Just a depressive thought - I
So yes, I remember vividly the way I was treated in school for years. Funny thing is, I thought about writing this entry because I remembered how a guy from a parallel class back then asked me, why I, back then already nearly 6 feet tall and pretty heavy, semi-muscular, never fought back.
And of course, the moment I decided to write this entry, some people started working in the hall where I'm sitting, drilling holes in the wall, fucking up my concentration. I rushed out of the house this morning, because, the day I decided to sleep in because today is the only day I do not have any appointments in the morning, of course today's the day the neighbours are doing repairs in their apartment, taking the drilling machine to the walls. Murphy's law I presume. In their defense, they did put an announcement up, warning they'd do such a thing and even apologized for the inconvenience. I hope their apartment will look nice afterwards. It still annoys me that the two places where I wanted to work today are being refurbished like this. Right now I'm sitting in one of the major halls of the university, trying to get away from the neighbours' work, and – as I said – the moment I start typing, the guys put their own drilling machines to work. Fuck this!
So, what I wanted to talk about is the way I was my class's scapegoat for about four years. In Germany we have parallel classes. So when you're entering the Gymnasium in fifth grade, you're being separated in a number of classes, depending on the state, city, and school you attend. The school that I went to had four parallel classes per year. So 5a, 5b, 5c, 5d and then above them the 6a, 6b, 6c, 6d etc. This went on like this until the 10th year. My dad had decided that I needed to learn Latin first. My sister, who is the oldest of us three, had to and I don't think she was particularly happy with it. That's why my brother had begged the old man to start with English, which he was allowed to. Now in this particular school, the "a"-class was always the one starting with Latin, while the other three started with English. My sister therefore had started in the 5a just as I did years later. My brother was put in the "d"-class. So when I finished elementary school and it was high time to sign up for Gymnasium, my dad decided that putting my brother in an English-first class apparently had not turned out in a way that he would've called "successful", so I was being put in a Latin-first class. I argued against it, I didn't want it, I didn't care for Latin; but he did not agree. He signed me up for Latin anyways.
When I went to the Gymnasium, I was about 10 years old. At that point my parents had been separated for nearly 8 years. My father had successfully eradicated most of my connections with my mother. And he himself had given into all of his obsessions. Books, old books, even older books, crap to hoard etc. The house had started to slowly transform into a collection of mostly useable but never actually used objects. The makeshift solutions turned it into a wartime U-Boat that hadn't been to an allied harbour in years. The sink was not really fixed but worked. The broken soap dish in the bathtub had never been grinded down so I wore a nice scar from it on my finger. The garage was slowly running over with Christian miniatures and scenes, which is a big thing in the holiday season. The stairways filled with books, boxes filled with books, and boxes yet to be filled with books. But it was still … mostly normal, or mostly tolerable let's say.
What definitely wasn't tolerable was the way that this influenced things like personal hygiene. The washing machine didn't run as often anymore because my father was occupied with … things. Acquiring stock for his fixed idea jobs saving knowledge of the Bohemian culture (and I mean geographically Bohemian, not boheme) and things like this. He cared less and less for his children, who at that point where only my brother and me, because my sister had been kicked out of the house years ago. She had dared to speak up. She got kicked out even before her 18th birthday and had to live in a friend's house for a while, even while preparing her final high school exams. Before, when she had still lived with us, she was actually the caregiver, washing clothes and making sure her two baby brothers actually had things to wear. When she was kicked out I was not even 5 years old, my brother must have been barely 11. I remember how my father started demonizing her the same way he had demonized our mother.
So, both caregivers, mother and sister had either scared off or actively kicked out and we, my brother and me, were basically not allowed to utter their names and state that they existed, let alone wish for them to come back or only see them for a day. Whenever my sister came over to see us, we were being sent upstairs, not allowed to see her for more than five minutes, but constantly heard the yelling from downstairs. And this was my environment back home. At this point for over five years.
Well, I was being sent to school. We didn't have the money to afford a bike for me, my dad was busy working at home on … something (it's been nearly twenty fucking years and I still don't understand what he worked on or is working on currently), so he couldn't drive me to school, and we didn't have the money to buy monthly tickets for the bus for me. So I had to walk to school. Which became sort of a tradition for me. I went to this high school for ten years. And I had to walk there at least once a day (in later years sometimes twice). Once there in the morning, once back home in the afternoon. Which took about half an hour each. All in all, I walked about 2.000 hours in these ten years.
I met my new class whom I was supposed to study with until the 10th year of school (so the next six years). They seemed decent enough at first. I remember a tiny guy called Johannes whom I sat next to in the first session. We were sitting in the first row together and had a nice conversation. Oddly enough he became one of my most fearsome tormenters for quite a while, but appeared to be a nice guy to everybody who was not me, and even to me when he was not with the rest of the group. Within the first session we were separated. I, being a tall guy, was put in the last row, while he was allowed to stay where he was.
Over the next couple of weeks and months a pattern would emerge that would not really change for the next four years. I, coming from a poor family, was wearing stupid clothes. I, coming from a household that didn't care, was wearing smelly clothes. I think our washing machine ran maybe once or twice a month at this point. And it would become way worse. Pretty fast, the class developed the simultaneously lazy and incredibly uninspired yet horribly painful name stinky (or "Stinkie" in the original German) for me, which was basically the only way anybody in this class addressed me for the next four years.
This class, as a group, didn't want to have anything to do with me. Sitting next to me was punishment. Having to have to talk to me was punishment. Even the guys who had to call me if a course was cancelled saw themselves as being punished. They hated me. And they made no effort to hide this fact. It was a group of kids who led the others in this hatred, obviously. Lukas, Magnus, and Johannes were the worst. They were the kids who actively encouraged the others to torment me. Johannes was the most sneaky of these kids. He was small, so he could play the victim card easily when I acted out, tried to defend myself. Most of the other kids in the class were following their advice. There were 22 kids, four of them girls, one being me. There were two kids who mostly tolerated me or even saw me as a friend for some time. Andre and Edouard.
Edouard was the son of Ukrainian migrant. Andre was a soft and good-hearted kid from the other side of town, coming from something that we could see as a "suburb" (even though this term is not really applicable to German cities). With these I could actually talk to. Unfortunately for me, Edouard became "cool" after we started with the 7th grade, so he distanced himself ever so slightly from me. But at this time the torment also became kind of old for the others. So I was not as much despised and more disdained at that time.
To this day I don't know how much the teachers actually knew of this. I remember our German teacher who once told me after class that I was old enough to actually take a shower every once in a while. Well, I guess he was right. But that didn't really matter, seeing that there were no clean clothes available for weeks sometimes. After I started talking about all of these things during the last three months, things I've kept secret for most of my life now, a few friends asked me why nobody called social services to check the house where I grew up. Which is a good question. Also a question I can't find any answer to. I don't recall ever having somebody from the social services at our house to investigate. I just think that nobody really cared. Group mentality I guess: Either you don't care, it's not your cup of tea (or "glass of beer", because that's the German approach), or you follow the herd when they decide to fuck somebody up for good.
I do recall that most teachers really followed that thought. Nobody cared, nobody asked a question. None of them asked me to stay after class and checked up on me. And at that point, when I was around 12 years old, I must have been running around in shabby, used-up, dirty, raggedy clothes and was seriously stinking up the place.
However, I do recall one teacher. He didn't care about my living situation. But he did care about me. As in, he cared to fuck me up himself. He was our Latin teacher for two years (5th and 6th grade) and he shamelessly pinpointed me for homework-squeezing, the great technique of asking one student all the questions in front of the whole class. This technique is debasing, belittling, mocking and traumatizing, especially to bad pupils. And it was his favourite when dealing with me. I was a bad pupil. I was seldomly prepared for school. I started escaping the nightmare of my life by numbing myself with audio-books and videogames because I was not allowed to use the TV at home. And Latin class I had started with a 3 (with German marks in school ranging from 1 to 6, 1 being the best and 6 being the worst, a 4 being the minimum you need to actually pass a class), and slowly falling to a 6 within my four years as member of this class.
So yes, I spent four years in this class. Personal hygiene at home fell because I was totally neglected by my father. My interest in school fell rapidly. I started hating going there so much I tried to come up with excuses to not go there every single day. I developed issues falling asleep. I lacked sleep so much at one point, that whenever I was woken up in the morning I was screaming from pain in my calves. They cramped up so often because of how much sleep I didn't get over the course of these years. I started eating compulsively because of the deep hole I fell into, knowing that I would only get mocked for 6 hours the moment that I laid foot on school-grounds. I feel from being an okay pupil to actually not being fit for transfer to the next grade within barely a year. For the remainder of my time in this class I was "versetzungsgefährdet" (which means I was an at-risk student, only a slight decline of my marks would've let to me having to repeat the entire year). And I stayed like this for the next three years when my grades in English and Latin fell just a notch. My reexamination in English was graded a 6 (an F), so I had to change to another class. While the rest of my class moved on to become the 9a, I had to go back an entire year and join the new 8a.
Even though I saw this as rock-bottom at the time and thought seriously about jumping off a building for the first time, it turned out that changing to another class actually made things way better for me. I was 14 at the time. I had been thinking about self-harm occasionally but never seriously. I vented my anger and frustration through other means. I started eating compulsively as I said. And because my father is an over-controlling narcissist, I was not allowed to eat whatever was in the sweets-section of our supply cabinet in the house. So I started to take things from it without being allowed to. This lead to me being punished on multiple occasions. When I was younger I was given a hiding a number of times, but when I became older and bigger, this faded out as an option for my father. I was rebellious, and growing so big that I could actually defend myself from this type of corporal punishment. So I was grounded a few times instead. But the big punishment was the removal of trust, if I may say so. While my sister had to hand in her key to the house when she started acting up as a 17 year old, I was not trusted with supply cabinet privileges anymore, when I was 13 years old. The cabinet was locked. And my father told me that he never had to lock it before in his entire life and that I was responsible for this.
So I started stealing the key whenever he wasn't around. The key to the cabinet was on his keychain, which usually was lying around on his desk. Often times I took it and then removed a few items from the cabinet to eat later. Those I usually had hidden in my bed or close to it. My father still noticed it and gave me a handful for it. Which lead me to not doing this anymore. Instead, I stole Nutella from the cellar.
As I said, the old man was and is a massive hoarder. So whenever he went out to buy something, he didn't buy one or two glasses of nutella, or two or three cans of beans, he bought the palette (but only when it was for sale). That's why we usually had a few palettes in the cellar. Two palettes for kidney beans, three palettes of peas, two palettes of Nutella etc. And we went to the cellar on a weekly basis to get stuff up to the kitchen. So nobody would notice a glass of Nutella missing.
I went to the cellar for weeks, if not months, on a daily basis with a spoon in my hand and quenched my lust for sweets and happiness by shoving this gooey, black and oily mass by the spoonload in my mouth. When I turned 14, I was about 6'3'' and weighed around 270 pounds (1,90 m bei ca. 120 Kilo Gewicht).
To be frank, I don't really know how to finish this entry. I guess that's the downside of going with the flow. I guess there is more coming another time.