I’m 17 years old, just sitting in my room playing video games and listening to music as normal. It was the day before Thanksgiving and my mom was out shopping with my family from out of town. This wasn’t anything out of the norm, I rarely ever wanted to go out shopping with family because I got bored easily just browsing Wal-Mart or Big Lots like the rest of my family. I was always more comfortable sitting at home playing guitar, video games, or just putting my headphones on and drowning out the world. My room is covered in posters of various metal bands from Pantera to Sepultura, your stereotypical angsty teenage boy’s room in the 90s. Suddenly I started thinking about my bully calling me a loser every day at school, the girls laughing when I would ask them out, or all the other kids having a laugh at the fat kid’s expense. That’s when the urge took over, the urge to just say “Fuck it, I’ll give them what they obviously want, I’ll leave” so I just start taking whatever medicine or pills are laying around in hopes that I just take so much that I pass out and die in my sleep before anyone gets home.

This is when it became obvious that something was wrong.

I was always “off,” so to speak, especially compared to my friends and classmates. I wasn’t interested in sports, cars, or other stereotypical things like my peers. Yeah, I enjoyed those things to an extent, but a lot of it was trying to learn more about those things so I didn’t feel so much like an outcast when trying to be social. My interests lie more in things like video games, comics, music, as well as other religions, reading, and poetry. Now that doesn’t seem too “off, but remember, I grew up in a small town in Alabama where you go to church on Sunday, show off your car on Broad Street on Friday nights, and watch football on Saturday. I kid you not, this was literally the weekend routine for most people around here in the 80s and 90s.

It wasn’t until I was around 15–16 years old, coincidentally when I started being a “mallrat,” that I found others that I thought were like me and really felt like I belonged somewhere. You remember those kids at the mall that hung out in the corner of the food court, wearing all black and listening to metal and punk loudly? Yeah, those were “my people,” and I felt like I had found my tribe. I started feeling more open and comfortable with myself, getting piercings, wearing all black, and growing my hair out. For once, even as the “fat kid,” I felt awesome in my own skin.

But as I soon found out, being comfortable with yourself brings a lot of backlash from people, especially bullies and people who were, in their own words, “normal.” This also brought on a lot of internal bullying as well, as even though I felt like I belonged, I also felt like an imposter, or as we liked to call it “a poser.” I mean, this group was cool; how could a nerdy fat kid fit in with friends who looked and acted like the rock stars I idolized?

So even when I thought I would fit in, I felt like I didn’t. No matter how much others treated me as one of their own or even told me that I was one of them, I still felt like I didn’t belong. This form of bullying, the “It’s me, I’m the bully” mentality, was far more painful and one that led to a constant war that I am still fighting to this day. The one that I will always believe is attributed to my mental health issues, on top of being a product of them.

Fast forward nearly 25 years, and I am sitting in a doctor’s office in Alabama being told my diagnosis, and it’s not what my previous doctors have been trying to treat for most of my life. I just learned that I am autistic, schizophrenic, and have bipolar 1, whereas my previous diagnosis was just borderline personality disorder. So here I am, just a few months after I decided to quit drinking (that’s another story for another day that a lot you already know.) and feeling like getting hit in the face with a brick but at the same time having thoughts like “Man, I actually make sense to myself now.” Yeah, I feel robbed, like I missed out on a different life, and would absolutely love to have those years back knowing why I am so different, but on that same token, I feel like I have a whole new lease on life now.

As a friend told me when I first received all this news:

“The incredible part to all of this, and the positive to take from it, as you endured, you for lack of a better word survived and are here to be able to learn a new way to live.”

So, this is sort of my “going public” and my first real step in opening up about my life, my struggles, the changes I have gone through in the last year, and how I am learning who I really am.

**this was originally written in 2022, and reposting now as the first official post on this personal blog**