I’ve spent most of my life in a bubble of family, close friends, and benevolent acquaintances.
It didn’t start out that way. I attended first through third grade in public school, and made friends and enemies there, and I was able to get along just fine. I would even say that I was rather normal.
But then, right before Mom died and I was to enter the 4th grade, she and Dad pulled me aside and had a talk with me. Our local school system combined grades 4 through 12, so they didn’t feel comfortable sending me to the same building with high schoolers at such a young age. They were afraid I would get picked on, they said. Also, they had “been praying about it” and apparently received instructions “from God” that me and my brother were to be “separated from the world.” So, as a result, my parents were putting us into homeschool.
Mom died before the school year ended, and Dad was left to carry out the plan they had both agreed on. He indeed put me in school at his home for grades 4 through 6. We used the abysmal fundamentalist Accelerated Christian Education curriculum, which was fine for neutral subjects like math and chemistry, but incredibly inaccurate and biased for subjects like history and biology.
After the unpleasantness with Dad’s administration of the school, it fell apart and the other students stopped coming. So we were put back in public school. It was an extremely small town, perhaps less than 1,000, so most of the kids there were nice and very non-confrontational. I don’t remember getting in a single fight while I was at Elementary School there. I do remember getting teased quite a bit because of my lack of knowledge about puberty, but I credit my own strangeness, late development, and lack of exposure for that.
Then we went to Juvie. If ever I was taken “out of the bubble” of kind, passive individuals, that was the time. It was a nightmarish hell world of juvenile delinquents who enjoyed nothing more than teasing, hazing, and punching the nerdy, weak, or different. However, rather than “toughening me up” as my Dad and stepmother no doubt intended (“You have to learn to deal with such people sometime,” they would say), it made me even more fearful and encapsulated in my shell. I mostly surrounded myself with nerdy colleagues and tried to wall myself off from the horror.
After that came Saint Academy. A small, friendly private school of only 100 students of grades K through 12 (there were 5 in my graduating class), I was first able to make really good friends here and start to express myself to others. Everyone there was very passive and non-confrontational and I never felt threatened or exposed. If anything, I felt safe, but that’s because it was a tightly controlled Christian school were ne’er-do-wells were quickly booted out.
Since I created those friends in high school, I’ve mostly stuck with them for the rest of my life. There was a brief period after I moved to Lexington where I got out and met new people, even came close to developing a relationship, but that was mostly at the behest of Christian, who was introduced to me through Darrin, my best friend during high school. Except for Jed (whom I met via Christian), all of my friends went to high school with me.
Now I rarely associate with someone I don’t already know intimately. I’m scared to make new friends because I don’t know what they’ll think of my poor appearance, my strange personality, and my terrible manners. I keep myself locked up at home in an isolated bubble; the few times I have ridden the bus to go somewhere on my own it has been a terrifying, nightmarish experience. I distinctly remember one time trying to go to a deli downtown and all the street signs were taken down for construction. I thought I would never get home.
I really need to work on this. Right now I’m horribly equipped to deal with the world. If I weren’t in my bubble, I don’t think I could make it. I’m institutionalized. Perhaps I should add it to my list of things to work on.