Diary of a bullied boy...20 years later

I was different

I did not fit in. I was raised under strict religious conformity by born-again christian parents. We lived out in the middle of nowhere in rural Kentucky, making it impossible to meet anyone, much less make friends. The land was nice, there were lots of hills and forests. However, it could get quite lonesome at times. Even if an occasional nice person at school were to invite me to hang out, it was impossible. We simply lived too far out and my parents did not want to drive me anywhere, and no one elses parents could be bothered driving out to attempt to find where I lived at risk of getting lost. We could not even call each other because it was long distance. We also did not have cable TV. You could say I basically lived under a rock. The only places I typically got to go were church and school.

The bus would come early. It took about an hour for the bus to get from the bottom of the hill where I lived to school. I remember the bus ride as a gradual hell because the closer it got to school, the more riders it picked up. The more people I had to fear.

Heres a thought. Lets send our children ranging in ages from kindergarten to high school senior (and in many cases where I lived, high school seniors repeating senior year) and force them all into over-crowded unsupervised buses. No harm could possibly come of this. How irresponsible.

Sitting with my back against the seat was a bad choice. If I did, my head would get whacked hard. It didnt really matter where I sat. Its not as if it were only a few obnoxious jerks who would do this to me. A few I could have handled. So I would sit with my back to the window. It was just safer this way. This was assuming I could get a seat at all. On the way to middle or high school, the buses would stop at the elementary school to let the younger kids off. At that point, all middle and high school students had to switch buses and attempt to get on the right one. It was difficult to know which bus was the right one because it was different everyday. You basically just had to look for people you recognized and follow them. And cram yourself into an over-crowded bus. Number of seats: 24. Number of butts you could fit in a seat: 2. (Note that this is Kentucky and the average-sized person may be a bit larger than what is typical of where you live) 24 seats with 2 butts per seat means 48 students could safely ride the bus. There must have been double that many on each bus everyday. It was next to impossible to get a seat. If I tried I would usually get kicked to the floor or kicked to another seat which would get me kicked to the floor. If the driver caught wind of this he would just get mad and blame it on me, claiming I was one of his "afraid-to-sit-boys". Way to hire a good driver. There were days I had to sit on the very edge of the seat, more of me hanging off than supported. It took all the strength I had to hold on and keep from falling into that disgusting bus floor every time the bus would blast around a corner.

The sad part is this was not even school. This was just the commute there. This was just the typical beginning to yet another miserable day of my living hell.