The book of life: Evolution of my self through incarnation 33

High school

At the end of elementary school I was fed up with the abuse and I saw high-school as an opportunity to change this, so I made a conscious decision to stop studying so much.

I decided to decrease grades and try to hide my differences in order not to get abused. So that's what I did.

Based on my grades from elementary, my parents wanted me to enter the best school available. But since I had a plan to fail, I wanted to go to a school that will not be the worst but not the best one either. So I signed up for technical school. The parents didn't argue much because this was still a good school and if I would have good grades I shouldn't have a problem entering college later.

But instead of caring for grades, at this point, I was more into things that I was really interested in. I was usually studying only as much as needed not to fail the class and I even started making fun of teachers which was well received by other kids.

Being introverted, this was not easy for me to do, but I still felt I had no choice but to do it. No one realized I was faking stupidity and I wasn't going back to real me.

I couldn't believe it, but people, including my parents, were actually associating high grades with high intelligence - they thought I just got dumber after elementary school.

But even though I wasn't studying much, on occasion I would get a high grade from mathematics or something similar - subjects for which I didn't really have to learn much to know.

This was confusing to others, including teachers. I remember once I got a top grade, the teacher accused me of cheating and I had to take the test again, but not on paper this time, rather on board in front of her. Reluctantly, she confirmed my grade as deserved.

I might have solved the problem of abuse, bud I didn't solve the problem of suffering. I could never be happy faking things and my parents were very hard on me because of low grades and expression of this behavior.

Often, when my parents would pick me up after school, my father always had some place, some meeting to go, before we would go home. He would park the car somewhere and say he will be back in 5 minutes or so. It never was 5 minutes, it was always a couple of hours.

My mother didn't complain, I guess because dad was earning good money at the time. She was used to it and always had something to read with her. But this was very hard for me, all I wanted after school was to get home and do what I actually want to do. But I didn't complain either, I almost never did.

My sister was rarely with us in this kind of situations.. probably because she would complain a lot.

But if I don't complain that does not mean I'm ok with it - I just don't like to complain, for the same reason I do not like to fight.

Regardless, my parents didn't care for my feelings, especially now that my grades were below their expectations.

Being extremely introverted, when I would be out with friends, I usually had to drink a lot in order to relax and be able to participate in social (extroverted) interactions.

I had a long hair and occasionally someone would call me Jesus, based on my appearance.

Things I liked to doDuring high-school, things I enjoyed, more or less, were listening and playing music, hanging out with friends and computer games.

But what I was really passionate about was computer programming. Very early on, I was into cracking - making patches, keygens and similar stuff. Although I was a member of few cracking groups, social interaction eventually always becomes a burden for me (probably because extroverted people prevail in society) so I generally worked alone. That's how it was for most of my life and that's how I still work now.

Cracking (reverse-engineering of software) and programming was indeed a true passion - glued to the screen I would often skip lunch ignoring the pain in the stomach, and my sleeping habits often resembled those of a bat. Sometimes I ate my lunch in the evening, sometimes next morning. Even when I did ate, I never ate much, just enough for survival. Needless to say, I was very skinny but I had no health issues related to this. It was not uncommon for me to sleep with my head on a school desk whenever that was possible.

Cracking held my attention for a while but, after a few years I've found the topic exhausted - there was nothing interesting left to learn. At that point I was already experimenting with websites - I had my own website where I was publishing my cracks, computer games and apps.

I remember once I developed a shareware application which got distributed with a nation-wide computer magazine but at the same time I've published a keygenerator for the same application. I understood proper piracy as essential for innovation and development.

My support of piracy is conditional. I would pay for software I use and art I enjoy, but it's not the crime to enjoy it when one does not have the money to pay for it. Copying or cloning of data is not stealing and it doesn't harm the author if one doesn't have the money to pay for it anyway, in fact, the author can still benefit even from such usage due to potential free advertising.

Creating and maintaining a website was not challenging enough on its own. I had to include hacking into the equation. So as I was decreasingly cracking software I was increasingly hacking into computer networks and this includes breaking into major ISP's and hosting providers. Of course, I didn't do much damage, it was all for excitement and learning. I did host some software on these servers but I tried not to exceed bandwidth of users whose accounts I've used (on one occasion I failed at this and found it very embarrassing so I soon stopped hacking). The links to this software were published on my website, however, these were not direct links. I devised an encrypted network protocol (links were beginning with m3ga:// if I remember correctly) and developed a special application that people used to download the software distributed over different servers.

Before my transformation about the age of 36 I did not like to share my knowledge. I invested a lot of time to discover and learn everything I knew, I guess I felt pride and wasn't interested in sharing anything so easily - it didn't feel right to me for someone to learn in 5 minutes a solution to a problem that took me months to discover. That, besides introversion, is why I declined any request for sharing or cooperation. Of course, it's obvious to me now that any such person is a hypocrite and if we would all have to start from the start no one would ever learn anything new. Enforcement of copyrights and patents is only dragging down the society.

After high-school, my interest for cracking and hacking was soon gone, but my passion for programming remained.