I have a history of bad birthday parties. My whole life, every birthday party I can remember for the last 12 years, has been a disaster.  They are disasters for two main reasons.  The first is because I am very particular and easily stressed out.  The second is that my friends are uniquely weird and abnormal.  This year's party was surprisingly different; mostly because I did not freak out once and/or storm out and insult the guests.  As a matter of fact, this year's party was relatively fun.  The most significant event was that there were no significant events.

      Not all my parties ended up this nice.  For example, let me tell you about my 11^th birthday party.  The first thing that happened was my friend David arrived early.  He is a hyperactive young man with ADHD.  He got me wound up on various occasions.  As you can imagine he was not the best choice of a guest.  Before the other guests arrived, he asked to hold my new pet rat, Count Dooku.  The rat immediately bit David’s finger causing him to drop the rat on the floor.  We had to run around for the next half hour trying to catch the little vermin. Count Dooku was never the same.  Just before we caught him, my friend Angela arrived.  Angela is another person with ADHD.  Unfortunately, as similar as they are, Angela and David hate each other's guts.   Angela saw David on his knees trying to reach the rat behind the dresser, walked over and kicked David on the thigh.  This started an argument that lasted the whole party.  By this time I was extremely aggravated and very disrespectful to all the guests.  Eventually this argument erupted into a food fight.  Just like many times before, David sucked me into this as well.  The climax of the battle included pizzas thrown at the ceiling.

      The party before that, when I was 10, was not much different.  I spent the whole month prior to it preparing for a giant squirt gun battle.  Day after day, I spent my savings buying squirt guns and toy dart guns for this imaginary conflict.  When the guests arrived I was careful to wait until everyone was present before announcing that I was planning this squirt gun war.  Most of the kids, however, had other ideas.  As a matter of fact they did not want to do a squirt gun battle at all.  I got so agitated that I opened fire with my toy uzi and chased everyone away.  I was traumatized for years; I still might not be fully recovered, even to this day.

      My 15^th birthday party turned out quite nice.  Using the knowledge I have gained about party guests, I invited people who got along with each other and none of them were hyperactive.  My friend Keith is relatively hard to keep occupied so I allowed him to bring some favorite games for my Nintendo Wii, keeping him busy for most of the party.  I also invited my friend Mark who's pretty easy going.  I made sure there was food everyone liked, including myself.  I planned to keep everyone occupied but I didn't plan anything complex.  There was just enough to do to keep the kids out of trouble.

            As a conclusion, I learned not to invite more than one friend with ADHD.  If you have a video game-aholic, let them bring their own game.  Do not plan activities so complex that you freak out if no one wants to do them.  Don't plan so few activities that your guests don't stay busy.  The thing about parties is that, even though it is your party, they are the ones that want to be entertained.  Hopefully, I'll be able to do this again for my 16^th birthday party!

    
                               August, 2009

What I Hate:  People who yell at me and don’t say what I did wrong.  I ask, “What did I do?”  Then they say “You know what you did” This has happened to me a lot.  At first I  just assume I didn’t do anything wrong and the person is a jerk because they don’t even know what they are yelling about.  Later, I think it’s like living with wolves. No matter how much you study them, you could live with them all your life, do one thing wrong and they might kill you.  You will probably never know what you did wrong. It’ll be easier if you just accept that that you did something even though you will probably never know what it was. If you act sorry maybe they’ll let you live.

A Lesson Learned:  After my TSS stopped coming to see me at school people treated me like a regular kid.  They didn’t praise me when I did something right.  That’s when I started on the downhill spiral. I have learned to praise myself so now I do good.

The Value of Feeling Angry:  When I was younger I used to cry a lot in school.  Everyone said I was just trying to get out of work even though I couldn’t help it.  So, I learned to turn all negative emotions, like depression or sadness, into anger.  I can handle that better.  I can still work when I am angry.  Those other emotions are paralyzing and also they kind of drilled that into me.

Now I don’t cry.

          Lying: I learned to lie in school because the teachers kept asking me stupid questions.  They would ask why I did something, I wouldn’t remember but they just kept asking so I had to lie to make them stop. Whenever the whole class did something bad I would get in trouble because I didn’t lie like the other kids. Teachers don’t listen very well, not that they try that. Other kids were allowed to get away with stuff that I couldn’t get away with.

They watched me closer than the rest of the kids so it was like a cycle.  Whenever the class did something wrong I would get in trouble so then they’d watch me closer so I would get in trouble even more.  It was like a chain reaction.

          Friends??: A lot of kids used my lack of street smarts, like saying slang bad words, to get me in trouble. My friends would tell me to do something that they didn’t want to get in trouble for. I just wanted friends so bad so I would do what they wanted me to. I didn’t tell on them, I just figured it was what I had to do to have friends. But once you do something weird there’s no way to redeem yourself. I kept trying to do things to make them be my friends. There is no way.  I thought friends were a luxury I wasn’t meant to have. I viewed it as an impairment I would never overcome. That’s why I decided to go to cyber school and start over. I had to start over with a different group of kids and use what I had learned. The kids I know now actually like me. I’m even kind of popular, isn’t that cool?

Insults:   In school kids would call each other “gay”.  What you were supposed to do was to react viciously and yell at them for the rest of the day.  My friends called me gay, I thought they were just teasing and kidding around. I didn’t react. So everyone started to believe it was true. Nicknames stick. My friends called me “Faggy McSunshine” after that.