Anguish

A Story by Aerautic

memoiric recall of childhood emotional struggle

I was in grade school when I fearfully realized there was something wrong and it was going to make my life insufferable if I couldn’t figure out how to escape it. I was doubled over in the seat of a school bus, hiding my face in my arms between my knees. A sensible part of me thought to just let go, stop what I was doing, come up for cool fresh air, to dry my face and bravely bear it to the world again; but I continued to hold it down in that small humid space to the sound of my own weeping, there was a stubbornness to my lonesome.

I was behaving as if I was trying to hide from my fellow classmates, and a part of me truly was (it’s not like I wanted to be noticed for having a breakdown), but there was an emotional contradiction going on because I did feel that I got, in part at least, what I wanted when I finally heard them take notice “What’s wrong with him? Why’s he doing that?”. Then the issue painfully revealed itself when in an alarming and time-stopping moment I next heard someone amongst them say “He’s just doing it for attention”, because deep down I knew that person was right, and I hated it.

How unfair, not only did I feel insignificant, but it was insignificant that I felt insignificant. And I knew it would be, that’s why I tried to hide having a breakdown in the first place. I was called out anyway, I hated

That remark had the effect on me of refracting my ordeal into a perceived confection of injustices.

I couldn’t tell what upset me more, the fact that he was right, or the fact that he was right about. I was embarrassed not only because I could be called out like that, but also because of what I was called out about. I was at angst with how unfair it all seemed. When the oppressive perception that one doesn’t fit in suddenly hits you, you don’t want to make things worse by causing a scene onto yourself with your own embarrassing emotional breakdown, so you try to go to into hiding; but in the event that someone bothers to take notice of either your struggle or your attempt to hide from it, all that comes of it is a remark that makes pathetic the triviality of both your struggle and what your struggling with.