All my life I wished to be special. I've never been quite sure why and perhaps I never will but I always dreamed of being unique. Of course I never was, at least not in my eyes. My parents would constantly tell me they thought I was special. Though for some unknown reason parental compliments never seem to stick or suffice.

It could have been that a part (a naive one at that) of me hoped if I were unique, peculiar just enough, I would be noticed or better yet included. This was not the case. I came to observe that the older and weirder I became the less friends I had. I later learned that as I aged less of them turned out to be real friends.

I can only now make the assumption in my young 18 years of life that in my eyes it was nothing less than a cardinal sin to be ordinary. If I were ordinary in the slightest, the easier it was for others to forget me.

Therefore I built fences, walls, cages, anything to hide my vulnerability, the normalcy I possessed. My father once told me that he came to the conclusion I hated high school because the vast majority of the population was fake, something I could not by any means tolerate. In a way I'm sure he's right, though in others he was wrong. I myself was fake and hid from everyone, I think my hatred for things and people which appeared fake stemmed from my own fears of being caught in my own illusion.