It’s only now that I want to disclose something that you might think is critical; I have no real timeframe for these memories of abuse. I’m estimating as closely as I can, and going off the process of elimination of my own memories. Generally, I can remember at least a handful of events from the rest of the periods of my life, but seventh grade is almost completely empty, and so I can only surmise that everything that did happen to me happened during that time. It’s not like there’s anyone who can confirm that, aside from maybe Michael N. himself, but I’d prefer to not know.
So, knowing that I can remember bits and pieces of my life in eighth grade, I’m figuring that most of the abuse stopped by then. Again, I could be wrong, but this isn’t just an exercise in letting go of pain, or telling a story, it’s also me trying to make sense of the horrible fucked-up things that happened to me. If that’s not easy to follow, I do sincerely apologize. Maybe one day, I’ll have that clarity, but considering it’s been pretty much 14 years since I started eighth grade, I’m willing to bet that the full story is gone for good.
Anyway, I preface with that, because around this point in time, things shift. Rather than telling the story of Nicholas Provenghi, an exuberant and bright little kid from El Paso, I’m telling the story of someone else. He shares the same name as our original protagonist, but there’s something… off. There’s a haze to his appearance, almost like he’s a projection of something not quite there, but to most people, he looks the same as Nicholas. And, for all intents and purposes, no one ever noticed that a change took place. Indeed, I don’t even think I realized that things were different now. But they were.
Eighth grade started, and I was obsessive about change, moreso than ever before. I wanted to go to a different school, I wanted new friends, I wanted to learn about colleges, I wanted everything in my life to change. Of course, that was impossible, but it didn’t stop me from thinking about it every day and night. It was a good way to distract from the mundane everyday drudgery that’s at the heart of eighth grade.
Something that I remember clearly is having a cell phone by this point, and never ever using it. Of course, I loved having a gadget, I loved having something that let me take knowledge I found online feel more tangible and real. Part of me even wanted to start opening it up and taking it apart. Or find a way to get a neat feature phone (mine was just a chunky flip phone, courtesy of Motorola) so I could use Twitter, like the “cool” phone reviewers who I watched on YouTube. Oh yeah, YouTube.
Aside from being an interesting period of time in general, 2008 was just a wild time for being online in general. People were getting paid to write reviews about prepaid cell phones, Facebook was secondary to MySpace, and the only exposure I’d had to the internet until then was via Michael N., who’d introduced me to FunnyJunk, 4chan’s slightly less dirty and less organized sister board. He seemed to get endless entertainment from it and liked commenting on posts, but that seemed to be a bridge too far for me. That was the start of a pattern for me, a pattern of passive participation.
I loved watching people interact online, almost as much as I did in person, but I didn’t ever want to interact with them. It made perfect sense; any one of them might have been the one with a perfect perception of the preconceived notion of a person I’d seemingly perfected. They’d see beyond to the sad, fat, gay, broken, utterly hopeless kid behind the screen, and I’d be ruined. So I let people be, and I carried on. And there was no better place to perfect that behavior than the pre-monetized era of social media. Content was getting cranked out at a blistering pace, and none of it was meant to drive interaction, it was just to share shit.
It was nice. Watching YouTube videos turned into a meditative experience for me, where I could see all of these interesting things and people doing interesting things and just not exist as myself for a period of time. Or I could watch TV shows - that’s how I ended up watching every episode of Frasier before I left junior high - or video game playthroughs, or machinimas, or shitposts, or whatever. All I was confident of was that anything that existed out there was better than having to maintain my appearances every day.
That takes everything back to eighth grade. There’s a moment I remember perfectly, because my cell phone played into it; my school was on a six-week grading cycle, so I was supposed to receive a progress report three weeks into any new cycle. During the second cycle, my homeroom teacher passed them out before we left for the day. My parents gleefully displayed anything of mine that had a grade on it on our fridge, so I was naturally excited to bring this home for them to approve of and slip under a magnet.
I opened the folded piece of yellow paper, and read down the column next to my teachers’ names. At the very end, in the last row, there was an “88” entered for English.
The emotional response I had to this information was not, as one would hope, measured, calm, rational, or even normal. I might as well have had a vacuum pulled on my insides and all of my organs were crushed inside me, and I was suddenly plopped from my desk and into a dark field, ready to be gunned down for my horrible transgression. I felt true and utter fear. Fear and anger.
On the outside, I doubt I looked perfectly fine, but I don’t think I showed any major signs of distress. If I had, I probably wouldn’t have been allowed to leave the school normally. I probably wouldn’t have taken out my cell phone and pushed the keys to get my mom’s phone to ring. I probably wouldn’t have started screaming into the cell phone in front of my school that I was ready to commit suicide and to kill myself for getting an 88. That I was a disappointment and that I was a failure and that everyone was ashamed of me.
In hindsight, this moment was another one that should’ve tipped someone off that there was something really really wrong with me. It didn’t.
That’s partially because I was perfecting my craft of bullshit. I was learning exactly what to do and say, and in what manner, to completely assuage any worry. Because even if the Nicholas inside the sphere of screens was hurting and wanted to end his life because of this one B+, I knew that the Nicholas outside couldn’t do something so irrational. So, when my mom got home later that evening, I explained everything to her as calmly as I could. That I was just scared and upset and confused, but that I wasn’t going to hurt myself.
It wasn’t the best performance, I’m sure, but it did the trick that time. And I only ever got better at it. Even now, I’m 26 years old and I catch myself doing this kind of thing. I project these fake manifestations of feelings onto other people whenever possible so that I don’t have to confront feelings as my own. That’s why I stopped writing things, because the first versions of my projected self didn’t have any strong feelings, since those are hard to act out. Like the rest of the performance, I got good at doing that, too, but still, I couldn’t write.
Eighth grade rushed by, as I filled my days with violin practice, math club meetings, volunteer activities, and homework. Lots and lots of homework. For a month-long period around my birthday, I would wake up at 4:00 am every day and read through a biography of Leonardo da Vinci for an hour and a half and take notes on it on little index cards. This was part of what I had to do for my Humanities class’ big project, a huge research paper on the Renaissance man himself. After all of that effort, my huge paper, which was a slog to write and I’m sure an even worse one to read, wasn’t selected to move on to the next round of judging for the contest in which it was entered.
That was disappointing, to say the least.
That process pretty much defined my life for the next few years. No one saw the amount of effort I put into that project, and it was judged without that making a difference. And so, I never measured up to what I thought was the highest standard for the highest effort. Obviously, there are times where that shouldn’t matter, but I hadn’t gotten to the season of life where I’d know what those were. Right now, all I had was academics, the world of right, wrong, and partial credit, so I strapped myself in for the tide of disappointment.
—
Living life as the survivor of childhood sexual abuse is already a shit hand to be dealt, but add in undiagnosed learning disabilities, and you’ve got a killer one-two punch of awful. And my face as the bullseye! At this point, my ADHD was acting up terribly, and funnily enough, so was my little brother’s. However, while I had no trouble sitting still or staying on a school-related task, he could never sit down or stop trying to talk. So my parents took him to the doctor, who put him on meds that helped him regain some control of himself. Easy peasy.
By the luck of the draw, all my standing up and screaming had taken place inside my own head, where I didn’t know that meant anything was wrong. So I just forced myself through it, through the periods of time where I couldn’t do so much as stand up, through the feelings of fear and rejection that seemed like a loaded gun pointed at my head, through the inability to have a quiet moment at any point ever. I pushed through, and no one saw it.
Of course, deeply damaging trauma layered on top of that kind of brain is not going to have great results. As a result, even though my abuse stopped, I didn’t stop acting like a giant asshole to my family at any sign of them frustrating me, whether real or perceived. By this point, they were somewhat used to it, but it still hurt. It drove wedges further and further between myself and the rest of my family, pouring hot magma in the cracks of the earth I’d created, so that no bridge could be built without being burnt.
I think we all just sort of accepted it, at that point.
My parents hoped it was hormonal, and that it would go away. (It didn’t.)
My brother hoped he’d get his own friends and that he wouldn’t need his older brother. (He did and doesn’t.)
I hoped it would just all end at some point.
I didn’t know how. I didn’t care. The mechanism was secondary to the release.
Every night in bed, I’d look up at the ceiling, and just stare. Then a plane would crash through it and kill me. My gaze would meet the pilot’s at the very last splinter of a second, and I’d smile. Or the ceiling fan would rattle itself free of its mount, and crash down onto my bed and make mince meat of my brain. Or the house’s creaks and groans would amplify loud enough to make the walls fall in on top of me, and I’d meet my end.
But not the rest of my family, though. They always survived these visions. In fact, the plane that hit our house? A tiny little Cessna, small enough to just hit one bedroom. The ceiling fan was only in my bedroom, and the house collapsing; well, I just hoped that the luck would be bad enough to where it made me into a sandwich.
Starting in eighth grade, every day, I’d perform the actions and feelings of a normal person, come home, do the meaningless things that I’d been told to, go to sleep, and think about death for hours before passing out. And I’d repeat that process every day and night, without an end in sight. And because I knew better, I couldn’t ever act out anything suicidal, it would’ve shattered the finely-crafted illusion. So, I eschewed death for purgatory, and just committed to wandering the world in search of some kind of release that may or may not ever come.
It took two years before it’d visit me for the first time. And it took a form I could never have expected, and it took me on a journey I could never have dreamt up.