A THANK YOU AND A ROAR
First, the thank you.

Anonymous, thank you so much for your kind and generous words. It's not very often that I feel like someone truly understands me. At best, I hope that they can just put up with me. But through your words, I know that you understand. And I thank you. Because of you, I no longer feel quite so alone.

Now for the roar. Two weeks ago I received an email from someone I haven't seen or spoken to since my sophomore year of high school. I went to grade school with him, and he was one of many people who made my life a living hell for 8 hours a day, 5 days a week.

His message was a mass email sent out to several people from our grade school, and its purpose was to gauge interest in a 25th anniversary reunion. The thought of going back to that hell and reuniting with the people who drove me to wish I were dead was so repugnant that I immediately fired an email off to this guy telling him that there was no way in hell I would come.

Within an hour he had sent me a response composed with a jaw-dropping degree of compassion and civility. If you had told me 20 years ago that I would receive an email like this from him I would have said you were crazy. But here it was.

Despite his kind response, I realized what a mistake I'd made. After what those bastards did to me, I knew that everyone on that email list needed to know why I wasn't coming. And I sat down at the computer & I started to write.

I know I'm on a good writing jag when the words just flow out of me, as if I couldn't NOT write them. That's what happened when I wrote this email. Not surprising, considering I'd been waiting almost 30 years to tell these assholes off. I held nothing back. I kicked ass and named names. It came out to almost 4 pages. It easily could have been double that, but my Ambien was kicking in. And I hit "Send" and went to bed.

For the next few hours, I felt so...light. Like some of the baggage I've been carrying since I was a child was finally gone. And in a way, it was.

Then I started getting responses. One was from a girl who had purposely targeted me. She didn't apologize for what she had done, but she was supportive. One was from someone who was pissed about being named, and as soon as I saw the tone of her email I deleted it without reading it. I'll never see her again.

Then I got emails from a couple of people who I had deliberately left off the email because they hadn't specifically done anything to hurt me. They were unbelievably supportive. Both of them had been bullied and they were glad to see me fight back.

I even got an email from a complete stranger. Someone had forwarded the email to her. She didn't go to my grade school, but she went to my high school before I did and knew some of the people I named. She congratulated me for my courage.

To make a long story short, I found out that the guy who sent me the original email lives near me. I also know that he's known about me living in this area at least since November. I don't know whether to be relieved or disappointed that he's never contacted me. On one hand, he was a jerk in high school. Plus his parents and my parents were friends, and the LAST thing I need is someone to be giving the idiots who threw me away unnecessary dirt on my life. On the other hand, I feel like I've been waiting all my life for someone who could be that kind and compassionate. And he's not that bad looking either.

In addition, I've heard through the grapevine that there's a Facebook page dedicated to my grade school and that the page is BUZZING with crap about my email. People are pissed. Small people whom I will never see again. Now I'm worried about getting sued. Everything I said in the email was true, but I have no way of proving it.

So I spent a week freaking out, but a few of my friends calmed me down. I even had a long conversation with a high school classmate I haven't spoken to since high school. She's living across the country now.

This week I've had a cold, and I've been feeling really run-down. Not sick, just no energy. My boss sent me home early on Thursday & told me not to come in on Friday because it was going to be a slow day. It didn't occur to me until yesterday why I'd had no energy. My doxepin ran out & I hadn't had time to get it refilled. I was going through withdrawal.

So I took some right before I headed back into the city for a concert. There were massive traffic delays, but I didn't mind because the doxepin knocked me out and I took a nice nap on the bus. I was fine by the time I got to the concert, and I'm fine now.
- posted by Pat @ 10:03 PM