I didn’t grow up in a boarding school, but my childhood and adolescence was much like this.

One of the problems with socialization is that it teaches the wrong lessons. When you’re young, you deal with the same people over and over again. This was especially true of me, because I spent my teen years in boarding school.

With people you will see every day, you can’t let insults or threats pass. You must not let anyone push you around. It took me a long time to learn that.

Yep. You have to fight and fight hard if you are a male misfit like I was in a backwards Southern town still living in the 1920s. To survive. To not become a permanent victim.

The best response as an adult however is to walk away, definitely. And I don’t get triggered by much these days. The last time was on a bus in Vancouver. It was everything I could do to hold myself back from stabbing that guy in the throat. If I hadn’t been there with a friend, it’d’ve been a different thing. Much blood would’ve spilled. Because like Ian, I fight to destroy. As a smaller-than-average guy, it’s all you can really do. Like your eyes? Like breathing? Then don’t fight me. I don’t fight honorably and I don’t fight fair. I fight to kill and to mutilate when I have to. Simple as that.

Which is why I try to avoid fights when I can.

Thankfully those days are behind me now. I don’t want them to return and I’m getting too old for that type of thing. But still, those triggers never really go away. They are chthonian, buried deep. When someone punches in those nuclear launch codes and turns they key, the Minuteman in my brain fires its rockets and it’s very hard to spool them down again.

Life changes you. A lot of my life changed me for the worse, really. But it’s what’s there.