For most of my life I blamed my overwhelming unhappiness on my mental state. From the outside, people would have called me a success story. I lost over 100 pounds, graduated from an alternative high school my junior year after I had dropped out of the regular system, was doing very well in college, and had a promising future in digital art. But on the inside I was a wreck. I was always discontented with myself, and harbored hatred and fear toward the people around me.
A few years before that when I was in high school, I became more depressed than ever, and considered suicide. I began to see a counselor and to take medication for depression. My goal was to somehow get in touch with that innocent, caring, funny kid—the person I was before all of the alienation kicked in around age seven. But the counselor hit me with a condemnation that rocked my world: "John, give up on getting in touch with that little kid. He died back there, and you will never, ever get back to him." The therapist was a professional, so I believed him.
I had also grown up with a great deal of trouble controlling anger. It was a horrible monkey on my back, especially because in my childhood and early adolescence, I sometimes acted on the rage—physically hitting someone. It was always a good friend, and my actions usually ended the friendship abruptly. The urge felt uncontrollable, and I couldn't believe what I was doing. It was like a raging storm in my head, and it would not stop.
