Tragedy at Massachusetts High School

I was stunned to hear that the 16-year-old student who is being held without bail after a fatal school stabbing has Asperger's Syndrome.   I remember when I was in high school that I was picked on and teased without mercy.  They wouldn't even stop after knowing how depressed I was after my older brother Alfred died in a car accident in 1980.   What the boy did was wrong, but I feel sympathy for him because life in high school is hell when you have no choice in being different from everyone else.

All that teasing and taunting of me escalated into a war between me and them.  I put some of them into the nurse's office after punching them out.  They would have ice packs on their broken noses.  Of course, I was punished.  When I was still in junoir high school, I once got suspended from school for a day.  My parents did nothing about the problems I was having with my fellow students.  In fact, my father referred to my suspension day as my day off from school, and my mother took me shopping (I bought a Wings 45 record called Goodnight Tonight on the A side and Daytime Nighttime Suffering on the B side, and also the Earth, Wind & Fire Greatest Hits album).  No wonder my situation in high school was so bad.  Nothing was being done to help me cope with the feelings of anger and depression.

I was diagnosed with Asperger's Syndrome in 2002 when I was 37 years old.  When I told my parents about my condition, my mother didn't believe it and still doesn't.   My father even has surprised and I had to remind him that I always had trouble socializing with people.

I always wondered why the teasing and bullying was tolerated when I was in school.  They would always tell me to just ignore it because it would all go away some day.  It didn't.  It persisted all the way to graduation.  Those years were torture.  I carried so many emotional scars from that experience that I have been seeing therapists for most of my adult life.

The tragedy at the Lincoln High School has been mentioned on Charles Laquidara's blog as well at http://www.bigmattress.com/mt-archives/2007/01/monday_again.html