Today as I was driving by my old elementary school I thought I would share this excerpt from my book:
“I can see it any time I look out my back window, but it usually doesn’t bother me much. Besides, it looks so small now and so different and so changed after all these years. On a typical weekday afternoon, I can hear the euphoric sounds of laughter and excitement coming from the direction of its playground. And when I am returning to my house a certain way, I can see the big red banner across the front of it with the words “Respect and Responsibility” printed in capital letters – a positive expression of values and morality that fills me with mixed emotions. For it is the elementary school I attended as a child, from Kindergarten through the sixth grade, in a time when ‘respect and responsibility’ weren’t emphasized nearly enough.
If I could summarize the most negative aspect of my life while growing up with just one word, it would certainly be ‘school’. It’s as sad as it is true, but school really was like a prison for me; perhaps at first for irrational reasons but soon for some terribly rational ones. Harassment in schools, having finally come to light through an epidemic of fatal violence, was a very little known or cared about issue back when I was a kid. Regardless the impact that it had in my case, even all these many years later, continues to live on within me everyday of my life. This is so because tragically, being bullied helped to trigger the onset of my illness and determine to quite a shocking extent the manner in which it played out.”