- The End, and the Tyranny of the Purple Suit - When There Was Once Hope – Hate for the Sake of Hate – A Different Type of Normal - The Betrayal – Andrew Stops Trying - Total Blinding Terror – Running out of Classrooms - Goodbye


It appears to have been quite some turn of months since my last foray into the dark and dangerous jungle of journaling, but I find myself unable to put it off any longer. So, here I am; typing out my thoughts again to be at last lodged in the languid lap of the limitless land of the internet. This journal entry is likely to be long, and complex, and very painful to both read and write. I am including above a list of topics that I shall add to as I go, but my first is also the last. The end.

The End. It has come. Some might argue it has indeed already gone. I finished my final exam early last week and am now free of the tyranny of the purple suit forever. Then why is it that I am now more stressed and more terrified than I have been before in my life? I have tried to attribute this to my upcoming university application interviews, the first of which is on Tuesday and I am entirely unprepared for it. I know, however, that this is not the case. In order to fully comprehend my currant fear, I must take you back to a time long ago, a time when there was once hope.

Growing up, and I use the term quite wrongly, I was more or less happy. I was smarter than everyone else who ever lived, and was certain I would become a mathematician or physicist or cosmologist of some kind, as I had a natural propensity for talent in those and similar areas that bordered on the effortless and also the inclination and spirit to propel me to work hard anyway. I also believed absolutely and entirely in the basic goodness of everyone on earth, I was the perfect humanist, really. But year 8 was when it all changed. Specifically year 8 camp.

During that week that the class spent out in the wilderness, I was... a victim. I will not bore you with anything specific regarding the most distressing incident, or with the general atmosphere of that hellish place, and the reason I will not do this is because that which happened to me was so futilely banal as to not be in any way significant at all. I was not the victim of any gross injustice or indecency, just of... something. It is something so pathetic that on the very rare occasions I have talked about it people have either assumed something else happened and I was trying to deflect, or that I was simply making fun of them. However, what happened, while so common as to boring to others, was to me such an incredible and wrenching shock that to this day that to think on it as I am doing now causes a headache of such an extremity that I must stop every few words I type just to let myself cool down. Surely you can see that it has affected my just through this enormous farce of a description. So why has it affected me then, when I know that it was to anyone else just a normal, almost common occurrence? This is something that I have thought long and hard about, and I have decided it was because it was an act of pure, purposeless evil.

In every great tragedy of history, I can see why. On some twisted level, there is always a why. Even if it was just the random chance of shifting tectonics, or the meteorological equivalent of a toss of the die, there is on some level, a reason. But for this? Nothing! There was no point to it! It could not possibly have been fun to anyone involved, and there was as far as I could tell no practical purpose at all, certainly not one that could not have been achieved with greater effect and less effort through different action. I could not, and still cannot fathom why. For all my skill at logical and methodical reasoning, I had absolutely no answer. This was something I tried to get away from in any way that I could. I refused to go to school for weeks, I changed classes, but still I was constantly haunted by the idea that such an act of spite could be done without a goal or aim, that there was a person on this planet who would commit an act of hate for the sake of hate itself. But even then, there was still hope.

It is possible, even though my faith in the goodness of all humanity, my faith in logic, reason and truth, had been torn apart, that I might have pulled though. I might have been able to be normal. I am, by the way, not talking about normal as in pop culture, mainstream, pathetically, obviously, stupid normal; the type of normal I am talking about will become clearer later. I will also acknowledge at this point that the likelihood of me ever being normal was always pretty low, and it may be that the window of opportunity had indeed long since closed, but I like to think, up until this time, it was still possible. I am absolutely certain that it is not now.

It was during the rest of that year that a supportive friendship group would have been helpful. A friend in need is a friend indeed. An ambiguous phrase if ever there was one. I, however, did not have a supportive friendship group, what I had was The Betrayal.

During that time, my list of close friends was very similar to what it is now, or at least, I thought it was. I don’t really know what triggered it, perhaps it was something I said, some unintentional or imagined rudeness, or perhaps it was just that I was boring, selfish and arrogant, whatever it was, this was its effect. Dann, James, Tom, at the moment these are among my closest friends, in year 8 they were already among my oldest friends. And they all decided to stop speaking to me. They, and others who I have forgotten entirely, or whose involvement I cannot recall with certainty through the haze of time, decided as a group that I was banned. At first I thought it was some passing phase, or that I was imagining the whole thing, but after the weeks wore on and on I had to face the fact that I was universally loathed by everyone I knew, and the more I tried to find out what I had done, to be kind or caring to those who it seemed I must have wronged, the more shunned I became. I was, when not at the end of some outrageously cruel joke, ignored entirely.

In the end, I was left with only one option. I had to stop trying. For months I forced myself to silence, I stopped myself from approaching, looking at, or speaking to everyone I had ever called my friend. I was, needless to say, unhappy. It took somewhere between 3 and 6 months for this to have an effect. I know it cannot be less than a term, and I know it cannot be more than 2. But after that burning, screaming, painful silence, I had at last, if not exactly friends, than acquaintances. It was not to last, however, and the next year I was treated to a repeat performance.

I was eventually to come up with the solution that has allowed me to survive with these friendships intact for the last four years. I would speak to them as little as possible. They would be my classroom friends, and nothing more. I would speak to them when, or if, the shift of the timetables put us together in the same room, but other than that, I was dead to them. Outside those classes I ceased to exist. I was as small as I could make myself be. And it worked. As far as I can recall, from year 8 to this year I never saw a single friend outside of school grounds. But I did, at the very least, have friends. Not people I could talk to about anything significant, but at least people I could talk to at all. And the reason I could not talk to them about anything significant was that I did not trust them, and, if I am completely honest, I do not think I trust them still. Can you blame me? To have been betrayed by them twice in such a complete manner, how on earth could I trust them? And all this leads me to the total blinding terror of year twelve.

Ah, year twelve. The end. The final failure of my plan. I cannot begin to describe how terrified I have been this year. Every week brought another milestone of finality, and every passing tick of the clock was a hammer on the nails of my coffin. Throughout this year I have had several bouts of depression that bordered on the suicidal, I have spent weeks under desks and in tears, I have seen a school counsellor and a psychiatrist. And I have tried to speak to my friends. I really, really have, but as soon as I want to say something, they’re suddenly busy, or have an expression, manner and tone of voice that is so clearly and patronisingly disinterested that I find myself unable to continue.

For years, I have sat there with a smile on my face while those around me talk about how much fun they had while X was over on the weekend, or how ‘everyone’ was over at Y’s house last night. I have been, despite my efforts, the outside of every in joke ever devised. And I have smiled. I have smiled so long that while my face is covered in tears I can announce with clarity and cheer that everything’s fine and that yes, I was sure. I was at a friend’s house the other day, for a VisCom study session. This person has been friend (aside from the mentioned interruptions) since year 3. That’s around 9 years, and I have never seen his house. You would think, therefore, that this was some improvement. It was not. It was a study session, another classroom, not a social activity at all, not the total uselessness that real conversations, real friends, gain with a totally effortless grace. I was there to provide a service. Nothing else. I was still outside of every joke, and it was one of the most painful experiences of my entire life.

I have now run out of classrooms. It was this year that I had to find a way to break the pattern. I was invited to a birthday party this year, something that has not happened to me for quite some time. I went out to lunch with friends, something that I had not done before, ever. But it’s over now. The opportunity has gone. No doubt your thinking something along the lines of ‘just pick up the phone and talk to someone, it really is that easy,’ and if you are, I want you to die. Have I not conveyed to you the horror and dread that social situations give me? Can you not understand the physical pain I receive whenever I try to speak to someone?

So then, this is it. My last attempt. My last medium for reaching out. I don’t know what I expect to be the result of all this pathetic whining and whingeing, perhaps I just want to be heard, one last time, before I disappear entirely. Yes... that’s probably it. Goodbye then. For all those who I have, without meaning to, without intending to, offended in the past through my words or actions, I apologise, and hope you understand from this journal how much each incident like that hurts me. For everyone else... Live well, live long, live life. Goodbye.