My Story: Part 2

• If you are just joining us, it would probably be a good idea to read the introduction and part 1 to get an idea of why and what is happening!

Picking right up from where we left off, I entered high school as an insecure freshman. There was that normal insecurity any freshman feels about being the little fish and wondering how to survive in "High School" because of all the horror stories, but I also had a different insecurity. I had a deep rooted unhealthy desire to be included, and to be included I would do anything.

The way to be included was to be cool, correct? We found out in part 1 what cool meant, and I was ready to figure out how to be cool in high school.

Shortly after school started, captains practices for hockey began. Now, for those of you who have never set foot into a locker room with upwards of 25 adolescent boys, I will be the first to tell you it isn't the Disney channel. The locker room is a place to wave your banner of who you slept with the past weekend, or hand out high fives from the most graphic party stories, etc. In the locker room, I was introduced to that "do anything" attitude needed to quench my need for inclusion.

Before we continue about the locker room, we have to go over a crucial event at the start of the hockey season that trained me to think and do as I did for the rest of my high school career. The seniors of the team my freshman year started an annual weekend camping trip for the hockey team their freshman year. At the beginning of every hockey season they would throw a party on the Friday night before, wake up, drive to the site and camp until Sunday night, and be back for school the following week. I got my invitation, and I took it.

I had never had a beer in my life, but on that Friday night, I had several. The boys on the hockey team were my idols, and I didn't want to let them down, so I binged. I drank to the point of passing out. I don't know when or how I passed out, but what I do remember is waking up behind a couch. This may seem comical, and I would lie if I didn't see some kind of slap-jack humor in someone waking up behind a couch and not remembering how they got there, but here is the real deal: I was willing to let myself go to the point of passing out from drinking because I was too scared of being called a "puss" from upper-classmen (and their friends) on the hockey team. I was 13 years old.

For some, this isn't that small a number because you might be around that age, but when you are in your 20s, you realize how young 13 is. And there is nothing funny about a 13 year old passing out from alcohol.

The rest of the weekend was spent camping, and drinking. Again, I had never had a beer in my life up to that Friday night, and by the time Sunday night rolled around, I had been close to the point of alcohol poisoning from liquor and beer two nights in a row.

But, I was cool. And that is what mattered.

For the next 4 years of High School, I was with the hockey team day in and day out. In the locker room I learned that the point of relationships with women was to see how far you could get with them. The junior and senior classes my freshman/sophomore years kept a notebook between them with a point system on who did what with who. I learned that being a prude was a joke, and if you weren't "bangin chicks" you were gay. I learned that being popular was the point of high school, and to be popular you had to be the guy who went the farthest whether it be partying, sex, drugs, whatever.

I thought that the more I could become this picture of a "man", the more I would have as far as popularity or self-confidence, or whatever I was searching for. Really, I thought this would make me satisfied. But, little did I know that with each second I subjected myself to these things, I was killing more and more of my conscience; I was building up higher walls in my heart; I was feeding this monster inside of me that only grew bigger and was never full.

Up to my junior year, I had kept a somewhat low status of promiscuity (by worldly standards only, and compared to what others were doing), but my senior year of high school was where the culmination of pressures of sex, drugs, and partying would come to a head, and I would finally fall to a point of no coming back.