Clearly, I was born to write and, being a gift from God, it
wouldn’t require much work to maintain my talent, which was lucky for me,
because I wasn’t too interested in working at it. I was far more interested in
accepting the plaudits of teachers, parents and other authority figures, the
people who knew what was good.
However, the following year I was plunged into a cauldron of
torment when I started middle school. In his comic book, School is Hell, Matt Groening calls middle school “the deepest pit
in hell.” Groening’s description of middle school proved prophetic. My friends
drifted away, in the case of my best friend, to find cooler companionship.
I unilaterally ended social relations with my parents and
younger sister. They seemed partly responsible for my predicament, and, in
retaliation, I downgraded our interactions to nonverbal or monosyllabic, and always
invested with a heavy dose of sullen hostility.
My diary became my primary confidante. It was a series of
school notebooks left over from various classes. In a fit of eco-consciousness,
I filled the empty pages with tiny writing. I could put two lines of text in
each college-ruled line. I’m not sure why I wrote so small. Maybe I wanted to
“waste” as little paper as possible on my random musings.
As a writer, my confidence has been worn down over time by
feedback and failure. But, at the dawn of my career, I was confident that
becoming a professional writer who could at least support himself was a pretty
easy goal. If anything, I was mainly worried that my genius might not be
recognized in my own time.
That became a compelling argument for my exhaustive diary.
It would serve as a window into my formative years. Future scholars would pore
over these notebooks, fascinated by the new light they shed on my
groundbreaking body of work as an adult. It would give them fresh insight into
my troubled relationship with my parents and the many indignities I suffered at
the hands of my peers.
On the surface, my life was hell, just as Matt Groening had
said it would be. I was bullied at school and essentially friendless the rest
of the time. My free time was mostly spent watching TV, trying to forget my
misery.
But it was all just grist for the mill of my genius. As we
all know, every great artist has to suffer, and these were my trials and
tribulations, the pain I had to endure in order to join the pantheon of great
writers. Shakespeare, Hemingway, Groening: I bet they were all picked on in
their school days. (Well, obviously Groening was, since he wrote a book about
it.)
All the pain would be worth it once I got the recognition I
deserved. The world would know how I had suffered, and, through the power of my
prose, they would sympathize with me and condemn my tormentors as the assholes
they were. The kids flying high in middle school would be brought low, and
those of us at the bottom of the pecking order, well, maybe not all of us, but
certainly I, would be exalted. Just as the Bible prophesies, the meek would
inherit the earth and the assholes would burn forever in the Lake of Fire.
I had to believe this, otherwise there would’ve been no
enduring the torment and loneliness. Even if I didn’t achieve worldwide fame
during my lifetime, I was still at the very least guaranteed a posthumous
exhumation of my oeuvre followed by the inevitable, global avalanche of accolades.
It actually took years for the whole world-conquering genius
narrative to take shape in my mind. I didn’t make the leap directly from
well-adjusted child to megalomaniacal teenager. But it’s taken much longer to
dispense with that delusion than it did to concoct it. By now I’ve at least
gotten to the point that I have serious doubts whether my genius will ever be
fully appreciated, although I remain cautiously optimistic.
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