Thinking the unthinkable
> “Then I’m going to kill myself,” he said.<p>I remember doing that.<p>>  He’s been on a slew of antipsychotic and mood altering pharmaceuticals, a Russian novel of behavioral plans. Nothing seems to work.<p>I remember that.<p>> A few weeks ago, Michael..threatened to kill me<p>I did that too.<p>She forgot to mention the time(s) he threatened to run away. (I'd be surprised if he didn't.)<p>After a marathon of transfers, expulsions, and incidents, I was at the end of the line. My parents interrupted my electronic solipsism for a moment to tell me the truth. It was a long conversation, but it can be summed in a sentence.<p>"Son, you're out of options, if you want to have a future you need to play nice at this next school."<p>Maybe I'd been delivered that message in the past, if I was, I don't remember it. This time it clicked for me. I realized that I'd had my fun hurting the faculty of various schools, but if I wanted to see the day after tomorrow, I would need to stop hurting people.<p>Before I continue on with my story, I would like to share an anecdote about handwriting:<p>For the longest time my handwriting was awful. My whole life in fact. When I was learning, I had a mean, evil instructor. She would yell at me when I wrote the letters wrong, it really seemed to bother her. So I wrote the letters the wrong way on purpose, because making her mad was more important to me than drawing Latin runes. Eventually I had learned how to handwrite, entirely wrong, out of habit.<p>As the years passed by, the root of this badness became obscured in other peoples memory. My mom attributed it to mental illness, everyone else did too. But I knew better. I <i>know</i> better. A few months ago, I decided to improve my handwriting. I would pick a font and learn to write in it. There wouldn't be any tutorials of course, I'd just copy the symbols until they looked right.<p>At first it was just trial and error, I would try and write the symbol the way I saw it on my computer monitor. (The only one that eluded me is that weird 'a' that looks more like an '&'.) Then, once I figured out how to write the symbol, I would practice the motions over and over on paper. I eventually moved on to writing whole sentences, entirely in this new script. Then whole paragraphs. I stopped short of essays, because by then I had basically mastered the points where my current writing lacked.<p>Then at school I would apply it, even when it was slower than my normal note taking, I would slowly and methodically do my symbols the new way; the right way. Occasionally I would fall back into my old habits, but only for a moment. Slowly I got better, faster. Over the course of days it became a habit. Over the course of weeks it became second nature. Over the course of months it faded into the background.<p>Back to my story. I knew I couldn't do what I was doing anymore. So I sat myself down and listened to Linkin Park's <i>Breaking the Habit</i>, over and over, on repeat. The problem is that it's stupid easy to threaten to kill people. It's stupid easy to be a terrible person. I decided I didn't want to be that person anymore, partly because I couldn't be.<p>I got to school, and did the last overtly malicious thing I can think of. (At least, that can be characterized by my earlier behavior.) There was a boy, let's call him Jacob, Jacob had earned a reward for his good behavior. I knew this before he did, because I was in an introductory one on one with the instructor, to explain the rules. She told me to tell him she wanted to tell him something. But not to spoil it.<p>I went up to him and promptly relayed that he was in major trouble. He went into the head instructors office crying. I hadn't meant to do <i>that</i>. I figured when he heard that he had actually received an award it would lift his spirits even more. It was a pretty stupid idea.<p>He came out of her office drying his tears, but still sobbing a little. It hurt me to see this. He didn't deserve that, and it was all my fault. I'd ruined what should have been a happy moment in his life. Of course; the instructor had words for me, they were scalding as I remember them. But as I contemplated Jacob, they were just background noise. I cried.<p>And after that, things got better. I stopped lying, I stopped calling people names, or threatening to blow them up. Occasionally I would fall into my old habits, but I'd rebound. Eventually, I was so well behaved that they couldn't justify keeping me at a specialty school, I was filtered back into the public school system.<p>I often think about what my younger self would think of me now, I don't think he would like me very much; in fact he might even threaten to kill me. If he did, I'd probably laugh. I'd tell him the truth:<p>"You can kill me, but that won't solve your problems."