High school was the most challenging and painful time of my life, when kids compare themselves and fitting in and feeling accepted are most important.  Any type of weirdness stuck out like a sore thumb.  I definitely felt weird.  Early on.  I had many friends and got along with every type of group, but as time passed I felt myself drift away from everyone else.  I was in a world of my own; it was very lonely.  This enraged me.  All I wanted to be was "normal".

Around age 15, I told my parents how I was feeling - depressed, paranoid, and different.  I had anxiety attacks and acted out weird, obsessive-compulsive rituals that made no logical sense, but that I needed to do to feel safe.  I also heard degrading, negative, and manipulative voices in my mind.  My mind and emotions would race.  It was difficult to hold any kind of focus for long.  It was difficult to control myself - I felt like a coiled-up spring.  I felt that I was 10,000 volts of energy in a body that could hold only half that.  I was like a live wire with no grounding cord.  I had mild ticks - Tourette's syndrome.  My parents took me to doctors - many doctors.

I balanced my inner chaos with humor, becoming the class clown.  I would gladly receive detention to get some attention.  It was very important for me to do anything I could to make people laugh.  When I did this, I was actually interacting with them on the planet - I was noticed! Then there were times when I could just sit by myself and think of an entire scenario in my mind - a sort of play where I could act out any characters I chose, doing whatever I wanted.  Sometimes I just suddenly started laughing hysterically, and when asked why, my explanation made absolutely no sense to others.

Being funny helped me forget my "stuff" - laughing feels so good.  However, I was also very unpredictable, switching moods instantly and without warning.  I was called psycho, loony, and so on - and I believed it.  That's how I really felt.  I thought I would never escape the prison I was in.  Various medications helped me with certain challenges for a certain period of time, but after a while, something else would pop up.  When I was about 15, one of the top doctors in the world specializing in Tourette's syndrome told me and my parents that I was the most unique case he had ever had: "It seems when we fix one thing, something else comes up.  he has all these little cubbyholes of problems.  I have never been so baffled in my life."