Another Life Is Possible

One of my earliest memories is of not fitting in. We’d moved from a busy suburban street of relatively new-build family homes where the kids played outside on the street on summer evenings to the middle of nowhere. A tiny little village. A small house at the top of a lane. Isolated.

I remember a minibus pulling up outside the house. It was already dark. I don’t remember meeting the driver that evening. I did pick up that something significant was happening.

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The driver was the local vicar and as a result of the grown ups talking that evening, me and my sister were to be inducted into the choir. I also became the altar boy. No one asked me about this and it never occurred to me that I had any choice.

Thursday evenings was choir practice. They were held in a church that was usually freezing in winter. The adults made jokes only they understood. My sister had a friend there, another girl. There were no other boys and I was at an age in an era where you didn’t have friends of the opposite sex.

There’s a bit in the communion prayer where it says “we who are not worthy to gather up the crumbs from under thy table”. I never said those words. I listened to the congregation intone them in what sounded to me like dull subservience. Even back then, I thought that if they only thought about what they were saying, they wouldn’t say it.

I also got to sing the first verse of “Once in Royal David’s City” solo carrying the cross leading the choir down to their section. This kickstarted the Christmas Eve service. I did it because the grownups asked me to and because I could actually sing. They seemed to like my singing voice. I had no feelings about it. It didn’t bring me pleasure. I assume someone got some benefit from it else why would I be doing it?

So, the belief that being me, the real me, didn’t matter started with Church.

But school is where I got to explore the idea thoroughly.

A few years after the minibus, I didn’t pass the exam that would get you into a selective school, I also fluffed an interview at a selective school, and instead went to the not at all local comprehensive 20 miles from my tiny village.

I was bullied at school. To this day I don’t know why. I was just a kid. I wasn’t special or standout except I had a huge imagination and I was socially awkward. I guess that was enough?

The awkwardness and the imagination are easily explained, my life outside of school was lonely. My parents were busy, I was the oldest of 3 children and I didn’t have friends I could call on locally because my school was 20 miles away which might as well have been a million miles away for a kid with no money living somewhere the bus only passed through on Thursdays aka ‘Market Day’.

My parents believed this faraway school offered me the best academic opportunity. Ironically, I didn’t even get the benefit of that. “Could do better” was consistently on my report. Yes, maybe I could do better but I’m a bit busy trying to survive the loneliness and bullying that no one but me seems to see.

When you are lonely and bullied, you learn not to show yourself. You make decisions based on survival. You develop a messed-up philosophy:

• Showing my true self gets me bullied, I will not show my true self.
• I am never asked what I think, what I think must not matter.
• This isn’t what I want, what I want must not matter.
• Engagement with other people leads to loss, confusion or hurt. I will not engage with other people.

These of course are unhelpful and make the situation worse. Your world gets smaller and smaller. In a school setting where hierarchy, being part of a pack is crucial, you are exposed, easy to pick off.

This in turn reinforces the philosophy you already had. You must withdraw as engagement only brings pain.

Then you stop thinking anything matters. Your agency is gone. Nothing you do brings a better tomorrow.

That’s when you give up. That’s what I did at around 13 or 14 years old. I stopped hoping for better.

I look at photos of that sad kid and I want to tell him “you’re not so bad. You just got very very unlucky very early on. Tough break living in the middle of nowhere with busy parents and no friends.” But even if I could have travelled back in time armed with the knowledge of the future me, I don’t think I’d have listened to me anyway.

My dad told me once that “I led with my chin”. I didn’t fully understand what he meant until decades later. He was suggesting I was actively looking for challenge, for trouble.

At the time I just thought “I don’t see any other way to be. I’m just me” and the idea that I would intentionally invite the attention that was so consistently negative was ridiculous to me.

I grew up not knowing anything about myself except that I was unacceptable.

Academically it was always “could do better”

Socially I was excluded, or worse, invited in so I could be humiliated.

That’s when I learned it wasn’t OK to be me.

Here’s where it ends, I want there to be a redemption arc.

But reader, there isn’t.

There’s just the deep, hard work every day reparenting that sad, unlucky kid that still lives inside me.

No neat Hollywood ending, just starting every day over sorting through the noise and putting anything that doesn’t help to one side.

But at least I’ve stopped running from it.

Another life is possible.

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