It was the summer of 2009. I was at my two story home by the pond in elko new market. I was sitting in my room when my mother burst through door with a delighted look on her face.
“Guess who got a job?!” She said.
“No way”, I reply “ did dad really find a job?” My father who had just graduated from grad school had been searching for months for job. I mean imagine our luck my dad, one of the smartest people that I have ever known, decides to go to grad school to become a nurse anesthetist. Nurse anesthetists are highly trained and educated individuals who specialize in the administration of anesthesia; they are also the ones making sure that you don’t suffocate as well as wake up properly when you have to be put to sleep for surgery. Being so highly trained and needed for every surgery there are usually in high demand, but as fate had it months before he finished the entire economy collapses. In a field where there had been job openings everywhere suddenly no one was hiring especially new grads. Another contributing factor to the long wait was that due to my father’s stubbornness in wanting to only accept a job from a small hospital instead of a large one; leading to a desperate search for a small hospital with an open entry level position. The smaller hospital offers a much higher pay and a larger standard of freedom for Nurse Anesthetists, because they don’t have to work under an Anesthesiologist, their doctor counterpart
So the news that he now had a job was astounding. “But there’s one little problem.” My mother said. “We have to move.” All of a sudden the joy that I had experienced suddenly vanished.
“What do you mean?” I reply. “Where do we have to go?” I was starting to get nervous, the thought of losing my dear friends was overwhelming. I felt like I was going to panic at the prospect of never seeing my home again. I hated our first move to New Market from Apple Valley, but I had gotten over that quickly because I was six, and I made new friends easily. Being that I would be going into sixth grade my group of friends had very much solidified with me.
“Fairmont.” “We are going to move to Fairmont; it’s only a two hour trip from here.” She says.
Thinking that since it wasn't too far from New Market I could visit every once in awhile, so it wouldn’t be too bad. That was the biggest miscalculation that I have ever made in my life.
Five months later. I slowly get up from the ground, dazed and not being sure of where I was, I wipe the blood from my face. Blood had been constantly oozing out of my nose after I had gotten sucker punched by another student, during an altercation. I look left too see the school which I was attending. It was just your plain old average school, which happened to be about the same size as the New Prague middle school. I hear the bell ring, recess was over. I begin my walk back to the school. A teacher spots me as we line up.
“Are you hurt?” “How did you do that to your nose?” They say. It took me a second to come up with a lame excuse.
I reply, “Yes I’m fine, I just hit my face on one of the bars in the playground.” Even if I did tell them what had really had happened it wasn’t like they cared; if I had I would’ve been sent down to the principal's office with the other kid to explain myself. Then after a brief talk with him and a fictitious apology from the other student we would’ve been both sent back to our respective classrooms, and the next day I would've gotten the same treatment tenfold. So I just end up keeping my mouth shut and hope I don’t see the student again.
Despite my best attempts to shield myself from the daily threat of bullying I failed miserably. It wasn’t so much the physical punishment that bullies go for, it’s the psychological, they just have to make you feel like a piece of garbage that has no future in this world. That’s what they did to me. I made the mistake of trying to make friends early on in the school year, the kid named Broderick was really welcoming to me. He showed me around the school, told me which teachers were bad ect. We were walking down the hallway one day, when I spotted Laura, the most attractive girl in the school, I nudge Broderick and whisper “man what in the world would it take for her to talk to us?”
“Only with the work of magic.” He responds
“Ya, she’s way out of our league; I just wish that wasn’t so dang pretty, her looks distract me in class.” I reply.
“Man you’re such a loser.” We both laugh out loud, it was just us two 13 year olds having a good time talking about girls. Unfortunately for me this would be no laughing matter, because Broderick turned out to only be a wolf in sheep’s clothing.
I came into school the next day completely unsuspecting of the horror that would proceed to follow me around for the rest of the school year. I walk into class and take my seat, but something seemed off. Everyone was whispering to one another except for me. I was just sitting there completely dumbfounded by what was going on. Then some people pointed at my direction and started giggling. Now I was mad, what on earth could everyone be talking about? Why in the world were they laughing at me? Nobody talked to me for the entire class hour, just some blank stares and odd grins. I was so confused to what was going on. I tried to find Broderick, but he sat in the front while I sat in the back of the class so he was of no help. After the class was over I frantically searched for him to no avail. All the while there was still nobody talking to me. After what seemed like decades of searching; I finally got someone to talk to me. I asked him “what in the world is going on, why is nobody talking to me?”
“Really are you dumb?” He replied. I give him a blank stare. He continues, “you really didn’t know that Broderick told everyone that you get a boner every time you see Laura?”
It took me a minute to process what he had just said. My face felt like it was on fire. Rage filled my very being only to be replaced by an equally quantifiable amount of embarrassment. The thing is most mature people wouldn’t have believed Broderick’s crude lie, but when you are in the sixth grade people will believe anything especially if it’ something that can be hurtful to others.
I never talked to Broderick again, what's the point I thought; he was a lying scumbag that didn’t deserve another ounce of my attention. Plus the damage that he had inflicted on me had already been done. For the rest of the year I was ostracised, I was seen as filth not meant to be interacted with. This was coupled with extreme amounts of sexual harassment made me not want to come to school anymore, and had the great side effects of depression/suicidal thoughts.
School withered on, with me hating every single moment of it. No friends and what seemed like  everyone else trying to harass me, and make my life as miserable as possible. Even without telling them it became very apparent to my parents that something was wrong, but being super busy with their jobs their help was limited during the school. Also I was very quiet and didn’t talk about my school life with them, so in their defense they didn’t know the extent of my misery in school. I was always hoping for a way out of the hellhole. The God that I had always learned and believed in decided to step in.
My misery finally came to an end in what, at the time, almost seemed like divine intervention to me, my parents had decided that it was best to move back. To New Market. They had seen how bad the school had been on me in spirit, and my near failing grades, and there were rumors of new job openings at the New Prague hospital. So we moved back into our old house which we had kept because the market was so bad at the time, but at first my dad had to make the long commute from New Market to Fairmont; which I will be thankful for until the day I die.
It took me a while to get my life back on track; in reality it took until my sophomore year of highschool to return to a somewhat stable mental state. I don’t hate the people that hurt me in Fairmont, but rather I feel a little bit of gratitude for them. Even though they hurt me everyday while I was there I have in turn tried to become a better person, to not judge others, to not criticize others, to try and better understand others. This was still hard for me to try and achieve, for I didn’t always see the world that way. Instead for a time I became more like the people who bullied me; I became a very mean and anger person whose temper would flare at any given moment. Until I had an epiphany, I realized that I was no better than the people who had hurt me. I then set forward with the quest to be the best person I could be, I lost many of my friends in doing so, because I came to realize that they were jerks who would pick on other people that didn’t meet their standard of normal. I still make mistakes from time to time in dealing with not criticizing and judging others, especially if it has to deal with politics, but I still strive to be better person, and move on from that one horrifying year of my life.