Hey there reader! My name is Jack and I’m the writer of this blog-journal-thing. I wanted to be able to share more about myself so that’s what I’m going to do here. This is part two of my series of writing about my life. If you haven’t checked out part 1 please do so  here.

Now begins the Pennsylvania phase of my life. I don’t remember much about when I first moved. I don’t remember much about 7th grade really at all. I remember seeing a new therapist and psychiatrist though. I was seeing the same doctor my mom was seeing. Her name was Dr. Shin and I was also seeing a therapist Cathy. During this time, I was diagnosed with literally everything you could think of. I had bipolar, schizophrenia, ADHD, social anxiety, depression… everything apparently. I was taking so many meds. Depakote and Lithium and Zoloft and Concerta and Klonopin and maybe more I’m just forgetting oh and not all at the same time, ya know, like I wasn’t taking Depakote and Lithium at the same time, I just remember taking them.

Around 8th or more likely 9th grade time frame I remember sitting downstairs on the couch watching tv with my parents. My dad excused himself to go to bed and he went upstairs. A little bit later I remember hearing a blood curdling scream come from upstairs. I ran up the stairs and my dad was in his office room that also was kind of like an extra bedroom because it had a bed in it and he was lying on the bed and just screaming. My dad’s never been known to drink in fact neither of my parents have my whole life but my dad had I guess a bottle of gin in the room and I don’t know how much he drank of it, he says today that that’s all he had that night but I’m not entirely sure still because when I asked him “what did you take?” he kept saying something that sounded like Ritalin but I guess it could have been gin. Even taking a bunch of Ritalin and drinking doesn’t really add up to what occurred there unless my dad was just having an extreme amount of existential pain. We ended up calling 911 and ambulance came and took him.

Let’s talk a little bit more about my schooling history. I think around the middle or end of 8th grade I was put into my first alternative school. I believe that schools name was progressions Academy but maybe I might be remembering incorrectly, but let’s go with progressions. The reason I started going to alternative schools was due to my poor performance at school. I wasn’t really a behavior problem at all I was good in class. My grades were just horrible I would do good on tests I wouldn’t do my homework. Long-term projects just never would get done like book reports. I believe I also wasn’t going to my gym classes maybe a couple other classes. It’s just that school was a little too overwhelming for me. So back to progressions, the school was going to be opening a closer school to where I lived but when I started there I was going to a school they had that was maybe like 45 minutes away from my house maybe a little further. The school in total only just had an older class and the younger class. There weren’t multiple classrooms to go to or anything like that. But a problem with alternative schools is you’ll have kids like me that are struggling academically, and you will also have the type of kid that was kicked out of school because they were little bit more of a behavior problem than an academic problem, but they had both problems obviously. That made me a little bit anxious about the whole experience. I guess I did okay in that’s school at this point. The next year when they opened the closer School was a very different experience. I made some friends while I was there no real lasting friendships. But I guess academically I still was very immature.

While I was going to that school I remember getting a student tech department job at the school district. This was an awesome opportunity that I’ll remember forever even though in reality I wasn’t doing it all that long. The school district had a program where they’d hire students to help the IT department. The pay was great for the time I guess, $10.30 an hour but we only worked for like 2-4 hours. We’d manage the server rooms for the different schools or sometimes we’d image and restore computers that teachers had installed unauthorized programs onto. That was a cool sneak peek into the power that an IT guy wields. I learned a lot from my fellow student techs, who were all older then I was, and from my bosses who really respected how quickly I picked things up and figured stuff out.

I forget what was going on at home I apologize for that, but I do remember that I was at home and out of school and dealing with insanity from my mom and depression from my father and being home schooled and treated like I was the problem. My mom would go on nightly tirades where she’d hound my father for hours about pure insanity. Emails that were clearly spam that for some reason to her were evidence of something deeper on how my father must be cheating or secretly gay. Remember, I described her, you saw her picture, she was a tiny 5-foot-tall woman, well picture her yelling a screaming and throwing things and chain smoking and just being the literal embodiment of insanity. It still haunts me, I’m surprised if I don’t have PTSD from all this crap.

If you’re ready to get depressed and triggered, please check out part 3 of this series on my life. Thanks for reading!