I’m cleaning out some cobwebs. Expressing frustrations can help lessen the tension it takes to hold things in. I hold in too much. I am hoping to achieve that feeling of less pressure and also express a situation that I will need to address in the future if for no other reason than to preface my inexperience with the community.
I believed that I was never meant to have close connections with people. I say this coming from a very big extended family. I say this because events of my life went strictly in one direction, always towards isolation. I attended five elementary schools and three middle schools. My family moved 8 times before I turned 14.
I was a career new student. Poor, quiet, small. Big eyes with black smudges under them. My attention span was so short. I was so impulsive that my mother had to put a harness on me like a cat or I would have run into traffic. In school, I fought constantly. I could let the verbal abuse get past me. It hurt, but I hate confrontation. When I was hit, I hit back. I got suspended a lot because no matter the circumstance, the winner of the fight always got punished.
I had a red sleeping bag. On my worst days, instead of going to school, I would stuff my sleeping bag into my backpack in the morning. Instead of going to school, I would go into the woods near my house and hide in my sleeping bag until school was over. I’m just realizing that when most kids were skipping school together, I was hiding in the woods. It worked for suspensions and school field trips too. The worst thing is those are still some of my best memories.
I could do the work in my classes. I didn’t. My biggest problem was boredom. A.D.D wasn’t a thing yet. My mom had me put in LD classes. She thought I needed it. I did not need to be further isolated. I did not need to be in what everyone called the “retarded class”. I was already in prison when she told me that she had had me exiled.
Middle school was worse still. 6th grade was my sixth school. Still in LD. When the rest of the school was changing classes from one subject to the next from hour to hour mingling in the hallways, we in LD were not. We spent the whole day in one small, loud room. My first time in 6th grade, while everyone else sat where they wanted at lunch, LD still sat together every day like elementary kids. It was my first institutional isolation. I failed the sixth grade the first time after missing over 100 days of school.
My brother was two years older than me. He and I had different fathers, but that never mattered. Then he left to live with his dad and his two other little brothers in Arizona. I was 11. I had too few people I cared about and too many instances where changes left me alone. When he left, he left me and my chronically sad mother, with our tiny house that didn’t have insulation, so you could see the ground between the spaces in the floorboards, where the fridge was usually empty. Where Ma missed meals but we never had to. Ma took it worse than me. His exit was a rejection of her. He went to get more money and some other family. It isn’t enough to say we were close. At that point, we were together so much that most of my family called us by each other’s names because they didn’t know which name was whose and because it didn’t matter. We were Ricky (me) and Punkin (Kareem).
Soon after Punkin left, Ma and I moved across town. Another new school, another retarded class. More noses to bloody and less patience for would-be bullies. Ma worked nights, so I was home alone until dark. The neighborhood looked like trouble, so I never went outside unless I needed to. I watched kids run around outside through the blinds of our second-floor apartment. They looked like trouble, too.
Before the next school year, we moved again. My brother moved back after a year away. I never asked why he came back. We didn’t hang out like before. I had found a new level of aloneness. Ma was happier with him at home, so it was a good thing for me. The whole family was happy he came back. I had something to shift focus from my useless, burdensome existence.
My next school was the same. I was a career new kid, career LD. I ate lunch in the bathroom, looking out the window at everyone else doing what kids did in schoolyards until their lunchtime was over. I did a lot of watching other people be together. I didn’t know how to use my words. Too little practice. All I had was my hands, and I had gotten good with them.
By 15, I was sustained by the riotous anger of the outsider always looking in. I had to figure out why things were the way they were all on my own. I decided that I was right, and they were wrong. I never got instructions, just punishment for mistakes. I didn’t feel a connection to a single person on the planet, and it was good like armor on my soul. If being the ghost of a suicide could be good, then it was a cold like that. Still there but nothing and gone forever.
I never showed up for high school. I dropped out of everything. Soon after that, my mind turned on me. I don’t remember much of 16 or 17 through 23. I do remember holding onto the notion that “other” was another word for enemy. That people were either us or them and that I was neither. That from a distance alone looked vulnerable. At 47 years old, I am still trying to break the habits that support these ideas.
Over my 24+ years in prison, I came to the realization that I have not done any better on my own than with people. I know that I was the problem all along. My issues are due to my own misunderstandings. Now with some insight, I can’t excuse my own inaction. I am dedicated to reaching out. The thought of sending this out is making my stomach hurt.