3rd grade, I’m on top of the world. I have 4 good years of becoming best friends with some of the greatest friends I’ve had, I’m comforted in a school that sits only blocks away from my house so I begin to ride my bike to school. I’m happy.

I’m the fucking king.

4th grade comes, and I’m no longer a fucking king. I’m placed in a of 1,600 kids. All of my friends are split between different classrooms, different places. I don’t know anyone around me, and the kids are so goddamn loud and obnoxious. On the bus to the first day of school, some kid 2 years older than me punches my seat and the shot vibrates through my backpack into my spine. I’m terrified, I’m car sick, and the smell of gasoline is blocking out all sunshine. I’m miserable.

I get to school. They have me sit in a gym full of 1,600 kids. We’re placed in our respective sections, classes. I know little to anyone. I see a friend across the gym. Sunshine. I wave out to them. Nothing, they don’t see me. I yell out to them, and I’m a loud fucking kid. They can’t hear me. All these other kids, all 1,600 of them, they’re as loud as I am, and while I’m trying to reach out for that one friend I knew, the one kid that I could talk to and be happy around, all 1,600 of these kids around me are making new friends. They’re talking and laughing and yelling and they’re happy. And with all this noise around me, I shrink. My voice isn’t heard. I’m a small child new to this big intermediate school and no one cares. I am, perhaps for the first time in my life, silenced.

I get to class. I get a teacher on her last year before retirement. She’s hard on me like she is with everyone, and she makes the class, while not even being an advanced class, more difficult than need be so that our 5th grade year is easy. She carries that philosophy with her, that everyday she teaches, she‘s teaching a class that will learn to understand all subjects at a 5th grade level by the end of the year, and she was damn good at it. Truth is, I needed a teacher like her. I didn’t need someone that would bullshit me and coddle me when I was anxious. I needed someone to pull the reigns, force me to continue on and keep me in check. A happy-go-lucky teacher could make me happy but would never be able to fix how goddamn anxious I was.

School was hell. It took only 3 days for my first meltdown. And this meltdown happened in front of everyone. One moment I was fine, and the second I got thinking back to 3rd grade when I had all my people, I just let it all out. All the stress and the anxiety, everything. Poof. I had never felt that before. I had never, to that point, been so utterly terrified and so anxious all at once. I had cried in front of people before but not let out all of my emotions in front of a group of people I didn’t know and didn’t feel comfortable around. Absolute misery.

I started getting sick about 2 weeks into the school year. Morning after morning I’d throw up. I don’t throw up because I wanted to and it wasn’t because I was trying to. I became so anxious and stressed that out of the pressure, I’d just throw up. And we didn’t know it at first. My parents thought something was wrong with me somehow, and we didn’t understand, I included, that I was throwing up due to stress, and so I spent a lot of the first quarter of school in the hospital with IV’s in my arm. Through my time in the hospital that year, I probably had at least 10 IV’s, if not much more. I got pumped full of electrolytes and good shit for my body, but I continued to throw up. I was so scared and I was in a building 7 hours each day that I’d rather die than go back to. I couldn’t stop crying.

When the throwing up stopped, the crying continued. It got so bad that during the month of October that year, I got strep throat 3 times in a tow. I’d get it, it’d go away, and then I’d get it right back again. More hospital time, more ridicule. When I was out of school they were all probably laughing at me. The crybaby kid giving himself strep. Doctors told me if I got strep one more time by the end of November they were going to have my tonsils removed. I wanted it, I wanted to be out of school. When November hit, it was like I was incapable of getting it again. The tonsils stayed in and I immediately had to go back.

My 4th grade teacher was no angel, but she was a saint. She started up a deal with me; everyday I went without crying, I’d get a can of Barq’s Root Beer. Root Beer was and is my favorite soda of them all, and she utilized that to get me out of it. She cared for me. She wasn’t going to baby me and wrap me up in swaddling clothes but she was going to set me straight, one can of that root beer at a time. I ended up getting 2 cans, that was all she allowed me, and when she rewarded me with my second can, she told me the deal was off. She said now it was time I continued on without tears, do not be afraid. She told me I could continue to sit in her classroom at lunch so I wouldn’t have to hear people talking about me in the lunchroom, that was my reward. I relied on it.

I learned fast that shell I had was gone, and what a shell it was. Most people are protected by their ability to fend for themselves and survive in the climate they find themselves in. I had to break into that state of being. Until 4th grade, I had been coddled. My childhood magic was made up of parental love and the idea that life would always be happy and loving and exciting, and in the flash of a light, it wasn’t. Life was cruel and school was full of people who were growing older and closer while I remained fixated on the past, leaving me vulnerable. I needed an inward ability to laugh at myself, laugh at situations, and find my personality in the moments of despair. It came, finally.

4th grade, I was assigned to an old, rusty locker that barely opened up for anyone, and more often than not, my bus had to wait on me before leaving because I couldn’t get my locker to open. Some times they would leave me, and when that happened, my mom would get a call and she’d have to come to the school and pick me up, and I was so embarrassed. But one day was different, and that one day changed me.

It was time to leave, and my locker of course, wouldn’t fucking open. Try after try of the combination, no luck. I had to tell my teacher, but man, I didn’t want to. It had been a good day though, that day, and so I went back to that classroom with a defeated, yet smiling face on, and with a chuckle, I said, “Mrs. LaTour, you’re not gonna believe this but my locker isn’t opening again!” And I laughed. I fucking laughed. I had never laughed at myself before, never found the happiness of a misfortune, but there I was, and goddamnit, I was smiling. And Mrs. LaTour, she stood there and she smiled, and she knew immediately I had gotten somewhere.

4th grade was never easy. Even after I stopped throwing up and crying, it was still a hard year for me, and halfway through April of that year, my family moved away and I had to start brand new at a new school where everyone was talking about me all over again. And I was scared, and slightly anxious, of course, but I tell you what. I wasn’t crying when I stepped foot in that new school. I was thinking of Mrs. LaTour. I thought about that time I laughed when my locker wouldn’t open, and when I stepped my right foot into that school for the first time, you best believe I was smiling.

Goddamnit, I was really smiling.