Fearfully and Wonderfully Made Chapter 5: High school low
Author's note: With the site back up, I'm gonna continue posting my autobiography here. Its a short chapter so I'll post another tomorrow Please Comment!

When we came back to Canada, we had a small problem - the house we had left behind was rented out. So we first went to as series motels before finding a place to rent on the north-east corner of the city until our house was available again. This made going to school challenging, to say the least ...

Three other factors made it even more challenging.

First, for the fourth (and thankfully the last) time, we had arrived after the school year started, so that was strike one, as it were.
Second, the high school had several of the student I had gone to Junior high with, including the girl who had spread the rumor about me dancing with another guy, so that was strike two.

Third strike was that my brother had attended before we went to Colorado, and apparently had had left an impression, to say the least. Rather than struggle to fit in, he reveled in being an outsider, deliberately poking fun at the norms by his clothing and his attitude, which resulted in him getting a nickname.

“Spaz”

Which resulted in me being hung with the label of “Spaz’s little brother” on the day I arrived at school ....

Despite these handicaps, I did make some progress.

I joined the Christian club, the Drama club, I participated in a mock U.N., basically I tried my best to fit in wherever I could.
But I still had struggles. For example, the drama teacher decided to put on “Tartuffe”, a french play from the 1600’s. So when I got a minor role I was instructed to go get a pair of bright tights to wear under my costume , which had a pair of pants that ended at the knees, and also to buy a pair of ballet slippers. For someone like me, you’d think this would be heaven - given permission to wear something rather feminine, but I agonized over the whole thing. Then I made things worse by buying a pair of bright yellow tights instead of the traditional white, which led to me given a role as a clown who played a kazoo badly during a wedding. All things considered, it went better than I feared, but it still resulted in me being much more “visible” than I wanted to be ...

And the whole girl thing hung over my head like the Sword of Damocles, and no matter what good thing was going on, I could never forget my internal struggle. I cross-dressed on occasion, but mostly held on to the hope that prayer and love could cure me of this need to be a girl.

Neither one really worked well. In fact, on the prayer front I ended feeling so despondent I took a bottle of pills to my room and counted out what I thought would be enough to end my life. I sat there, looking at the pile of pills on my bed, trying to imagine taking them.

Finally, I put the pills back in the bottle, and went to sleep with tears in my eyes.

Around the same time, I saw the movie “The wall”, and it had impacted me deeply. I decided to pray to have my walls removed, which turned out to be a serious mistake.

Because it actually happened.

Unfortunately, it turned out I didn’t just have a wall between me and the world. I had a wall between me and my past, and I was far from ready to confront it.

I think I went insane for a couple of days, fighting this internal darkness while my body kept on autopilot.

I came back to myself, and time past ...
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