When I was in grade 5, my parents took me out of the Catholic school system and placed me in an expensive private school.

I did not fit in to the new school. Until then, I had been a star student and confident of myself, though I had been overeating for about a year. My new classmates universally thought I was conceited, and before long I was universally disliked.

Teachers were less harsh, but most did consider me a smart aleck. Most did not see the many abuses and bullyings that students engaged in on each other.

I was riddled with insults based on my weight, race (I am south Asian), and personality. The clothes I wore were mocked, my voice was imitated. I was stuck with compasses, framed for mischief, shoved around, pushed, punched, and ganged up on. My notes were stolen, my pens burst open. I was slapped in the face, criticized, parodied, pinched, leered at in the washrooms, so that I hardly dared move in the hallways unless a teacher were present, sometimes not even then.

I was not the only one bullied; there were two others treated just as harshly. One of them took out his frustration on me; he pushed me into a closed locker and urinated on me.

School became an ever-present nightmare to which I saw no escape. I told, in preteen false courage, neither parent nor teacher of what was happening. In part is because, faced with a never-ending stream of propaganda from nearly all of my peers that I w as worthless, conceited, stuck-up, lazy, and greedy, I began to believe it. After all there were other nonwhite kids and they were not bullied. It was my personality that offended. The same personality had not provoked anyone before like this, but that was not the point.

At the same time, the collapse of my parents' marriage, described in my previous post, began. So as home fell apart and school became a dread, there was no escape from the horror of my existence. None of this shows in my report cards of the time, which maintained high grades (though the class booed me whenever my marks were read out). Nonetheless, something died in me. Since then I have never been really happy, and have always hated myself.

I have often thought of suicide, but that was the only period I seriously contemplated it. I was ten years old. I began to carry a pocketknife, but did not have the nerve to actually stab myself. I started eating a berry I believed to be poisonous but suffered no ill effects.

My parents pulled me out of the school after two years. But the damage was permanent. I had learned that, as I was, with no pretenses, no one would like me and no one would love me; I would only be hated for being my true self. I learned that to talk f reely about my strengths, or even to accept a compliment, was despicable conceit. I learned that I had to be absolutely perfect to be happy, for even the tiniest flaw soon generated jeers and jibes.

Since then I have never loved myself. I cannot do so. I look in the mirror and all I see is an ugly, hideous image. I look at my life and I see a half-hearted, lacklustre, imperfect, unintelligent, and inferior individual who has not accomplished much, who has never helped anyone, who has only been a worthless drain on his community and his society. I no longer snarl at people who praise me, but I do not believe their praise. Yet I accept anything negative anyone says to me, no matter how farfetched it may seem to others. I accept any criticism, but I am always hurt by it, even if meant constructively.

Interestingly, neither then nor since have I felt any anger at the bullies. I felt then that I deserved it. The only anger and hatred I felt was at myself, and there was much.

I never had fun again, or never really enjoyed playing games, letting loose, or being a child. I became deadly serious, seldom smiling, seldom laughing, silent and cold, crying inside but aloof and distant outside. I still do not know what it means to h ave fun. I cannot relax without guilt rising like a storm cloud. And to this day I feel, and others tell me I act, like a much older man. I am 22 and look about 27, and behave about 40, or so I am told. Certainly I feel old, tired, fatigued, as if lif e is nearing its end already.

Nor have I ever fit in society again. If in a group of other people, I feel alien, disconnected, excluded even if no one has been unfriendly or unsupportive. I am vastly uncomfortable in the presence of people I do not know well, or even of people I do know in any relaxed or social setting. Only when working, driving myself relentlessly, can I feel comfortable with another person.

I feel reluctant to post this, since some have said that these kinds of stories are irrelevant to recovery and only the present matters. Yet my present is consumed by the past. I am sorry if I have wasted anyone's time or space. Thank you all for readi ng.

Oasis, June 8, 1997.