So you survived part 1! Although I have to warn you now, my life is about to get really difficult, and this part actually contains the worst parts of my life so, be prepared to read through alot of stuff.
Last time I left off, I had just received the news that I was moving to Kenosha, Wisconsin. THANK. GOD. Tomah was not doing it for me, and I just couldn't wait to get out. After 2nd grade I moved to the new, big city. I was in awe of how big it was (98,000 people!). And it had a beach! Kenosha looked good, and there was always something going on, it was kind of impossible to be bored. Actually, the first night we arrived in Kenosha, I went on a bike ride by myself, got lost, and wound up 25 miles away from where my house was. I was 8. Needless to say my family was worried stiff, but they were impressed on how calm I was, I'm not usually the type to stay calm when I'm miles away from my family. I did get to know the city, though, and I basically acquainted myself with its various neighborhoods (and water parks!). So from the outside, everything was great. But I had to go back to school eventually, and then I started 3rd grade at Jefferson Elementary. I was nervous, like all new kids are, but third grade was kind of the eye of the storm. I mean, 2nd grade was so terrible there was nowhere else to go but up, but 3rd grade was largely uneventful. I mean, yeah I made some enemies, but not the entire school this time, and my teacher Mrs. Schneider was the best ever! She actually cared about her students and did her best to fix our problems!
But the really important stuff happened after third grade. My class was introduced to a woman called Mrs. Turcek, a violin teacher. She brought in all of the string instruments: violins, violas, cellos, and a bass! I picked up the violin first, and fell in love with it. That night I told my mom I would like to start violin lessons in the summer. She was very excited to hear this, as she was a viola performance major in college. And yeah, summer of 2003, at 9 years old I started learning the violin. I admit, I wasn't that confident at first, I thought I was doing everything wrong, but I still had fun doing it! It was a totally new experience, and the more I played the more I liked it. Plus, Mrs. Turcek was an awesome teacher! And I also found out that year that music was something that I was very comfortable with. I also started learning guitar and I was doing really well in music class. Oh, before I forget, I should also mention that before third grade, I met one of my good friends, who was also named Nick! His brother Joey would join us in daily shenanigans and we'd sleepover all the time since we were across the street neighbors! He was my friend all the way through my time at Kenosha, and although it was a very turbulent relationship, we still had alot of fun in the end.
So anyway, now on to 4th grade. Before it even started, I already knew I was in for a hard year because the teacher was Mr. Masterson. If you weren't one of his students, he wasn't all that nice to you. In the end he turned out to be okay, but at the start of the year I was not feeling it. But he was the least of my problems, the students were the real pain in the ass. They really did not like me, at all. They were all a part of Mr. Masterson's third grade class, so I was the uncool outsider that dared to infiltrate their scared classroom (or something like that). 4th grade was the year everybody started to know who I was, and thus began the ostracizing and the name calling all over again. I really was just uncool, and as a 10 year-old, that really bothered me. I was mainly criticized for how I dressed again, apparently sweatpants are the most uncool thing to wear. I loved my sweatpants, I still do, and if it were up to me, I would have wore them all the way through the rest of school. But it came to a point where the only way they would stop relentlessly teasing me was to start wearing different clothes. I did, but the teasing only calmed down a bit. I was still the unpopular, weird guy, and it was very obvious one day, when this asshole Freddy Vierra was celebrating his birthday. He was the guy who really had it out for me, making fun of me and saying horrible stuff about me every chance he got. On his birthday, he made 18 cupcakes for a class of 20. Obviously, two people were not special enough to get one, and I was of course one of the two. And when people weren't making me feel uncool, they were trying to get me in trouble. I remember one day, a girl said I threw a pair of headphones at her, when she was nowhere near me when she said it happened, but no one was going to believe me, I wasn't cool enough. I think I must've gotten at least 10 detentions that year because of stupid stuff like that alone. My friend Nick wasn't in my grade, so I couldn't talk to him as much as I wanted to, so I was basically alone that year. As the year came to a close, I had to move to another house in Kenosha. This time it was because my current house had been robbed twice, and we couldn't stay in that sketchy neighborhood any longer. So we moved across town near Curtis Strange Elementary, and you guessed it, that's my next school!
Fifth Grade. Wow, um, this was not a good year either. This year proved that the bullying was not going to let up, in fact, it got worse. I once again moved to another school, so I had to be the new kid once again. I was lucky enough to make a friend, Ryan, the first day, and I got another friend, Jamal, the next day. Those two got me through this year, because it basically was just one bad day after another. My teacher, Mrs. Schwartz, was very nice, and she taught very well too. Once again, the kids were the ones that didn't like me. And it wasn't just my class anymore, the whole fifth grade knew that I was the kid that everyone should pick on and/or exclude from all the important groups and stuff. The name calling didn't let up, and I was now starting to be criticized for my weight. Since I was so depressed, I had little motivation to do any kind of excercise, so I did put on the pounds, and I was called "Fat Boy" by a couple of girls...who were fatter than me (fifth graders don't make much sense, do they?) This is the year I met Amanda, who was an arrogant girl who acted like she was the next Paris Hilton or something, and then there was Lakeisha. Oh my God, that girl was the snootiest, most stuck up girl I have ever met. She walked around like she was queen of the castle and that everybody was her servant. She was very immature, yet acted like everyone else was inferior to her. They were easily the worst people there, but that doesn't mean everyone else was an angel, either. I mean, everybody pretty much teased me at one point in the year, I was event "pants-ed" by a guy in the hallway. Like back in 2nd grade, I eventually started lashing out and treating people the way they were treating me. Actually, I was so angry that at one point I started drawing pictures of everyone I hated, and in them they were being killed by a train or something like that. Like I said, I was an evil little child. I wasn't so evil to the point where I deserved the amount of bullying I got, but behind closed doors I still had issues to work out. I was 11, and I was miserable, and I had to start taking stronger anti-depressants to get myself through school everyday. But bless Ryan and Jamal, they were my only friends and they were always by side, no matter what. Oh, I graduated elementary school, yep, I did, and it wasn't all that special. I was just glad that fifth grade was over with.
Then came Sixth Grade. As if adjusting to middle school life wasn't bad enough: Amanda and Lakeisha both followed me to McKinley Middle School, and they only got even more immature. Lakeisha would go around saying "Look at this behavior. It's so elementary!", while she was being more immature than the rest of us. And Amanda was just vicious, she made it a point to pick on me every chance she could. To make things worse, sixth grade is when I met Brendan Hall. She was a very skill, very tall guy, who was also a complete d-bag. At lunch, when I put my drink down he would come over and spill it everywhere, and then he told me to clean it up (I didn't btw). He was friends with these two guys Cody and Joey, who, like Amanda, had to bully me every chance they got. They tortured me on the bus most of the time, they even told the older kids to slap me. But Brendan was the biggest asshole there, we had several classes together, so he really just went out of his way to make my life miserable. Actually, most of the kids just took the time to make me feel like I wasn't cool enough for them. And believe me, there were alot of kids in that sixth grade class, and everywhere I went I was called some kind of name or people would talk about me under their breath. Also, I don't think I learned anything in sixth grade. The teachers were nice, but they were so unorganized. But that really was not a big issue, I was 12, had no friends, and was just a sad sap. I tried to make friends and not get in anybody's way, but it was too late, I was doomed for all the bullying. And people were still trying to get me in trouble, I remember one time six friends claimed that I kicked a pair of scissors at one of them, when I really didn't, and their ingenious plot was to pretend like they didn't know each other and all say that I did it. It looked like it really was just six random people who weren't in an alliance, the dean fell for it and I was sentenced to one day of ISS...I repeat, I did not do anything. After five years of non-stop teasing, I was over it. I started to fake being sick so I didn't go to school, and then one day, feeling at the end of my rope, I wrote my first suicide letter. I really didn't know why I was still living when nobody seemed to want me around, it's the worst feeling in the world to feel unwanted and that's what I was. I should also mention that at this point, my parents' marriage was falling apart, and my sister and I were caught in the middle of the fights. My home life was becoming just as dysfunctional as my school life, and my mom tried the best she could to support me, but she was pretty pre-occupied with the drama with my dad. My sister and I were closer than ever, but regardless, she still had her own life, and I just felt perpetually alone. I tried to commit suicide that year. I heard that if you bashed your head against a wall enough times your skill will break and your brain will stop working. I didn't do it hard enough to actually die, but I did have a massive headache afterwards, so I just fell asleep and got away from the world for a night. Sixth grade eventually ended, though the damage was already done, I was so unhappy and not even the summer could cheer me up.
Now comes Seventh Grade. It was essentially the same year as sixth grade, only with better teachers, I now had my new friends David and Julia, and my home life started to get really bad. My parents were at ends, they slept in sepearate rooms and to make matters worse, my mom started to crush on my therapist Andy. Before seventh grade started, my mom decided that I couldn't see Andy anymore because she was getting too attracted to him, and this was much to my dismay. I had saw Andy for three years and he helped keep me from drowning in my tears. I was really mad at my mom, but she didn't really care, she was unhappy like me and after awhile didn't really care about what others thought of her. So while my parents continued to fight, at school everything was like it was before. Brendan and Cody were now in all of my classes, and any friend I would make would ditch me after three weeks and hate my guts forever after. I was constantly getting in fights with this kid Gavin, gym class was torture because I couldn't do any of the activities (I was really out of shape at that point), and the kids in my orchestra class didn't really like me either. David was in orchestra, so he helped some, and the teacher, Mr. DeBeor, was a bamf ginger who always picked really good music to play. I liked orchestra regardless of the people. And then there was my science teacher Ms. Parrish. She is like, the nicest and funniest person ever! She made science fun, and I learned alot that year. Those were the few good moments I had, everything else was just as torturous as it was before. I had a new therapist Kim, who was also really nice, but even she couldn't help me from the hole I was living in. The anti-depressants stabilized my anger, but I was still very, very depressed. In March of 2007, at 13 I tried commiting suicide for the second time. I slit my wrists, but this time the cuts weren't deep enough to draw enough blood so I was just left with a couple of nasty scars. But at this point, my parents were finally starting to catch on to the fact that my depression was worse off than they thought. My mom confronted me about it in IHOP one day and I just started crying, I told her everything that was wrong and showed her the suicide note I had written the year before. She hugged me, then brought me straight to Kim who at that point put me on suicide watch. I didn't go to school for the next week, meanwhile I was going through intense therapy. After that things started to get better, I was hitting my strides in orchestra, I was actually becoming a pretty good violinist, and people were finally starting to get used to me. The teachers were really helpful in that respect because they didn't put up with bullshit, and put the blame where it was due, whether it was on another student or me myself. My parents were starting to reconcile, and everything started looking up.
Then she said it. My mom delivered the news that after seventh grade, we would be moving back to Tomah. I cried. I cried for a long time, I started throwing up, I just couldn't deal with being with those kids again. I started to take my anger out on my pets, which I largely neglected during this time. I didn't care about anything anymore, I did not want to go back. Kenosha was not perfect in any way, but I was finally starting to turn things around, going back to Tomah was going back to square one, and I knew it was going to be a disaster. But my mom just didn't want to hear it, she was tired of Kenosha and said she would only feel happy if she was in Tomah again. Needless to say, my mom and I just started butting heads from that point on, and with great reluctance, I packed my things and moved away from the great big ol' city, back to the po-dunk town of Tomah, Wisconsin. So, was my prediction correct? Was I going to relive 2nd grade all over again? You'll have to wait and see for part 3! It actually does start getting a little better, but I will warn you that 8th grade is not a light read. Thanks for once again catching up with me and getting a blast from the past!
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