Don't be a Twat. Part 2.

1998.

Due to a five-year avalanche of shit from peers and teachers alike, by the time I leave school and start college I genuinely believe I am an ugly, unlikeable moron. I've made so many mistakes with my schoolwork that I'm afraid of tackling the new college work. Due to this memory problem that no-one seems to be able to define, a belief eats away at me that the reason that they haven't defined it is because they aren't allowed to tell me I'm thick.

I meet a girl on my course- let's call her K- and we get on well as friends. When we work as a pair to complete coursework, we disappear to record soundbytes and people joke that we are having sex. What only I know, seemingly, is that I wish we were. I never let her know this, though, as the very real possibility of rejection- at this time- would destroy me. When she passes me in the library a few days later, she strokes my chest and calls me sexy. Just like the girls did in school before they shot me down.

K quits the course early. I never tell her how I feel or even see her again.

By the time I'm due to finish my first year, I've hardly done any of the work. I was so afraid of fucking it all up, like I did in school, that I didn't do it at all. I scrape everything together at the last minute, so late that my tutor has to ask the college to pay him to stay in work an extra 2 days, just to mark my work.

I sit another 2 years of college. It's hard and fast graft. I'm getting more confident all of the time, hitting deadlines for once, and I pull the odd girl at a party here and there. But I'm way too busy to sort my head out with the whole girl thing. Besides, the town in which I'm studying is about 70% guys anyway. I've never been diagnosed with depression, but this could have been an issue. I develop a fixation with a girl. Let's call her Z. She knocks me back about 10 times. I don't take the hint until I leave college. I am seriously, seriously depressed throughout all this.

2000.

One evening, when I arrive home from college, my tea is waiting for me but there's no-one home. I pile up the waffles, sausages and beans on my plate. There's a strangely large amount of it. I try to eat it all.

My dad arrives home. He's been travelling 3, sometimes 4 hours per day on public transport since an office relocation a few months back. An argument break out about the food. My mum arrives home not long after this (she prepared the meals, plural, earlier that afternoon.) I have all three portions on my plate.

Amidst the argument, I put this point forward: How am I supposed to believe that I'm intelligent, like people say I am, if I make mistakes like this?

We all get very emotional. Seriously, there are tears on all sides and everything. My dad agrees to talk to his manager about the stress caused by his job. My mum plans to buy a whiteboard and to install it on the kitchen wall, so we can leave messages to each other and an incident as ridiculous as that never happens again.

My mum tells me that I'm actually quite a good-looking lad.

You're my mum, I tell her. You would say that.

She reminds me about the restaurant at my cousin's 18^th. The group of girls at the end of the table. “They were saying, y'know, 'he's quite a looker isn't he?'” she says.

This just doesn't fit in my brain. I remember the restaurant clearly, and it makes sense, but emotionally I just can't accept it. For the previous five years, I'd been told the opposite every day. What did my cousins' friends see that nobody in school could?