(Transformations 2. Part 2 of 6: The Cradle. Continuaton of Part 1: Leverage.)

Writing about my leverage that moulded me into what I am today was one of the hardest things I have had to do. Everything mentioned happened only three of four years ago but now it seems like it was another lifetime. It was a former self.

To recount the emotions experienced at the time of my life I read my old emails, looked at the old photos and read the old love letters I had stored in a secure metal box under my bed. After being so happy for so long it was a riveting emotional shock to my system.

In going over everything that happened it helped me to realise and appreciate how far I have come and remember what I fail to realise so many people are subjected to on a daily basis. Most walk around trapped in the prisoner of war camp that is their own confused soul.

But to escape this place of torture there is some kind of a process. A series of experiences. Some will never get to the bottom of the well. Some live life as alpha males and are on top of things from day one. But for the most part everyone is constantly struggling. Until they hit the bottom of the well.

In hindsight the leverage I wrote about was very messed up. But don’t think that I don’t realise that many people have far more fucked up leverage than I do. But it’s true that everyone has a ‘worst thing’ that they experience and that ‘worst thing’ is relative from person to person. That ‘worst thing’ might be similar in terms of how extreme the negative and desperate feelings are from person to person.

Looking back in horror and embarrassment of what I was I wondered how the fuck I could possibly have been in that headspace? On a weekly basis I wonder why my budding students could come into program with the worldview they have. Once that sadness and desperation is out of your reality it really is out of your reality. Once you start making shit happen and take control of your life there is no going back. You can’t avoid becoming what you want to be, becoming what you are supposed to be .

If you are coming from that place of fear and scarcity then it is quite a challenge. I realised the only reason I was in that headspace in the first place was because of myself. The more personal the wound the more universal. My story is similar to everyone else’s.

When I was young and in the embryonic stages of my identity development I was heavily influenced by my parents. As it is the case with most people my parents were proud, caring and took all the responsibilities for me.

Like all parents they wanted the best for me and they worked tirelessly trying to make it happen. Private schools, tutors and driving me to any sports training I was involved in. We lived a perfect life. But because it was so perfect I had a lot of responsibilities taken for me. This resulted in me growing into a little bitch. A total mummy’s boy.

I was a romantic, I wanted everyone to be friends. I thought about marrying a girl when I was ten and I was deadly serious. I was raised on Disney movies, milk and honey. I didn’t like conflict and I couldn’t handle confrontation. I was massively socially scared and awkward during school. So I spent most of my time being introverted or attention seeking and digging myself a deeper social hole. The deeper I fell the more engrained my self-inflicted social retardation became

Because I didn’t live in the moment and in the social interaction I lived in reaction, very soon I was shunned because I was always playing social catch-up and not offering value. I hung with the cool kids though because I was involved in lots of sports. But because I wasn’t usually involved in the conversation I had huge amounts of time to quietly think to myself. This spawned a consciousness of social self awareness and an intense interest in analysing social dynamics.

So instead of developing a sense of the social world and its intricacies I saw other people talking and I because an expert of standing outside the circle and a master of being inside my head. These times spent inside my head lead to formation of a strong ‘little bitch’ ego. Pretending to be a chode. With decades of practice I was soon an absolute pro at watching desperately from the outside of a conversation all the while cultivating a larger than normal cognitive capacity to think about social interactions.

Interestingly, though it may not be relevant, when I was young I was dropped on my head. Yes, as funny as it sounds as an eight month old infant I was dropped down two flights of stairs. I tumbled down sharp steps then over a three foot ledge then kept tumbling to the bottom of the stairwell. I was critically injured and in an unstable conditioned when I was rushed to intensive care unit at the hospital. I fantasize that I have superpowers now like a cartoon character in the sense that my brain would rebuild itself stronger like a muscle would after damage. Maybe the drop did have side effects though? Possibly a little quirkiness or a neurological tolerance to ethanol?

I am told that the doctors told my parents and grandparents that I would be lucky to live. I was the first grandchild of for both sides of my family so I was the centre of everybody’s attention. So this event was a monumental disaster in many people’s lives. It is said that it shaved years off the life of my relative who dropped me. I can’t imagine my parent’s emotional reaction when they watched in horror as their infant fell down several flights of stairs, seeing his head balloon to the size of a basketball and then being told that he would be lucky to live, or live without irreversible brain damage.

Realistically this event probably just resulted in me being babied more and given extra special care, love and attention. The long term results would have it that many extra responsibilities would be taken for me casting me into the mummy’s boy role.

So from parental love and school experiences by the time I was ten I had well and truly developed the lethal combination of negative self image with plenty of cognitive capacity to reaffirm it. This massive cognitive dedication to thinking about my how much I sucked strengthened with religious repetition and as a result my identity of little bitch evolved from embryonic stages into a full grown mummy’s boy.

I remember in primary school the massive frustration of having so much going on in my head and no outlet to vent it. The tension would build up and make me angry and emotional as a little kid. I took it out on other kids. Through the last four years of my grade school I would pick on less fortunate kids. Not even for attention but just because I was frustrated. I would systematically and intelligently make their life a living hell. It was of course because I had bought a living hell onto myself by allowing my thoughts to become so immersed in self dissatisfaction that I forgot what it was to be normal.

Because I had no respect from my peers and because they overtly demonstrated that they had no respect for me I passed it forward. Kicking kids when they were down, spreading rumours about them, breaking their things and stealing their stuff. On the outside I looked like a smiling happy little dude but the older and more self aware I grew the further and further down the pit I fell. The older I got the more brain power I developed and with more brain power came a greater ability to take myself lower and lower.

Socially I was a logical, desperate, attention seeking and validation seeking. But academically I had all this headspace to use. I remember I would yell abuse at teachers in primary school for attention and get separated from the class. As a ten year old I would throw rocks at the substitute teacher while he had his backed turned to the class. He would send me out of the class with a shitload of maths problems to keep me busy. But I would annihilate them immediately and be right back inside openly criticizing the teacher for not giving me more of a challenge. The teacher would accuse me of using a calculator, I would brag to him condescendingly ‘Don’t worry about it, I’m a genius son’.

So by this stage I was well on the path to being self destructive. I remember around the age of ten all the kids would go for sleepover’s on the weekend. Did I get invited? Nope. I would spend many Saturdays and Sundays just wondering around the house. I wasn’t a fun guy to be around, but I understood that I could act fun and deceive people into thinking I was cool for a while. This was even worse because not only was I a social black hole but I was also developing fluctuating authenticity. That would use my brain to be transparently manipulative. Which is even worse.

Clutching at straws I was really losing out in the social stakes. I would have some friends that would be temporarily impressed by my antics but then turn on me pretty quickly when they would realise it was a compensation for a lack of self worth. If I wanted a social life I needed to create a situation where people would have to be friends with me. I realised that playing sports was the answer.

I played in at least three sports teams every season. When I played in a team we all had a common purpose so the friendship was guaranteed. All throughout my childhood and up until the point I went to America to represent Real Social Dynamics playing in sports teams was always my crutch for having a social life.

Sports was good because when I came into a new team the disrespect I had earned for myself previously didn’t exist because of the team situation. Teams were good compared to social situations where I didn’t have anything to offer anyone but neediness and insecurity. Because I was unequivocally convinced I was a substandard person I was never a good player in any team I was in.

I played to ‘not screw up’ instead of having fun and playing to win. I was fit, strong and skilful in the sports I played, anyone could do that, especially me because I had a lot of time on my hands. But because I expected myself to fuck up I would. This made me constantly frustrated with my performances leaving me to think about where I was going wrong for hours. Soon this frustration turned into underhanded physical aggression and dirty play directed at other players.

If I knew then what I know now about inner game now I would have been very good at any sport I committed myself to. The application of what we know about confidence and execution would be invaluable to a professional team or athlete’s performance and consistency. It would give a professional athlete an advantage that no one else would even know existed.

Also, instead of being the player who wanted the ball I would hesitate and let others go before me. I was the calculator who watched and analysed the play of the game and the tactics. With excess cognitive capacity to worry about my lacking social skills I could easily dedicate that same capacity to analysing the game, the players and all the variables involved. This made me an even worse player. I didn’t at all trust myself in the moment and when I did go to execute something in the game then I would be slow, reactive and jerky and usually lose out.

I played most of my time in defensive roles because my coaches realised that when I was under pressure I didn’t have a chance to think and second guess myself. For me and my coaches it was excruciatingly frustrating to have skills, strength and fitness but still come nowhere near my potential. It was all self imposed sabotage resulting from a lack of internal trust. There were days when my Dad would drop me late to the game and I would just be thrust onto the field without a chance to think. On those occasions I played like a champion. When I go back and play again in a few years I will be a very different player.

The time I spent watching the games I wasn’t impacting on and my dedication of headspace to analysing the game lead to the rise of my interest in coaching. I coached football for years and was very good at it. I was a perfect thing, I could think for others, they could execute and I could hide behind that. I was a good football coach. My coaching success and experience qualified me for the job I have now.

Back on the school front I was about to go from primary school to high school. I was enrolled at one of the most prestigious schools in the Southern Hemisphere. After such a torrid primary school experience, albeit self inflicted, I was pretty concerned about starting a new all-boys school with lots of rich kids. On the other hand at least I had a blank slate to start with in terms my reputation. Also, two teammates who I had played football with for years were starting at the same school with me.

The school itself was amazing and to my surprise everyone there was pretty mature and friendly for twelve year old’s. Everyone one came to the school from all over so everyone started equal. In the beginning I had a little honeymoon period of social success in a group with my friends from primary school and a few others from my football team. But sure enough my insecurity, immaturity and neediness became apparent to those who got close enough to get to know me. This was like having the social carrot dangled in front of my face just perpetually just out of reach. The desperation to achieve that social security drove me to more immaturity and neediness forging a reputation for myself that was unfavourable. I was quickly categorized badly by my peers.

Both my teammates who I knew quickly made friends with the cool group of kids. I would orbit the cool group of kids but no one would really talk to me. It was a case of me dreading recess times and trying to get into their group. I tried harder and harder to fit in. I wanted to be invited to the parties that they were having. So I would ask them about their weekends and the parties they went to, drawing attention to the fact that I wasn’t invited.

Things got even worse. People turned on me when one of my teammates started talking condescendingly about me openly. So I found myself in a situation where people hated me who I didn’t even know. So, instead of just being unknown, now I had a shit reputation. Of course due to my immaturity and insecurity I deserved it and I can’t blame any thirteen year old for doing socially aggressive things. Nevertheless this resulted in me hating myself chronically, spending hours and hours wondering why people didn’t like me and further driving myself deeper into my own cesspit of self worthlessness. I had been stabbed in the back by someone I trusted and I relied on.

I had no friends at all at school for three quarters of a year at a time in any young person’s life where social acceptance is the most important thing in the world. While I was becoming more outcast social circles would become stronger and stronger and harder to crack into. I became introverted, sad, angry and depressed. I embraced my outcast identity. I ate myself fat. I compensated by playing heaps of sport and I cried a lot. I had to come to terms with the fact that my old friend had shunned me and given me a fucked up reputation.

I bought straight into the reputation I was told I had and I believed it so much that my identity came to fulfil that reputation the world was projecting onto me. At least it gave me a strong sense of self. I didn’t do anything but study and think excessively about why I was such a piece of shit. I became a stellar student because at least I could do that. I began to identify with my academic results because I was getting some good results due to uncompromised homework time.

I identified myself as being scientific both socially and academically. Weirdly I thought of myself as some kind of scientist of life. I didn’t live life, I just watched from the sidelines thinking a lot about it. With this came a sense of empowerment or control that I though compensated for a lack of happiness. Really I had become a self hating, 13 year old geek with moobs.

At the end of my first year of high school my life was all kinds of sad.

With no friends to occupy my weekends and weeknights and the notion of having girl’s in my life was still beyond my reality. I had plenty of time to become a ‘high achiever’. I would spend hours working out, working on my fitness and working on my sports skills. Working out at the age of thirteen stunted my growth which I really regret because now I am a short-ass. But it did get myself into the prestigious A grade football team at school. With this came some respect and helped me to move away from my bad reputation.

One day I had a gym class in the school gymnasium right before the lunch hour. Some guys from another class had come to the gym early in the lunch hour because they had gym class right after the lunch. I played football with one of the guys who went onto become the school vice-captain. He was, and I think he still is the perfect human being. A genius academically, musically and socially. He was in the school teams for football and cricket and the fastest athlete for all the prestigious events in his group and above. He also won something like six academic awards for difference classes at the graduation dinner.

Only now am I beginning to understand how one person can be so impeccably successful. That day he asked me if I wanted to join in their game of indoor soccer in the gym. Like the other lunch hours I didn’t have anything planned except the books in the library. I accepted. Socially proofed by a very popular dude and with their group having no prior exposure to my reputation I joined in and for the first time I had a proper group of friends.

Most people will never realise how much of a big deal it is to be accepted socially especially after not knowing where I fit in for the past seven years of school life. I could never have known it at the time but because of the events on that day, the meeting of the Scotch Crew, that I would meet Jeffy and Tyler from Real Social Dynamics.

Now, every lunch hour I had a crew to hang with. These guys lived in the same part of the city so now I had someone to catch the train to school with. These guys played basketball and football and cricket so now I had a crew to go to games with and hang out with after. Now I had a crew to talk to about the ideas of girls with. Life was pretty fucking sweet.

All the while I was a loner I had a mind that was ultra creative and adventurous. I wanted to do things, take risks, grow, adventure and push the limits. Now that I had peers to do that with I was inspired. Because I was coming from a headspace I self hate I didn’t care about rules and standards anywhere near as much as they did so my antics were very entertaining. We were all into the high achievement thing and we would compete with each other academically and compete alongside one another in sports.

Also, at a time in life when so much is new and exciting to have someone to share all the new experiences with is pretty amazing. Every day of a thirteen year olds life leaves him in awe of the world, what he is capable of and in wonder of what is possible. It’s a magical stage in life and for me it was that much more intense in contrast with the previous decade of sadness. As a kid, to have friends, play sports and go to an awesome school is pretty much the pinnacle of fulfilment. I didn’t have a care in the world. For the first time in the life I was happy.

I had developed so much headspace to dedicate to whatever I wanted. Now I was extremely happy. I was playing very well in the second best cricket team at school with my crew and I played social basketball every weekend with my friends. Most importantly I was playing in the prestigious A grade football team at school. With the onset of a positive perspective on life I even began to get better at the sports I played. With that newfound success came a massive newfound happiness through fulfilment of finally capitalising on all the extra training hours I had put in.

In my second year of high school I was selected to be in the accelerated mathematics class along with the guys in my Scotch crew. On the academic front I was acing all of my classes and I even ended the first semester of my second year of high school by getting straight A grades in 6 of my eight classes. In the other classes I would get High B’s, but those classes were Religious Education and Music Class so it didn’t really matter.

Life was better than good and getting more exiting. At this school I was on a path to becoming a school leader which is a very prestigious position to occupy and a golden ticket into any job after school. Years later most of the Scotch Crew became school leaders. Academically I was on par to get into the college Psychology Course that I’d had my heart set on since I was ten years old.

I had gone through the dark times and I had learnt from them. Now it was smooth sailing in socially exiting style. At this rate I was going to become the psychologist that I always wanted to be, maybe if I grew taller I could play football seriously as well? The opportunities were there and I was ready to take them. Life was going to be ok.

Then, just as I was reaching the point where the negativity and and self inflicted sadness had almost faded completely from my mind, I was robbed. My self-worth was pulled out from under my feet and the future I had planned for was taken from me, never to be obtainable again.

After finally settling into somewhere in life and finally getting an awesome social circle and finally having my academic potential nurtured at school, life was turned upside down by numerous family based events.

We had originally moved to the city of Melbourne when my Dad was promoted in his job. I lived in Brisbane until I was eight then I moved to Melbourne and stayed there until I was 13. My Dad was a very good industrial chemist but due to a merger he has been laid off and all of a sudden the twenty-thousand dollars per year school tuition fees became insurmountable. Plus I had two younger brothers who would require the same investment when they came along to school.

As fate would have it, if my Dad didn’t get laid off that year in the future I never would have been able to earn the money to invest in bootcamp.

At the same time my mother parents’ heath was declining. They lived in my hometown of Brisbane where living was generally cheaper especially for private school fees. So to afford school fees and to move back closer to support my relatives we planned to move at the end of the year. What this meant for me was being abducted from my perfect situation that I had been through so much to achieve. However I had no idea how badly this move would impact on my life. It was soon after I moved that the leverage part of my story began.

As well as the move the job situation put our family under a lot of stress. At the same time I was becoming a teenager and had to deal with all the headaches that come with that. It was hard enough moving back to a city where old bonds had withered away but to add duress to my situation my Dad had decided to start his own business.

Since the time Dad started his first business in his field of expertise it was very touch and go. Of course when you start a business you have to expect to go hundreds of thousands of dollars into debt. I remember the combined stress of running a family, putting three children though expensive private school and going into massive debt to run a business caused a lot of stress in my family which I felt I beared a lot of.

This is not to mention the risk involved with not knowing how successful a new business will be. So Dad stepped up his workload to make it happen for our family. Mum did the same. So instead of having the Dad I used to be able to play sport with and a mum I could talk to it got to a stage where I felt neglected. Of course I reacted by regressing back to the victim bitch I used to be and this only worsened the situation.

As it turned out, in spite of my Dad’s superhuman work ethic and enthusiasm to make his new business work he was the victim of corporate sabotage. While he didn’t know it at the time colleagues were sabotaging his business and interfere with his prospective clients. This meant that for a few years he would work his hands to the bone and make no progress and the accumulation of even more debt. At the time this was a disaster for me because the Dad figure was caught up in so much work. I was lost at the best of times but this didn’t help. Years later he started another business which is now inspiringly successful.

Now he lives with my family in the richest suburb of the city and he has not one, but four Mercedes Benz and a four wheel drive in his driveway. His work ethic and success is an example of extreme work ethic and a heroic victory of an underdog that inspires me all the time. I’d think to think that hard work is part of my identity as well.

But at the time when I moved back to Brisbane my Dad’s business success was still a decade away. At the time we moved back we were suffering from serious financial scarcity. I was one of the kids at a private school who didn’t have the same possessions or do the things the same cool things as the other kids. Starting at a new school was suicidal torment and pure misery. Stress on the home front rounded out my daily life.

When I moved states there is a difference in the education system. The age someone starts school at in different states is different by one year. So, when I moved to Brisbane I would have to go from year eight straight into year ten to stay with my same age group. When we saw the teacher at the new school he warned my parents and I that I would have trouble keeping up and I would be effectively ‘accelerating past a grade’. But my academic results at my former school were stellar where I was one of the highest academic achievers in my class. So we all thought that I could handle skipping a year of school.

If it wasn’t simply bad enough that I had to start at a new school where I knew no one there were several other factors stacked against me.

Firstly I lost a year of relative maturity. By going into a grade where everyone else was accustomed to a higher academic workload than me I was acutely immature by comparison. I had trouble managing the sudden onslaught of homework that I couldn’t understand. My social skills and sense of self worth didn’t have the most stable history. Having a maturity and experience disadvantage wasn’t an advantage at a new school.

Also, people from Brisbane generally don’t like people from Melbourne. I was reminded of this daily.

Also, at the time I moved to the city of Brisbane no one played Australian rules football there. My one ace up my sleeve at my former school was that I was a good football player in a school where football was religion. But in Brisbane the dominant sport was rugby. Australian Rules was not just a minority sport but it was verbally hated on by everyone. Conversationally the Australian Rules is known as A.F.L. Conversationally in Brisbane Australian Rules is called Gay. F. L. I played ‘Gay F. L.’ which made me gay.

By year ten students have formed extremely solid cliques with which they identify strongly with. By identifying with a clique they develop a competitive hate for those from other cliques. If you weren’t accepted by one group or another you were left to be ostracised by every clique making it harder and harder to be accepted into one.

Also, around the age of fourteen is the time when boys start to realise their physical strength. This is expressed by wrestling and fighting. Brisbane is one of the most violent cities in Australia especially due to the rugby culture. Every class I was in I would be mercilessly hit or beat or punched until my bruises had bruises and I couldn’t use that part of my body anymore.

When I got to school at the start of the year it was cricket season. In my grade there were about five teams graded A through to E. At my old school I just payed for fun. After try-outs at my new school I was put straight into the A cricket team. This should have been something to celebrate because the A cricket team is an indicator of status. Unfortunately this meant that a popular player from last year’s team was dropped from the team when I replaced him.

I wasn’t an A grade player at the time and I would always make mistakes cost the team when I played. So the other very alpha guys in the team would hate on me and take it out on me at practise. Because I had no idea how to bat I would always have to practise. At which time the guys who had accelerated though puberty to the point that they were man-children would bowl rock hard cricket balls at me faster than I had a chance to react. At practise I got laughed at as I was a mannequin on a firing range. I would go home aching, bruised on my chest, back and groin.

The one thing I had going for me at my old school was my academics. When I changed schools and skipped a grade I found that I couldn’t do any maths at all. I went from being an A+ maths student to an E grade failing maths student. With extensive tutoring I could get the occasional C grade but it was too expensive to keep up especially when I wasn’t producing results. In the other classes the teachers simply didn’t give a shit and my A grades my old school became D’s grades at my new school. I spent most of my classes defending myself against being beat by other students. Soon enough I realised that I couldn’t possibly make up the grade skip and I just stopped trying. After the grade skip there was no way I was going to get into the psychology course at university that I wanted to. I wasn’t going to get the university entry score I needed so I just gave up altogether.

Also, my last name is Treasure. This is another disadvantage to start at a new, ultra competitive all boys school with. But what was worse, and I still cannot believe that the school teacher did this, was that on my first day at the new school, when the teacher called my name during roll call, my teacher actually made fun of my name in front of the whole class. Saying things like “You are a newfound treasure for this school” and asking me if I was “mummy’s little treasure?” in front of everyone. A situation cannot get any worse when the teacher is the one to publicly belittle you in front of thirty blood thirsty adolescent peers.

If all that wasn’t enough to make life at my new school unbearable at least I had the one saving grace of starting with a blank slate. I go in fresh and be able to project myself the way I wanted and retain the things that people might interpret negatively. But, as it happened before I even got to the school the guys from the most influential social group in my school knew all the bad things about me and had a bad opinion of me. I never had a chance from day one.

My parents had an old social network in the city we were moving to and in that social network were parents of kids going to my school. Of that network my parents strongest social contact was with the parents of the most popular guy in school and the most successful athlete. So, with awesome initiative and awesome intentions (and I do mean that) they set out to organise for me to meet some of the guys from my school before I went there so I would have some friends to start off with. In theory, a perfectly good idea.

But a ‘play date’ that is organised by parents for two thirteen year old boys was never going to be a ‘cool’ thing. Imagine being the coolest kid in school and being told that you have to go and hang out with a random stranger you have very little in common with. A stranger who is vastly less mature than you. No thirteen year old will be enthusiastic about that. Combining the cool guy’s generally negative disposition, my negative disposition towards moving cites, my insecurity and neediness that I sucked out of him and the entire homosexuality of a thirteen year old pay date all culminated in the result of me making a very bad impression. This guy even played in my cricket team when I started at school. The guy told everyone at the new school about me and how gay the whole situation was and gave me a well known bad name before I even got to the school.

I can’t blame my parents for acting out of good intentions and trying to help me out. I can’t blame the guy for not wanting to be my boyfriend as organised by my parents, especially when it was so forced and I sucked so hard at the time. I can’t blame myself for being a fucking victim bitch at the time because I didn’t know any other reality. And anyway, I was getting a stronger and stronger ‘why me’, ‘life’s not fair’, ‘I’m so poorly done by’ reality every day. By now I was a seasoned bitch. Life from the point of the move was always going to drastically set me off on a fucked up course in life.

Even though intentions were good it didn’t change the fact that I had a fucked up life on a day to day basis. Nothing to hope for and that same desperation being shoved back into my face repeatedly. I had the shit kicked out of my enthusiasm for being alive.

In summary, at the time I had been pulled out of a perfect situation socially and academically where I had friends and I could get to university. Then I was dropped into a hovel of a school, where people didn’t like where I came from. I had bad social skills to start with so I couldn’t break into a clique which was intensified by one of the most influential people in the grade tarnishing my name before I even got there. My two best traits, academia and football, the things I identified with, were taken from me. I had no friends, no sense of self, nothing good going for me, I was getting fatter, getting intense acne and being injured daily. And I had pretty much never spoken to a girl, but I would have never even thought that possible coming from my mindset.

In hindsight, all of this was my fault. My lack of initiative and responsibility was my fault. But no one told me that at the time. Those sorts of ideas were beyond my comprehension.

So, the first year at that school was a very dark time. In a time where I wanted someone to care, no one did. Instead I was belittled and antagonised. I spent lunch times sitting on my own. I tried to study at lunch times but I couldn’t cope with the work I was doing. So I walked around on my own or sat on my own reading. People pitted me in fights against other students which meant new lows for me and a bruised skull. I started cutting my arms, carving words like ‘fuck’ or ‘suicide’ into the backs of my arms. I tried playing new sports but I was very bad due to inexperience. Especially in rugby where it was a physical free-for-all that I wasn’t built for. I was a very lost kid at that time.

About three quarters of the way through that first year at the school I was riding a bus home sitting on my own. A little kid started talking to me. He was about eight years old I think. He told me he lived near my house and that he had a sister who is pretty. He gave me her email address and I added her on online messenger. That night I met up with her and her friends at her house. That is where I met the girl that would give me ‘direction’ for the next six years in my life. The first girl I wrote about in my leverage story.

From this meeting did come some sort of a social life. After having no one else to talk about and no other hobbies to engage in this girl became the centre of my world because my world was empty.

I spent countless teenaged Saturday nights sitting on online messenger or just wandering aimlessly through my house. While I wondered around the house my parents would even ask me why I wasn’t out partying or at least hanging out with people. Because of the patterns I had become so routine I looked at everyone else as above me. Due to the intense repetition of bad social experiences I developed a very strong reality of ‘I am lesser than other people’ and it inevitably became a self fulfilling prophecy that people would think they are above me. Exactly where my strong reality had put them.

While this was ultimately a value taking disposition it made me humble. About three quarters of the way into my first year I had taken so many beatings and taken so many verbal abusing that I simply ceased to give a fuck anymore.

I distinctly remember dreading going into English class one day where I would take the majority of my beatings and verbal abuse but I just didn’t have any heart left to defend myself or even care. It was like I wanted to be hurt. I just embraced what I was for the first time. Nothing. Little did I know it at the time, but when I embraced the identity of nothing I became inherently cool. When I stopped defending myself, when I stopped caring, when I felt no more anxiety, I stopped projecting the mummy’s boy reality and I became cool.

In hindsight I can so clearly understand why I had such a torrid life a teenager. Perception is projection. I validated the negative attention I drew on myself, I expected to be hated on, I was sorry for who I was and what I did. Given the excessive headspace I had developed from having no friends my perceptions grew into a strong and influential reality. An influential reality that begged people to hate and disrespect me. A reality that begged people to think I had a reason to be sorry for myself. I had built a strong and influential reality that assumed that people wouldn’t like me. So they didn’t.

When I embraced that I was nothing it was a temporary fix. I stopped expecting negative attention, so I stopped getting negative attention. But I could only have achieved this after hitting rock bottom midway through that first year. The human psyches self corrects. If you are too low you cease to care and begin to offer value again, if you are too high your ego is venerable to bruising and you become humble again.

That day in English class was the first of a few events that would see me develop some friends and a social circle. This time though I had been through events that put me into a headspace where I viewed any social success as a bonus. I had also made harmony with the fact that at any minute I could be alone again. Having lived so much of my life in perceived social isolation and living so long perceiving myself as being worthless I had come into harmony with these ideas. I no longer projected the ‘I suck’ ego, I just didn’t care about anything. I was cool. For a while.

Hitting this point of absolute indifference would sow the seed of recklessness that would inspire the many, many stupid, risky and self destructive things that would become a staple of my future everyday existence.

In this indifferent mindset at the time I was more relaxed and willing to take risks. I had the life purpose of making the girl I met my girlfriend. And to my great joy, after rugby season was over there was an Australian Rules season at school. I played in the A team and contributed a lot. Being a very sports oriented school this won me some respect. So I generally conducted myself with a positive and indifferent demeanour. Positivity attracts positivity.

Taking the bus home one day I realised that every day I was travelling to school with a guy who I played in the A cricket team with. He was also playing in the A football team with me at the time so we started talking shit on the way to and from school. Since I started school ten months earlier my bad reputation had faded somewhat. Soon I went over to their clique of four or five dudes where I was welcomed with open arms.

The clique was a group of high achievers, the Brisbane version of the Scotch Crew clique I had in Melbourne. Now, again I had some friends, and for once in my life is was in a happy and indifferent headspace where I offered plenty of value. Two of the guys were South African and new to the school as well. Compared to the shit I had endured for the previous 10 month to have likeminded people to talk to, even just to have someone to talk to, can put you on top of the world.

Being on top of the world due to this was a bad thing. As a guy who had a strong history of having his reality defined by the external world these positive expectations grew beyond my control. For a month or two everything was good and fun. But I couldn’t keep it up. It was kind of like a honeymoon. This fun reality where I had friends wasn’t the me I had always known. After a few months I was back on the downward spiral again. Two of the biggest self sabotaging acts I performed were making fucked up jokes at the expense of the guy who stuck his neck out an invited me into his clique. I made a Jokes about his girlfriend and his little sister. He didn’t forgive me for a long time and reminded me f what a bad dude I was. I had effectively sabotaged a good situation. What was a taste of popularity soon saw me cast aside in the group to the point where I wouldn’t participate, I would just hover around the group and say nothing.

I realise in hindsight that I was so used to being rejected and walked all over and excluded that when I did actually get accepted and invited places my reality simply rejected it. I remember feeling really uncomfortable just hanging out and chatting with the crew. In situations where people just relax and chill out I would do overt self sabotaging attention seeking things. This reality snap back is a very real thing for anyone coming from deeply ingrained negative patterns and then all of a sudden finds themself to be happy. This is a complete mind fuck to me today. I had no chance of comprehending my extremely frustrating self sabotaging behaviour back then when I was fifteen.

During my little social honeymoon period, before I sabotaged myself, I had a chance to branch out and meet lots of girls. The good thing about not playing by the rules and confines of a particular clique is you are free to be expressively manoeuvrable and socially versatile. When I met girls at that age I was indifferent in life and carefree because of it. At the same time I was unhealthily obsessed with the girl I met when I was thirteen so I didn’t care at all about trying to impress these other girls. I made a lot of female friends because I was a carefree, risk taking, self destructive and emotionally extreme guy. They might have thought I was unique, which would have been true, but unique for the wrong reasons.

Whenever I met a girl I would almost instantly get into a free flowing comfortable deep and meaningful conversations about girl to guy dynamics. Because I had no real prior exposure to girls, and no guys to tell me that girls were out of my league I could talk honestly and openly to any girl except the one I was obsessed with. I would talk for hours on end to lots of girls about the girl I liked, emotions, attraction theories, psychology and love. Chick crack.

The girls who were fourteen and fifteen themselves loved this. I was a heterosexual version of the classic ‘hot girls homosexual friend’ to them. Fuelled with passion I couldn’t stop talking about girls and emotion mechanics in a constant mental struggle to try and figure out how to get the girl I was obsessed with to like me. I still dedicated massive headspace to thinking about the delicate intricacies of relationship dynamics and because I always bought drama on myself with self sabotaging and risky behaviours I was always had interesting stories to tell.

My life between the age of fourteen and twenty-one was lived though the medium of online messenger. Even now, when I hear the alert noises from the very earliest versions of the program it instantly throws me back into the lightless mind-prison I used to slave to. I would spend hours after school every night talking to any girl online about social dynamics, gossip and my ongoing drama I had with the girl I was obsessed with. I spent more than five years talking about social dynamics online with hundreds of girls for hours at a time.

I gained a better understanding of social dynamics from those thousands of conversations than more people learn in a life time. I still have many of the developmentally pivotal conversations of my life printed and stored safely in my house. But from all these understandings I gained from spending so much time thinking about the topic, as thorough understanding as they were, it was still just an understanding. It wasn’t experience.

Once I had made a compounding network of female friends that I could talk to online my lack of social popularity in the real world was displaced. I didn’t really have any guy friends in the real world but it didn’t matter. I rode buses to school with girls, wrote emails to girls at school at lunchtime, I chatted to them online while I was at school, rode the bus home with girls then spent hours talking to them online at night. I would add their friends and chat to them as well. There is a handful of girls who played a massive part in helping me survive my self-inflicted agonising teenaged life.

Meanwhile my academic life was back on track. The second year at my new school was the first of my two senior years so I got to choose specialised subjects. Unlike the year before where classes were a continuation from the years I missed before. Now I could keep up with school work and I actually enjoyed my classes. They were biology, physical education (gym class), IT, and Business- Technology. A bit of everything but biology was clearly my favourite.

Due to my abysmal academic results and general self hate the year before, my dad had laid out an incentive for hard work that would be measured in terms of the grades I scored in the next semester. Regaining my love of academia with my selected classes and having burnt my social bridges with guys at school (except for a few) I was again right back into high achiever mode.

The academic incentive was that if I could score all B grades in five subjects then my dad would spend $1,000 on audio equipment for me. After kicking some ass, I got the grades. In 2001 Dad took me down to ‘cash converters’ (a pawn broker) and bought me two concert grade duel 14 inch cone stage speakers. I still have them today. They are so powerful they can be heard from more than five kilometres away on a clear night.

During the times I was speaking to girls online I would be running Napster and limewire collecting thousands of MP3’s. I would trade collections via external drives with friends. At the time I was awarded the speakers by my dad I had collected about 11,000 of the hottest and coolest party MP3’s. All through the confusion of my high school times I would always be thinking intensely, planning and scheming because I didn’t trust that I alone were enough to make friends. I was hatching a master plan to gain instant and elite social status at my school.

The clique I was hanging out with broke apart, the guys who were left in it didn’t respect me which I deserved. So, at lunch time I would just go to where we sat and sit quietly thinking intensely to myself all the time scared to talk. I feared being shot down for saying something stupid and getting myself kicked out of remnants of the group. I didn’t go out on Saturday nights, and besides my one bus friend Reubs I didn’t have any life except for talking to girls online at night about the girl I was obsessed with.

Even though I had low self worth for most of my life, very limited social experience and had done bad damage to my status I planned to become the coolest person in the school. I had a brain and I was scheming with it.

With my computer and stage speakers I decided I was going to host the party to end all parties. I was the kid at school who had no friends who decided to throw parties to make friends. At the time I hated my parents and naively blamed my lack of girlfriend and lack of friends on them and adopted a passive aggressive mindset towards them. I convinced my parents to have a party. They didn’t know the possible damage and destruction that can happen to a house under siege by hundreds of drunken hormonal teenagers.

I didn’t care what happened to the house because I didn’t give a fuck about anything and I hated myself and my family at the time. It would be cool being the host of the party because that way people would have to be my friends. But more importantly I thought if I created a situation where the girl I obsessed over saw me as the ‘guy to know’ at a party I would finally get the girl.

For people that age house parties are a scarce and valuable event. At the point of announcement I had people coming up to me at school that I didn’t even know introducing themselves and being friendly. This was cool I thought. I was giving value to people. By this stage I was so convinced that people didn’t like me that I stopped trying to manage it. I knew that I couldn’t trust anyone or expect anything back from people for anything generous I did for them. So I shifted my energies towards constructive voluntary things like throwing parties. With this came an exciting and new sense of intense satisfaction. I didn’t have anything to show for doing generous things. But more importantly I had a satisfaction that I had never known when I did something cool for other people.

These voluntary efforts grew from this point onwards. I worked on the school dance committee, did charity work, wrote for the school magazine and did excessive volunteer coaching. I got nothing from these things except the satisfaction of adding value to others’ lives.

So with my speakers, the empty estate surrounding my parents house and more than 200 drunken hormonal teenagers I threw an awesome party. I was the guy to know that night, nothing serious was wrecked but we had a five dollar cover charge to cover damages. I was actually the ‘it guy’ at the party and it was awesome. I went from nothing to everything on that night. It was a perfect situation that felt right. I wasn’t trying to fit in anywhere, I was just doing something good and having fun.

Only thing was, the girl I was obsessed with didn’t come. Her friends came. She didn’t come.

Her absence drove me even crazier. After that party I realised that I would need to become even more popular if I was going to win her heart. So I took a number of actions. I volunteered to mobilize my audio equipment so I would get invited to every party in the role of ‘DJ’. This happened and over the next two years of high school I took responsibility for the music at almost every party I went to. Co-incidentally I was only getting invited to parties I was doing the music for. The girl I was obsessed with never once came to any of these parties.

I started to learn poetry to write and send to the girl I was obsessed with. I didn’t ever actually send her any, I would just harass her with excessive emails. But I did send her flowers on various occasions in true Walt Disney style. At the parties I would go to and online I would make close friends with her friends. Her friends knew me as an openly confident guy who was at all the parties where I was responsible for the music. But this good impression never rubbed off onto the girl I was obsessed with. All the failed efforts only made me crazier and crazier about her. It made me think more about how to get her. The more I loved this girl, or the idea of cherishing her tenderly in the night, the more I cared less about the other girls swirling around at the parties I went to.

So on weekends I found myself in an interesting situation. It go to the point where it was just assumed that I would bring the music to the parties I went to so I was almost always the DJ when I was at a party. I was getting to know everyone online and at the parties on the weekend and getting a reputation of a nice guy because I talked to all the girls about the girl I was obsessed with. I didn’t exactly have a solid group of friends so I wasn’t socially stifled by the standards of a clique which left me without anyone to impress or answer to.

So when girls met me at these parties, I would be talking to everyone and socially proofed through the roof, they would have heard about me from word of mouth from their friends I talked to online (and a memorable last name), in very good physical shape from lack-of-social-life-excessive-gym-time, comfortable in the environment having been the first one to get to the party, emotionally indifferent to the new girls I met and indifferent to how attractive they were. When I was young and sober I had no confidence because I over analysed and second guessed everything. My discovery of alcohol was the ignition of immaculate state and the conception of nimbus.

I started getting paid to bring my music to the parties. Another privilege I got was free alcohol all night from the hosts. Drunk and in a position of authority and contextual status I found myself surrounded by scorching hot, drunken teenaged private school girls who knew me but whom I had never met. They would come and sit on my lap and do attention seeking things. It never crossed my mind that girls were on a pedestal, except for my unobtainable one-gina infliction obsession girl. To me, having friends was on a pedestal.

So for me I saw no reason why I couldn’t just kiss these hot girls that were talking to me. We were both horny, I knew that girls got horny because other girls told me these things on the internet. So I didn’t sit around waiting for the girls to ask me to make a move, I just made a move. When I was drunk I would just instinctively take girls by the hand and lead them down to a dark part of the paddock and lie down on the grass with them and hook up.

I remember keeping a track of all the girls I kissed in my second last year of school. I think it was about 55 which is plenty for any guy that age. There would be a lot of ‘second base’ or ‘third base’ situations going on but I didn’t think to actually have sex with any girl because I wanted my first time to be special with obsession girl. There were a lot of girls I would hook up with me in the paddock grass but I would leave them with an unfortunate and painful case of the blue cunt.

As we began to get older the girls started to make a move on me. This would often mean that the girls would just tell me to make a move. I remember my first foray into sex was at a party with a stunningly hot and popular brunette girl who looked somewhat like Natalie Portman. I was running around nimbusing talking to all the girls I knew from the internet. Ultra spontaneous, drunk to the point of numbness and on a collision course either passing out or hurting myself from hazardous behaviour.

I found myself dancing with the drunk babe outside somewhere when she told me her name. I realised it was the same name as the singer of the song so it was justification enough for me to engage my automatic response to these things and lead her into the woods for some ‘second base’ times. The woods were not grassy, it was a dust bowl. Ah well, I couldn’t feel anything nor did I care. So I laid her down in the dust and we started hooking up. She was very enthusiastic.

Soon we were completely naked laying in the lumpy dust bowl. I didn’t know anything about sex and I though the vagina was somewhere at the front of the body so I didn’t go there. Seductively the girl told me that ‘it was ok’ and that she was on the pill. So I started a deep sea exploration mission of wetness and dust with the teenaged babe. My naked body was starting to hurt really badly by this stage and I felt like my skin was crawling. I think I did officially have sex with the girl, but I think it was by her doing, I didn’t know what was going on, but I was amused by the situation. I was confused however as to why my whole body stung and why I felt like my skin was crawling.

Soon the lights came on in the distance and the music stopped. The police had called a halt to the party and we had to find out way home. With the lights on I could now see the girl properly and I realised how pretty she was and how good her body was. I though, I’m going to tell everyone about this and then ask them why its hurts so much.

As we crawled out of the dirt, sweaty and covered in grime I realised the we had laid down on top of a black ant’s nest. I had welts all over my naked body and my skin was crawling with ants the size of quarters. I freaked out and ran to the ice bin for ice and more soothing beer. As my drunkenness wore off the agony kicked in. Over the course of my last year at high school there might have been about eight more instances like this. With no one else to hang out with, I would talk to girls at parties and these sorts of things would happen.

But still, I hated it because none of them were the girl I loved and was obsessed with.

I became a manwhore. I didn’t care about the girls I hooked up with. But I continued to hook up with random girls for two reasons. One, I thought that guys would think I’m cool if I hooked up with lots of girls, which didn’t happen. And two, I thought that if my obsession girl heard about me kissing all these girls that she went to school with then she would get jealous and think I was attractive. This has some influence over my obsession girl but as soon as she asked me about the girls she could clearly tell that I was still madly obsessed with her and kissing them to try and impress her that I’m cool. Nevertheless I gathered a lot of experience getting drunk and hooking up with girls. I didn’t ever have a girlfriend because I wasn’t actually a cool guy, so I would just get lots of practise and proficiency at the meeting and hooking up bit.

So this was my lifestyle going into my senior school year. Parties on weekends and by now I was even getting invited to other parties because I was just on the scene which was kinda cool. I played lots of sport to ensure that I had people around me to compensate for a lack of friends. Sport was also a good way to get myself into shape so I would think that the girls would think I was hot. By keeping busy with sport I didn’t have a chance to face my lack in social confidence and people skills. The rest of the time I was kept busy with senior school academic workload.

While things were going pretty well at the start of the year a few monumentally bad things happened that that tarnished my name so badly that it caused in terrible social repercussions. One night at a party I went early as always to set up my computer and speakers. Then we all had some aspirin to thin our blood to get us more drunk. Then I drank a shitload of rum and fell down some stairs. Vomiting and bleeding everywhere my friends got me naked and threw me into a shower. I missed an awesome party and was paranoid that the guys would hate me for having to look after me all night. Of course me expecting them to hate me for it fulfilled itself and they thought very little of me for it.

One weekend my South African friend’s parents were overseas leaving him with a mansion of a house to himself for the weekend. He decided to throw a massive party. This party was going to be a huge event. It was going to be the balls-out party of the year. He was a rich guy, there would be hundreds of people and alcohol everywhere. It was one of the most anticipated events of the year drawing great hype from our school and all the other schools involved.

At the time I was seventeen years old. But I still had a curfew of midnight ad my parents would always ring the parents of the host of the party to make sure it was ok if I came. Of course when they rang the parents of my friend his parents found out that he was going to have a party and they went berserk at him. He then took that out on me. Which I thought I deserved, so I accepted that I was a piece of shit for my dad making the phone call.

When the party was cancelled there were a whole lot of people calling around and telling each other that I had ruined the party of the year. While its responsible parenting to make those sorts of calls it was delusional to think that it was the right thing to do given the irreparable social repercussions it had on me.

I wrote an anonymous chain email publicly abusing the bitchiest and prissiest girls in our social network. I did this because I thought I could have a Dawson’s Creek style relationship with a girl who lived in my street but she shot me down badly. It was a hilarious email and everyone who read it agreed. Though they weren’t sure that I wrote it I got the blame for it and they proceeded to make an even bigger effort to ruin my reputation than my chain email messed with their reputations. Months later the same girl who had turned me down had a dead possum carcass nailed crucifix style to her front gate by someone else. At least I wasn’t the only one retaliating to her egocentric ways.

One night at a school dance I got wasted drunk and got emotional. I was going around telling people about my insecurities while they were sober. Enough said.

But the worst thing was a scandal where a group of us effectively dobbed in one of the guys in our clique to the heads of school. This devious act resulted in the victim of our backstabbing getting into massive trouble with the school. When it was discovered that I was involved it incurred massive social backlash and hatred.

The whole scandal thing started one night when I was at my bus friend’s house. In our clique at the time there was maybe seven guys. One of which was getting massively bullied by another guy in our group. This same guy doing the bullying was also planning to meet up with my bus friend’s girlfriend in the Myer change rooms so she could suck his dick to spite my bus friend. Furthermore he had stolen one of the teachers network passwords giving him access to student’s records where he could do things like manipulate grade scores.

That night at my friend’s house another guy in our group told my bus friend that he was getting sick of the bullshit that this bully was pulling. He suggested to my friend that they two of them, and the main target of this guy’s bullying should go and report all this drama to the heads of school. This was a pretty righteous, and honourable thing to voluntarily do, especially if those guys got caught. But it was at a time when the very prestigious school leadership group was about to be elected by the students and teachers of the school. Besides helping out the bully, they had extra motivation to be seen as upstanding citizens of the school. Because I was also getting negative attention from the bully and I was witness to the conversation I couldn’t avoid getting involved with the backstabbing scandal. Not that I would have wanted to avoid doing something eventful like that at the time.

So we went to see the school councillor, the deputy headmaster and the teachers of the bully and his target. Of course the school took this extremely seriously. The guy who was the target of the bully had a hard life at that school. People would kick him, yell abuse at his face and make his life a living hell. I never thought I could be a part of the schools leadership group. I knew what that guy was going through and I felt or him. I wanted to help him and do a good thing, I wouldn’t get anything else from being involved in the situation, but the two other guys went on to become the school leaders they wanted to be.

After we spoke to the teachers the bully got a massive punishment and was denied the chance to become a leader of the school which was a really big deal at the time. When the teachers spoke to him they told him all the things they knew he had done. He realised instantly that someone had dobbed him in, and not just the guy on the receiving end of his belittling. They never suspected me because I didn’t have anything against the bully except that he spoke down to me, which a lot of people did. The others weren’t suspected either because they had plenty of social integrity. He got punished by the school and so did a few others. But they had no idea who had talked and backstabbed everyone by going to the staff. I was part of the immediate discussion about the fucked up things those convicted guys were going to those who were responsible for dobbing them in.

Even though we stuck our necks out for this guy he ended up changing schools anyway. He was just that miserable and I really felt for him. In his darkest hours I would hang out with him and stay at his house so he would have company. I was there for him and helped him morally wherever I could. My fragile reputation was tarnished even further just for spending time with him.

After he left the school he still had contact with everyone via online messenger. A few months after he left school he went online and told everyone that it was me who dobbed in the bully. Even after I was there for him when he was depressive and suicidal. To add insult to insult he even dated and hooked up with the girl I was obsessed with just to spite me. He told me how she sucked his dick, but she told me that when she did he couldn’t get a boner. What a fuckhead.

This was so shocking to me that I couldn’t even comprehend it. I wasn’t even angered by the situation, just upset about people as a whole. After that incident, and dad calling the parents of former friend having the party and the whole backstabbing the bully to the teachers of the school I lost all trust in all people. I still didn’t trust myself. But I never made the mistake of trusting people again.

The fuckhead thought that because he changed school he could talk shit online and not have to worry about anything. Because he had launched an offensive on some of the thugs of the school they came after him. From what I hear from girls he knows he’s bought a lot onto himself from those guys.

Towards the end of my school year I had again bought myself down with repeated stupidity and self sabotaging behaviours. To make matters worse, academically I was never going to come close to getting into the course I wanted. But one day the university came to the school to offer students the opportunity to study one university course while they were still at school. If you could pass that course you would get instant entry into the prestigious psychology course at the cities most prestigious university.

I thought of myself so lucky to have an opportunity like this after being fucked over so badly when I moved to my new school from my old school. So I jumped at the chance to take up the offer and organised for my parents to come to school to authorise my commitment. When they got there and we discussed this with the school for some reason they thought that I shouldn’t take this opportunity but instead continue with my studies from school and try and get the unobtainable university entry score I needed to get into that course.

I still don’t know why they thought it was the right thing to do to deny me a golden opportunity to do what I always wanted to do. Of course because I had no faith in myself so I didn’t question them. I continued to be academically mediocre.

In my final year of school I thought I had an ok social life because of the DJ thing and I always had people around me because I played every sport I could possibly fit into my schedule. But I still wasn’t any closer to getting the girl I was still obsessed with.

There were a couple of harsh occasions when my social isolation and ineptitude was bought out from beyond my blindspots and shoved into my face. Times when I had to face the fact that people didn’t like me. On the night of our formal (prom) the group of guys I hung with at lunch time went ahead and organised a table without me. Leaving me and my partner, the girl I was obsessed with, with no one to sit with. We ended up sitting with one of her friends who was going with a guy from school.

I didn’t get invited to the formal after party which is like the ‘party at the lake after the prom’. The others guys from the group I hung out with were invited except for myself. So I organised to throw a massive party the week before the formal to give myself leverage to ask for an invitation to the formal afterparty. With some bribing and persistence I got two expensive tickets to the afterparty. But then, my obsession girl left me half way through the night to go home. I went alone to the party and passed out in the dirt after drinking myself unconscious.

On the last ever day of school everyone had plans to go drinking, or dye their hair for the holidays or go to the beach and party or whatever. I had no plans and no invitations. I just went home on my own on the last day of school. On that occasion I remember I think I cried.

And to round out the Australian high school experience we have schoolies. Schoolies is a festival where tens of thousands of high school graduates go to the Gold Coast to celebrate finishing school, get drunk, party and have sex all week. The guys in my group all organised their room and didn’t even tell me what their plans were going to be so I wouldn’t stay in the same building as them. They made an effort to neglect me.

In the end another guy and I stayed with some guys who we hardly knew with very different values to us. One of them even stole my extremely expensive minidisc player. Everyone else spent the week partying in their buildings with their friends and hooking up with girls, having sex and getting drunk. My friend and I just chilled a bit, got drunk in the room on our own and failed miserably trying to hook up with girls. Oh, but I did sleep with a fat white trash bogan. I freaked out half way through the experience and ran out of the room leaving the condom in someone’s packed clothes dryer.

What should have been the best week of my life was a fitting anti-climax to my school life.

Soon afterwards I got my university exist score in the mail. It was considerably worse than what I had expected because of the initial lag in grades when I changed schools. Had I have taken the opportunity the university provided it wouldn’t have mattered and I would have got straight into the course I always dreamt of. My score was 40% lower than what I needed to get into my course.

Receiving my school exist score bought down the curtain on the horror show that was the nurturing cradle of the impressionable span of my young life.

The patterns were inescapable. I was what I was.

I endured school belittled. I started the real world less.

Alexander~

…

To be continued.