Buried, of course. But I want to write about it.

When I was about eight years old the neighbor lids - a pack of feral kids who had been our friends up to this point - decided they had been insulted. So when my parents weren't home, they attacked the house.

Banging on the door. constant ringing of the doorbell. Shouting. Pulling brush up against the front window. Daring us to come out.

One innocent remark, purposefully misinterpreted, became their excuse for insisting there was a war, a feud, between our families. I remember standing in the middle of the living room frozen. There was fear, of course, but mostly it was having absolutely no idea of what to do. Run? Hide? Sit? Yell? Fight? Cry? Everything tugged at everything else until I was immobile.

I don't remember what happened right after that. But I do know that this feud, land-war, battle, they started lasted until my parents sold the house a couple of years later.

Is it normal for a seventeen-year-old to punch an eight-year-old in the stomach? They hit my dog with their car. Stole my toys. We went to the same school, there was no peace except for staying inside the house. Anytime in the yard included nervous looks over my shoulder and sometimes running back in the house if someone came near.

By the time we moved the damage was done. I was at that point emotionally frozen, did not grow up as my friends did. Have you seen /r/StoriesAboutKevin ? I was kind of like that. Unsocialized, immature, with a Aspergers-like razor focus on things with simple rules I could understand and manipulate. I was good at math. I liked Legos. I was into audio recording technology. I thought I was a genius, but really, it was that focus and lack of emotional distractions.

I didn't understand people, though, and that bothered me. If there's one advantage I've had in life it's that I am tenacious. If I want to figure something out I don't stop. If it's a hard problem, I'll take out out every once in a while, blow the dust off it, and take another look. For years, until I figure it out to my own satisfaction.

Growing up with a stunted emotional life, no alone, with no guidance, is a very big problem. Insanely big.

I won't tell you how many years it took, but I'm confident that I'm traveled more psychologically than the vast majority of people ever have. I wasn't satisfied with fixing problems, with handling life, I wanted to be normal 100% normal.

And I made it. At the cost of the rest of my life. I've spent almost my entire life fighting to get what most people start out with. And while I am happy to be normal now, I have nothing else. It's a strange sensation to question, and then discard, the most basic parts of your personality. To find out that the people you've hated for all those years were right. You were wrong, your were screwed up. But what do you want to do - change to be right, or stay begin wrong your whole life?

I can see why most people don't like to change.

But now I have nothing. Mentally, I should be just getting out of college and looking for that first step in a career. Instead I'm middle-aged with few prospects. I'm even unemployed.

All my experience is more appropriate to that former person, the one that felt that toxic environments and having no control over one's own life was normal. The last few years, when I was discovering the normal person I was becoming, were pretty bad.

I'm a good problem-solver. A good organizer. My attention-span is a little short. I can write a bit, but I am terrible at self-promotion.

I hope I get another job. I have only a limited amount of time before I run out of money and everything falls apart. It's funny that I have a plan in place now, when even in my darkest days my thoughts didn't go quite that far. After all I've done, I'm not going to flip burglars and live in a shack. I deserve more. I've earned more than that. It may be selfish, but if it comes to that I'd rather quit.

All because some neighbor kids had terrible parents.