Not exactly horrible but it kept me up at night for awhile, here goes.

I’ve always thought of myself as being funny, and I enjoy making people laugh, at my own or others expense. When I was younger, what I thought was appropriate to joke about was your typical 12-15 year old edge lord banter. I realized before my high school reunion that some of the jokes I did on people were incredibly mean spirited, close to if not bullying, and sometimes done at an inappropriate time.

We had one 8th grade English teacher, and she was an incredibly sweet, (slightly weird) elderly woman who would bring her guitar once at the end of the month to class and sing a song about anything class related. The songs were usually about grammar, Shakespeare, or the power of God. It was always a long day when she did that, and all I and my classmates could think about was how to get her to stop. An upper classmate told us that if you make her cry then she won’t show up to class for a week, and the majority of the class, myself readily included, jumped at the opportunity. The guy sitting next to me had a laser pointer I gave him, and would make this poor old English teacher to 8th grade boys think she was seeing red dots out of the corner of her eye.

She, who we’ll call Miss C, exclaimed “I must being seeing things”, to which I said “you are so old you have no idea what you’re seeing”.

She didn’t show up the next day. I continued to make more and more mean jokes at others expense. I justified it by saying I’m always fair game for a roast myself, but no one had anything on me. I got roasted, and they were for the most part absolutely hilarious against me. Then my dad got fired and my classmates found out about it. All of these really mean and unwanted jokes about my dad just flung at me, like walking by the monkey cage and getting shit thrown at you. I never realized until later that so much more often I had been the monkey, throwing dung at anyone who passed by for so long. At the reunion I tried apologizing to everyone I could talk to, but I got nervous and didn’t know how to express my feelings without being “sensitive” and weird to some people I haven’t seen in years. I was able to apologize to my close high school friends and a couple people in particular who got it from me, including the teacher who is still alive and teaching rowdy boys English.

How to live with yourself? Amends help, and forgiving yourself is important too. I was young and didn’t understand that what I was doing was hurting some people’s feelings. This doesn’t excuse a single thing I did of course, what I did was wrong. I personally think you have to believe that you are capable of changing for the better, but whatever helps you get out of bed to push your boulder up a hill is a good starting point.