“I didn’t ask to play…”

I guess the best place to start my mental health blog is when I began school, because that was where the first manifestations of my mental health challenges were revealed.

I went to a public school in rural upstate NY, just a few miles from downtown Albany. School was the first place I really was forced to interact with people outside of my immediate family and a couple of scummy neighborhood kids who were, at that time, the closest thing I had to friends. Looking back, I can very firmly say that no, they were not friends.

I hated school from the moment I was forced to wake up early for my first day of kindergarten. It was wild to me that some jerks I’d never heard of before thought they had some right to dictate literally any part of my life.

We had rules in my house, but they were sparse and meaningful. It was things like, “clean up if you make a mess,” and “don’t put car keys in the wall outlet.” Rules with clearly-articulable purposes didn’t bother me, and at home I had very few behavioral problems.

The rules at school felt random, purposeless, and unjust to me. Permission to use the bathroom? Enforced nap times? Walking in a line? The school faculty and administration, in my mind, were totally out of control.

It didn’t take me long to come into serious conflict with my school. Just after lunch, on my first day of kindergarten, my teacher put me in the time-out chair after accusing me of swearing during a film strip. Though my potty mouth would get me into plenty of trouble over the years, I was legitimately innocent in this instance. The teacher ignored my explanations and banished me to the time-out chair, which sat between the classroom door and the corner of the room.

I trudged to the time-out chair and took a seat. Inside, I was white hot with rage. I determined it would be good and just to steal the teacher’s keys and flush them down the toilet.

As it turned out, I didn’t need to do all that.

After letting me stew for probably around 10-15 minutes, my teacher approached me, presumably to ask if I’d learned my lesson. As she stooped down to look me in the eyes, I jammed my heel down on the arch of her foot. When she opened her mouth in shock, I spit right in it.

Over the course of that year, and many years following, I found myself in constant conflict with the adults at my school. My teachers, by and large, had no idea how to handle me. I became very skilled at creating chaos in ways where I either hadn’t technically broken the rules, or where everyone knew it was me; they just couldn’t prove it. I stole stuff, got into fights, skipped class, destroyed school property, gaslit my teachers, and got classmates I disliked into conflicts with each other so I could sit on the sidelines and watch them argue and get into fistfights. At any given time I had between 0 and 2 friends, and I liked it that way. I found people in my age group to be mostly intolerable — mean, profoundly boring, and incredibly stupid. I developed a seething hatred of bullies, and found ways to make their lives hellish both in and outside of school.

I was never mean just for the sake of it. Cruelty has always upset me. Harming people or animals has never brought me pleasure; though I do have a vengeful streak that runs deep and hot toward people who intentionally harm me and don’t attempt to make amends — a streak that as far as I can tell has no expiration date since I’m still just as mad at some of the people who hurt me in 2nd Grade as I am at people who hurt me last week.

I was sent for several evaluations in 2nd and 3rd Grades, which resulted in me being very briefly placed in a “gifted & talented” program that was run by a booze-reeking hallway monitor. My grades were awful. I probably would have been left back grades except I excelled at test-taking and always tested far above my grade level in most topics. I got some sort of “classification” from all those evaluations, but to this day I have no idea what it was.

In 8th Grade, a big meeting was held with my parents, my teachers, the school guidance counselor, the principal, and the district’s psychologist. During the meeting, one of my teachers compared me to this shitty little kiss-ass motherfucker named Barrett, who was your archetypal good student from a “good family”: JV sports, honor roll, school clubs, blond, etc. As my teacher explained it, “School is like a game, and Barrett is very good at that game.”

“I didn’t ask to play,” was my response, and the only words I spoke during that entire three-hour meeting.

I spent most of the rest of the time rolling my eyes and flipping off the various adults in the room who weren’t my parents, as my parents had always advocated for me in appropriate and meaningful ways.

By the time I got to high school, the district had more or less figured out that the less they trod on me, the less I acted out. They knew that for every inch they pushed, I’d push back 10, and I was better at it than they were. It also helped that I had substantially more independence than I’d had in earlier school experiences. Being able to pick some of my own classes was nice. I went to those classes and took them seriously. For classes I had no say over, I would basically just skip them and go read non-fiction books in the library up to 6 out of 9 periods a day. I kept acing all my state exams, which helped the school look good to the State, and I did just enough make-up work to keep my grades just about good enough to graduate on time.

I was still a little fuck. I enjoyed unscrewing door hinges so the doors would topple over out of their frames when people pushed on them. I flushed hamburger buns in the boys’ room toilets so they’d overflow, soldered locks to classroom doors shut, started fires, continued stealing district property, and encouraged my slowly-expanding circle of acquaintances to engage in various risky or rule-breaking ventures. But the chaos had been dialed from 8 down to about 4.

In the summer between 10th and 11th Grades, my parents enrolled me in the NYS Theater Institute’s summer youth program. For the first time in my life, I found myself surrounded by peers that I didn’t find to be cliquish dullards. They welcomed me into their circles, forced me to come out of my shell a bit, and tried to genuinely get to know me in authentic and non-judgmental ways. As if it was for the first time in my life, I learned to speak, to walk, to dress, and to emote.

There are no words that can express the change that came over me during that summer experience. When I went back to school for 11th Grade, people literally didn’t recognize me. I’d changed my hair, my clothing style, and more importantly, the other parts of my outward appearance: body language, tone and volume of speech, facial expressions, and conversational style. Within weeks, I went from having almost no friends to having basically a crew, as well as a never-ending series of often-overlapping girlfriends (which contributed to a life of immense promiscuity that didn’t abate until my late-20s). Basically, I’d found the mask that worked for me. Feeling like I’d discovered a super power, the next stage of my development was learning how to harness my new skills for constructive ends.

High on my sudden success, I decided to try to get my academic life in order. My junior and senior years of high school were a flurry of me trying to undo the boondoggle I’d worked myself into since kindergarten. I stopped fucking around so much (not entirely), went to classes, sought extra help, and ended up graduating high school as literally the lowest-ranked student to actually graduate that year, with a 4-year cumulative GPA of 64.5, which they rounded up to the passing GPA of 65.

This story was a crucial part of the social history that I provided to my psychiatrist which, along with other types of evaluations, led to my diagnosis of Antisocial Personality Disorder (ASPD) in October 2021.