Quite often I miss the carefree times of elementary school and parts of high school when everything seemed so brutally simple. Almost simple. I got a call from a friend who worked on an essay for school and needed to ask if I remember any bullying at the elementary school. Of course, I do. She made me think of it. Children and teenagers are pretty much in this like children from the book Lord of the flies. Bullying, even the smallest one we had in elementary school was like a huge championship. No one has been spared. The domino effect of each stumble. We were all hunting and being hunted at the same time. Both girls and boys did it. Example of superiority. In our ignorance and naivety, it occurred to everyone that this was the standard. It seems to now like a huge waste of time. Every stone must be sculpted somehow. Bullying developed us into something. It wasn’t caught in the start. Adapt or you’re done. Adapt. If you don’t hunt, you’ll be hunted. Championship in debility. Nothing else.

And then they all fly to different schools, where they can either continue or start again. So I tried it. To start over. Maybe if I went to the eight-year high school, I would succeed. But the seed of destruction was already rotting inside me and I came from elementary school corrupted. A poisoned apple and at the same time disappointment for myself. While there are wolves around me, I was just a lamb in a wolf’s robe and over time it lost its fur. And it was replaced by myself, deviating from the standard that had been set from the beginning. Naive. Dreaming. Hard-headed. Loud. With a strange laugh. A strange expression on my face. Once I had only one shoe at the gym, the teacher wanted to send me off the field, so I took off my shoe so I could play barefoot volleyball and refused to leave the field. Normal things. That’s what everyone does, isn’t it?

Joints for free hours, why not. Joints on evenings full of underage drinking, just to run away from yourself. Black eyes. Psychosis. Somewhere in my head, Pandora’s box was opened, and I will never close it again. Someone, probably me, took a crowbar and broke the lock when I took my first joint at the age of fifteen and then rolled all summer before boarding the high school. It happens. And it’s not good. Little human mistakes. When a person is young and stupid, he ruins it. At the same time, when a person is young and stupid, it occurs to him that something is wrong with him when he deviates from normal and is not like his friends, and it sends him into a black hole that devours him.

As I get older and look at myself from a distance and hear from O. as I heal, “Adéla, be yourself. Love yourself as you are. ” or „I’m proud of you for getting better.“ Because there are still things I can’t tell myself constantly and every day. It helps me. Mr. Dimple. And sometimes I hear the same thing from other people: „I’m glad you’re happy.“ Yes, please. Because if someone believes in me, it can mean that soon I will be able to believe in myself. Because these things have to start with the person himself. And if I succeed, it will be another big step towards Pyrrh’s little victory in this never-ending championship of debility.