I think I started suppressing my feelings, well trying to, when I was in elementary school. When I would get embarrassed, I turned a dark shade of red that made everyone laugh, everyone except me. Inside I was screaming, how could my own body betray me so easily. I cried out to God but he did not answer, so at a young age I declared myself an athiest, angry at God and the whole world. I suppressed that anger, compartmentalized it, my first bag of many that I would tote with me everyday. Despite my poor memory or because of what I chose to remember, I can go through my baggage but not name a single person I went to elementary school with. Even after all of these years, I still can not prevent myself from blushing and I still get angry with myself when it happens. I feel like the same scared angry little boy who just wanted to be accepted, not laughed at, not provoked, not tormented by my class mates.
There was never a single person who bullied me, it was most of my class that bullied me. It did not help that I would sit in class and day dream, not paying a bit of attention, staring off into nothingness, forgetting my work and the world around me until my Teachers would call me out, then the vicious circle would begin, me blushing and children laughing. I just wanted to will myself away into nothing, to be gone out of this world, unnoticed, forgotten. Even today my chest tightens and feels like it wants to cave in just thinking about how I felt growing up. I never understood until much later in life that what I felt was despair and isolation. Much of the baggage I carry around revolves around these incidents and unfortunately these were not isolated incidents but weekly occurrences across many years.
Maybe by pouring it out I can begin to heal such old and painful memories and cast them aside, work on laying down my burdens.