was five. She was four, and she lived down the block. Back then, in the late 1960s, kids that young actually played out on the streets (we had no sidewalks). She was my friend then, and she’s my friend now, now that I’m almost 46 and she’s almost 45. We live a few hundred miles apart and we don’t see each other often. We have, through the years, because she stayed in our hometown and so did my mother, so I’d see her once a year or more often as I visited. She and my mother have moved, though, and I don’t know when or how I will see her next.
But back then, she was my friend. She actually covered my babysitting job so that I could go to my very first AA meeting. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
During the years in question, I cut myself. I cut my forearms and my face. At that time I had not heard of anyone doing this. I hid my razor under my jewelry box, and one day my mother dusted my furniture, found the razor and took it. Didn’t say a word. When I cut my wrist (not nearly deeply enough to really hurt myself), I said the TV wires had cut me. Her husband commented that those wires can cut like a razor. So she had told him. Still she said nothing to me.
I wrote a story for English in which a girl tries to kill herself. I was scheduled to see the school psychologist. When he asked me to draw a person, I drew a cartoon figure. I wouldn’t talk, I didn’t cooperate. Ditto with the school guidance counselor.
I thank God I found alcohol. The recovery from that has saved me in so many ways.
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