Children Are Monsters
Children are monsters. Other than that, I have very few thoughts that I can trace back to my childhood; most of my memories come as flashes of emotion scattered in a montage of vague images. Of these reflections, those that exist in their clearest and most vivid form are the sadistic behaviors of school children. This isn’t to say that I never had a tender or endearing moment, but those times blur into obscurity under the weight of every negatively reinforced social experience. From that, most of what I remember can be divided by one of two focal points: problems from being fat, or from being quiet. My childhood was not a happy one. Everyone deals with cruelty at some point, and we all have a threshold for how much of it we can withstand. I reached my high water mark around the age of 12.
Like many other children, in my most ambitious dreams I was normal. Overweight, socially awkward, and speechless aren’t qualities that a person’s would generally call desirable, though they were qualities that kids generally used to describe me. Most of my teachers found me unique and precocious, but because I lived on the floor of the elementary school pecking order, I could not possibly care less about what any adult thought of me. I had bigger concerns. In every school, there are children that love nothing more than to remind everyone how they embody the tip of the social bell curve, usually by shaming anyone that deviates from that homogeneity. I, unfortunately, was that outlier.
If someone had told me I was stupid, I wouldn’t have been happy, but I could have defended myself. The really insidious effect of being teased for my weight or my conversation skills was that I identified with every epithet. I knew that what they said about me was true, because it was. Forming an identity is like building a house, and the only building material I knew how to use was vitriol. By receiving poor treatment at such a formative age, laid in my foundation was the belief that there was something inherently wrong about me. Those children’s judgments had nothing to do with what I had done; it was about who I was. During the first few years that I endured, when I wasn’t suicidal I was depressed. But at some point, I realized that I wasn’t the problem. They were. Then, to put it mildly, I became furious.
Around the age of 12, I discovered the solution to every problem I had ever had. With loud hair, loud clothes, loud music, a foul mouth, and a bad attitude, I immediately fell in love with punk rock. For most of my life, I did anything to get permission to not be treated horribly. The anger, resentment, and disillusion that I accumulated had become the fuel that drove me. The only behavior I strove for was aggression, and my dress changed into a collage of nature’s warning signs. I sheltered myself in a leather jacket peppered with rows of sharp studs, my clothes were either day-glow or black, my mohawk came in artificial colors, I spoke in grows, and I breathed smoke. If I wasn’t in school —which was happening regularly— I was likely drunk, looking for a fight, being chased around Seattle like an escaped zoo animal, or a combination of the three. For the first time in my life, I felt that I had control.
Oddly enough, I was rarely teased after my metamorphosis. Most kids were scared of me, and I loved that. Positive or negative, everyone’s opinion of me had shifted. Where before I was seen as socially awkward and aloof; after, I was viewed as stoic and contemplative. Weird became eccentric; peculiar became expressive; harmless became dangerous. My life had changed for the ironic. One of the biggest paradoxes was that I original wanted invisibility, but I have couldn’t have possibly made myself more conspicuous. Punk is loud, colorful, aggressive, opinionated, and punks will do just about anything to irritate anyone. Thinking back on that phase of my life, I understand why I adopted a flamboyant and antisocial lifestyle. I was making the social equivalent of driving into the skid.
People felt no less disdain for me after my transformation than before, but their judgments weren’t the same. There was never a word said about my weight, or how little I chose to interact with others. They talked about my hair, my clothes, or that I was a Marlboro-smoking 12 year old. What they didn’t understand —nor did I— was that my lifestyle was meant to be a decoy. My persecutors were no longer judging me, but my shell. And that shell was deliberately made thick. For my entire life, I felt a constant pressure to aspire to some idealized version of who I was supposed to be. But the more I tried, the louder I was reminded of my failures. I would never be the star quarterback, be voted “most likely to be handsome”, have some remember my birthday, or hold hands with someone that wasn’t my mother. But then punk came along. Now I could meet every demand the world made of me by picking my nose in its general direction, giving it a big, heartfelt, “Go fuck yourself.” I was free.
