To thine own self be true

In this video Johnny Paycheck says he feels like an old violin soon to be put away and never played again. How many times have you ever felt this way? Or how many times have you felt like you don’t belong no matter how hard you try? I have felt that way many times but the most uncomfortable was at church. I didn’t seem to fit in with the congregation, oh I was accepted just didn’t feel welcome. That can really be unnerving and intimidating. There have been numerous times in my life that I felt like this. I will discuss a couple of them.

One such time I definitely knew I didn’t fit in was the eighth grade. I had just been sent to live with my father over the summer so I was coming from public school to a private school. I was arriving with nearly fifty-thousand pounds of emotional baggage from all forms of abuse. My mother decided I needed my father after I was brought home in a squad car because they caught a man video taping her twelve year old son having sex with him. The beating was bad that night from my mother’s boyfriend. But this was the second such incident of this nature.

I never fit in at school either. If a child can’t fit in there then life is hard on the child and opens them up for being bullied, which was the case for me. I knew between ages eight to nine that I was gay. I had a boyfriend by age nine, my mother’s first boyfriend after my dad was the one who…