Control: Remembering a Terrible Time In One’s Life…

I, Dalton Lewis, need to plan more. Evaluating and outlining need to happen for me to make it as a writer. Putting my thoughts onto the page in an explosion of text, desperately and passionately expressing myself to the masses, didn’t work. That sort of planning would have made it easier to express what was wrong with middle school.

People laughed at me for writing a poem about being enshrouded in darkness and obsessed with the stories in my head. I wasn’t schizophrenic yet and thought mentally ill people were terrible and needed our pity and support. I couldn’t believe how terrible it would be to become that person, to be unemployed and living with one’s parents at forty-two.

I tried to push a jock for being an arrogant asshole. I couldn’t move him and fell down myself. I hated myself just then. I remember when an asshole started to spit on me, on the back of my neck. I turned and punched him, over and over. We were sent to the assistant principal’s office. I was ordered to go to a detention. I never attended that detention, nor did they notice.

I tried to write a speech about optimism and practically puked with disgust. I talked to my mom in her room upstairs, at the right when I walked upstairs. To the left were my room and my sister’s room. I remember when she called me a dork and I died inside. Anyway, my mom told me to write with some honesty: to express what was wrong with life. I wrote a speech.

“Optimism sucks,” I said. That started a speech in which I talked about all the bad and negative things that happen instead of being happy and hopeful. I won the first round of the competition and the second round, but then I panicked and didn’t do a third round because I hated myself and didn’t believe in myself. Kicking the bathroom stall made sense to me and then caused me to limp for three days, waiting for my ankle to heal, not knowing to see a doctor.

Things were different back then: middle school students talked about gay people in hushed, conspiratorial tones, not acknowledging any attraction to one’s gender. On the weekend I would hang out with a friend and then on Monday he wouldn’t even say hi to me at school. Stuff like that happened a lot. People would tell stories of masturbation in order to embarrass and humiliate people, and it worked.

I persisted. I didn’t kill anyone or kill myself. I learned to have a thick skin about being harassed. I learned not to cry anymore when things went bad — and things always went bad. Slowly learning to not care about bullies and torments created a new me: someone with the integrity to ignore the madness and pain around me and have a decent attitude about life. I live with that attitude to this very day.

I wanted to write a novella about the pain that happens in middle school, and I feel that I wrote something powerful and personal, sad and happy, tragic and comic. I hope that you check it out.

Thanks, and take care, friends.