Michael David Boyd on Facebook

I'm Sorry, Kendrick

The Face of Regret

There is a large and elaborate story that I have been working on recently that I've mentioned so much that it is probably now becoming urban legend. In that as-yet-unfinished story, I will share many unbelievable experiences from my strange and extraordinary life—even more than you are about to read presently—as a part of a narrative about the process of the discovery of my "Theory of Everything" equation that I recently published. I want to finish it, and I'm ready to, and I think by the end of this, the agents and publishers of the world will have one more reason, and this time a much more human reason, why they should want to make sure I get a sizable advance and a contract to finish that book as soon as possible—and it would not take me much longer.

This not something I'm mentioning now for selfish reasons.  It is no secret that I have been working to establish a career as a writer for a long time, not only because of things that I would like to be able to do for myself, but moreso for what I would like to be able to do for people I care about. There was a boy named Kendrick that I used to know, who I hope has now grown to be a man, and I believe he might appreciate it if I ever became a success, because I owe him more than I can ever repay. But I am going to start repaying the best I can right now…

While I felt some sense of urgency to tell the story of my experiences with Kendrick, I really felt it was important to tell it as a part of this larger work that I have been immersed in. But recently, I've been going through a very tough emotional struggle with a close and dear friend who I feel might be bottled up about things similar in effect if not in character to what I will reveal now. As I contemplated and prepared to argue to her how bad it would feel if she suddenly found herself unexpectedly at the end of her life and hadn't untied her knots inside, I then looked in the mirror as I always try to do, and thought of how bad I would feel, if I saw my impending death, and hadn't yet said what I need to say about Kendrick. So I am doing it right now, and with respect to my friend, as I see it, leading by example. It has been a very long time, so every detail or timeline may not be exactly accurate, but there is nothing missing or wrong large enough to change that this is the essential truth of what happened.

When I was in the third grade, spanning the ages of seven and eight, Kendrick was a little boy around my age who attended my school. Kendrick was small and thin and from his clothes and shoes and demeanor, one would expect that his family was quite poor, as mine was. He seemed to possibly have a mental disability of some kind, but he was functional and seemed to be what people would call "slow", although I wouldn't swear to that—he just didn't talk much at all and was different. But he was definitely not so disabled, if at all, as to be unable to show his personality to the world. He was, from all I could tell, a nice kid.

The school I was attending at that time was ethnically mixed, for Kansas, which is to say that it was probably about 75% White, 15% Black and 10% other. Kendrick was White, and I, for those who do not know, am Black.

A large cross-section of the other boys used to tease and bully Kendrick relentlessly, across ethnic boundaries and without any group being in the majority. They picked on him for his apparent mental disabilities, they picked on him for his clothes and most brutally…

The bathrooms in our school had a single big open trough urinal, so when classes would break, or recess would start or end, and large groups of boys would go to the bathroom together, it was inevitable that boys would see each others privates. Now, I never looked, nor felt any urge to look, nor cared, and I still find it weird today the quick glance down that so many men take when you are standing next to them at a urinal. But in any event, the ruckus of laughing and teasing that would ensue whenever Kendrick was there was so impossible to ignore that eventually, I took a glance.

Kendrick had an unusually small penis, small enough that it looked on sight like it might be a disability. Although I didn't stare long enough to be certain, if my usually accurate photographic memory doesn't fail me, he was also uncircumcised, which at the time was another anomaly amongst boys our age, although thankfully that antiquated ritual is starting to slowly but surely disappear and from statistics I have seen, I doubt that in a bathroom amongst young boys today that it would stand out as much as it did then.

I always felt bad about the way people treated Kendrick and wished that I could do something to help him. I was amazed at how he took this treatment. He never seemed to break down or lose his composure. But he never fought back or stood up for himself, as if he realized that at his size and outnumbered, it was a battle that he couldn't win. He went about following the commands of his bullies with an almost robotic obedience as they would regularly force him to demean himself in various ways. No, it wasn't robotic. It was, "I'll just cooperate and get this over with as quickly as possible."

Sitting here now, 35 years old, I know a dozen things I could have done to help him, but I was seven or eight, and all the options I could contemplate seemed too frightening. I wasn't a "cool kid", and although I generally escaped too much teasing—I presume largely because I was bigger than the others and always the smartest in class but not visibly nerdy—I did get razzed with some regularity about my cheap clothes and being overweight. So the truth is, on top of not knowing all of the actions I could have taken, I feared challenging kids higher in the social order and having the full brunt of the teasing that I had been spared fall on me. If this was the end of the story, it would leave the self-serving impression that I was such a good person that my big secret that I was so deeply troubled by was that I could not muster the courage to be heroic.  I wish that this was true, but it is not.  I wish I could tell you that this was where my sins stopped, or even where they really began. But I have to go on…

One day, I walked into the bathroom and Kendrick was there alone. I mocked him over his small penis, pushed him around, and made him lay down in the dirty urinal, and then without saying another word, I left him there. Just as with the others, he never resisted and he never said a word.

Almost immediately after I walked out, I felt terrible about what I had done, but again, I had no idea what to do, and figured there was nothing I could do that would change it. I saw an apology as empty if I could not give some explanation, and I could not, and I did not trust that he would be able to see any sincerity or meaning in it without that.  I didn’t even know why I had done it. As far as I know, he never told on me.

I don't recall how long it was before I saw Kendrick again, but I was shocked when I saw him next.  He seemed unchanged by what I had done to him, and he didn't say anything and didn't treat me any differently. I was puzzled by it until years later, I finally realized what it was: At eight years old, he had already been so relentlessly shit on in life that it didn't even affect him anymore. He expected it. It was his routine. And even coming from me, a kid who had up until that point been sympathetic and friendly, and never engaged in the bullying, it still wasn't a surprise for him. And recognizing this, I felt even worse.

I had never done anything like that before. Not just that I had never bullied anyone, but I had never done any action that I hadn't thought through and considered the potential consequences. From a quite unusually young age, I was conscious of how my actions would affect others. I was still a child of course, and did stupid things, but the wheels of my mind were always turning when I took almost any action. But this one, where it seemed I wasn't thinking at all and my brain was completely off, it felt completely alien to me, and while on rare occasion since I have been so angry that I felt my self-control wavering, I have never felt that particular way any other time in my life.

I don't know what happened to Kendrick. I changed schools the next year, and I never saw him again. Since Google came into existence, I have tried to find him with no success—and I am very good at finding people if I have a full name, sometimes less than that. When Facebook came into existence, I knew that I could very easily locate former classmates who may have gone with him to later schools, but I didn't want to have to answer why I was asking, and to be honest, I was afraid of what I might hear. My darkest fear was that Kendrick had not survived all the shit that we had heaped upon him, and had perhaps decided at some point to take his own life, and I did not know how I would possibly live with myself if I found out that this was true.

I honestly cannot remember at all how I responded when others bullied Kendrick after that.  The most probable truth is that I continued to do nothing and the abuse went on.  But I never bullied anyone else again, and after I left that school the next year, I never again stood in total silence while anyone else was bullied. I didn't become a saint or a protector—I didn't always go as far as I could have, but I always at least said to the bully that it wasn't right or, more often, tried to use my intellectual gifts to create some distraction that would seamlessly draw attention to something else. But unless I knew the people involved well, I never went as far as to physically intervene, because in the neighborhood where I lived, which was different from where I was bused to school, too many fights ended up being settled with a knife or a gun. And although my school was in a distant, semi-rural suburb far away from home, I carried wherever I went that awareness that you always had to expect that any fight might be taken to the furthest limits. I can argue either side that I was a coward, or that I was exercising good judgment and accepting the lesser evil in not potentially escalating the bullying to something worse. Maybe both are true.

In subsequent years, as I got fatter, and kids around me entered those cruel, insecure adolescent years, I was very painfully teased about my weight and many other things. It never rose anywhere near the level of what happened to Kendrick—I still had a social life and was well-liked enough to be elected to student council twice in my remaining school years. But I accepted far more of the teasing than I should have, because I thought, "How could I now have the nerve to stand up for myself, when I never stood up for Kendrick, and then in the worst turn, joined in abusing him?".

It was only recently that something occurred to me that I had never thought of before. It came to me as an image, almost like a vision, of what I could recognize as a grown-up Kendrick, sitting on a bed in a small, cluttered room, his expression still and angry, and above his head was hanging a Neo-Nazi flag. It made perfect sense. How would Kendrick not grow up to hate Black people?  At the time, I hadn't yet been socialized to the sexual race stereotypes in society, so when I teased Kendrick, I was just teasing him about what everyone else did, and I myself did not yet have any idea of the social implications of a taller, larger Black kid teasing a scrawny White kid about the size of his penis. Kendrick may not have known those social implications at that time either. But it would be perfectly logical that when he got older and learned them, that he would assume that was why I did it. So even though many had teased him, that incident with me, because of our races, and because I had been nice before, and because we were all alone, would logically become the one burned most vividly in his memory as the iconic representation of the collective trauma.

We have a tendency as adults to look back and project our grown-up psyches into our experiences as children, and because we do this, we tend to process the things that other kids may have done to us too much as if another adult had done it, and fail to realize that our bully was so young. This is not to make excuses for myself, because there is no excuse for what I did, but it is a relevant perspective to consider, even when we think of our experiences from early adulthood. Being 35 now, I think of things that people may have done to me in my early 20s, and when I look around at what it means to be 20 from the perspective of a 35 year old, it changes the level of responsibility I put on those other people from my past. Or to put it much more simply and directly, we all do stupid things when we're young, and depending on the perspective one is taking, 7 is young, 17 is young, and in some ways, 30 and 40 are still young. While one should never excuse bad behavior in advance and should always set out to do what is right, I think a more fair standard of judging another person or ourselves is not by the worst thing they have done, but by looking at the slope of their life over a long period and asking, intellectually and ethically, are they moving forward, moving backward or standing still?

I think that I may have had some at least subconscious processing of the potential racial implications of what I did before they struck me consciously, because I have always found myself uncommonly sensitive to those who hold virulently racist attitudes, to an extent that I have often enraged my Black friends, and even in a few instances, some of my White friends. This is not because racism isn't still a huge problem in this country, and this world, and a far bigger one than many people are able to recognize and admit, but because I know from what I did that acts that seem to be brutally malicious are often not as evil as we think.

As hard as it can be, I try to extend the same empathy to people who commit acts that hurt me or people I love. I did not hate Kendrick, or even dislike him. I did not hate or even dislike White people.  I did not care about the size of his penis.  I did not assault him thinking that I wanted to do him harm, or even considering the possible impact or interpretation.  If you don't know another person's full story, you can't understand them, and thus, cannot fully understand why they may have done something or why they believe what they believe.  By the time I am finished, I hope that I will have presented a clear example of exactly how this is true.

I put this idea into practice many years ago, when I signed up as a member of Stormfront, a large online discussion community for people who hold what they prefer to call White Nationalist views, but which most of the world would refer to as White Supremacist or Neo-Nazi views. I started a discussion thread and explained more or less accurately who I was. I fictionalized some details about myself to protect my identity somewhat should things go off the rails and there be a bad apple who might look to identify me to try to do me harm, I gave a generally accurate account of my background and personal history without any of the dramatic details.

Over several days, I engaged in a fairly long-running dialogue with several members and tried to see if we could reach any common ground. The discussion was far more reasonable and productive than most of you will likely imagine it could be, and even I was surprised by the results.  I like to hope that perhaps someone, even if they did not engage in the discussion, might have changed their path as a result of following the discussion that took place. And I think I can reasonably say that some of those who I did talk to walked away truly considering some ideas that they previously had not...as did I.  Although there were a few knuckleheads as there are on any internet forum, I found several members who, although we retained some deep disagreements of course, were very intelligent, very reasonable and fairly open-minded.

The discussion went well until the issue of interracial dating came up, and the environment became too hostile for me to remain. But if many of those men had incidents in their youth like I had with Kendrick, I would understand how they might react that way, and honestly, as a human being, regardless of your color, while of course we may feel certain they are on the wrong path, haven't we all had something traumatic that has followed us, whether it may seem large or small to someone else, and we just can't always set it aside as we should?

If Kendrick tells the story of what I did to him, of course anyone who hears it who has even the slightest inclination toward disliking Black people already will easily integrate that into their mental files and perhaps it would serve as their final baptism to an ideology of racism. It almost makes the story worse that I had been nice to Kendrick before, because, forgive me, I must state the implication that could easily be drawn in the naked ugliness that it would most probably be expressed—"See, you can't trust a nigger even if they have been nice to you for years."

I've often heard White kids tell stories like Kendrick's, and some Black people outright accuse them of making it up, because it seems so outlandishly cruel no one wants to believe another member of the social group to which they belong capable of such a thing, especially the inherently assumed but often false assumption that all minorities have more empathy for victims of discrimination.  If Kendrick later told a Black person what I did, perhaps even seeking out catharsis, and they refused to believe him, it is understandable that his pain, rage and hate would only go deeper. And likewise, when we as Black people tell our stories of appalling things that have happened to us, White people often refuse to believe it in a similar fashion...sometimes even when its on video tape and clear as day. And yes, most of us had had these experiences with racism, even though we don't talk about them at the office or chatting in the grocery store checkout line because we realize it makes you uncomfortable, on top of the fact that so often the response is dismissive and/or defensive.

Almost every Black American has a story about something unbelievably racist happening to them. Most have more than one. I'm sure there are a great many instances where the people who committed these acts were not malevolent, but just confused and hurt and troubled like I was. Some incidents may indeed be outright misunderstandings.  I am arguing that we all need to seek to understand what is at the root of these actions, so I'm not saying to instantly demonize the apparent perpetrator or instantly accept the apparent victim's interpretation of what happened.  But the point is, any time another human being tells a story of something that has hurt or troubled them deeply, the first step should always be to empathize with what they felt, before moving on to discuss whether they have correctly identified the motive of the perpetrator.  It is probably not appropriate to introduce that discussion at all in a first talk.  To defend the perpetrator before empathizing sends a horrible message, especially if you are wrong and it is a case where the instigator's motives were as the victim suspected.  I have failed in this as well.  We all have to change. We all have to forgive. But no one can do this alone.

We have to be a society where we really listen to each other, and are never afraid to engage in dialogue, no matter what our initial perceptions of a particular idea or particular person may be. Rationally and openly defending a correct position should not be difficult. We have to be a society where we are able to be honest with ourselves about who we are and how we have lived, and we all have to make a world where the person who makes an honest disclosure of their sins, without a readily apparent selfish motive to do so, should be applauded for taking that leap of faith in the rest of us.

My basic theorem on human society and why we all spend so much time hurting each other is this: I believe that almost all of us are tied up in knots inside over something that is perhaps not as extreme as my assault on Kendrick, but sometimes may be much worse, but in either case, for that particular person, it is that thing that they never tell to anyone. I'm not talking about the worst things that have been done to us, which we all love to tell in selective situations and cry and enjoy the support and sympathy because we are the victim. But no, the stories of the worst things we've done, where we cannot imagine that we didn't do great harm, or even are certain that we did, and where we cannot imagine that the world would ever accept us again or that the victim would ever be able to forgive.

I believe almost everyone has this kind of secret inside, perhaps many of them, but usually, even when someone else shares their own most terrible secret, other people choose to stay with the herd and demonize the confessor.  I believe these secrets are sometimes so deeply buried that I do not doubt that people have spent their entire lives in prison, or even gone all the way to their execution without ever revealing the true inner motive for their crime because they are that deeply ashamed of it.  We have to change this. And I don't just say this to protect myself from the perceptions about what I did, as I think will be abundantly clear by the time you finish this story.

I do not want to give the impression that I am arguing that there is universal moral equality. I am not saying that a saint and a child murderer are in some way actually equal, beyond that they are both human.  There are amazing people who are doing phenomenal works of good to make the world better for those they touch, and we should celebrate these people and support them and emulate their image, and when we discover that they have flaws, or have made awful mistakes, we should not overreact to the extent that we ignore the full sweep of their life.  Likewise, there are people who are doing great harm to those around them, from those who commit unspeakably horrific crimes, to those who engage in deception and manipulation to serve their own financial or emotional goals, to those who may unintentionally do great hurt to others through a wantonly selfish approach to pursuing their own trivial desires.  But everyone who is human has an internal motivation driving them that if you could just feel for an hour how they feel, you would understand their actions even if you cannot condone them.

Though there are many people in the world doing terrible things, things that we must act strongly to prevent, I believe that inside almost every human being is a basic moral compass. I'm not talking about the moral compass of whatever religion or social or cultural norm. I'm talking about the moral compass that nobody can read what I did to Kendrick and not know that it is horribly wrong. The moral compass that made me know as soon as my brain clicked on again that I had done something that I would regret forever. But once done, it is so hard to confess such an act, because society as a whole is so vengeful, and cynical and unforgiving. And thus people twist themselves in tighter knots, and the cycle of people hurting each other continues. We have to stop it, and it will take a leap of faith, faith in the basic fundamental decency of humanity, for each of us to be willing to first untie our own knots, and then, when others untie theirs, make an honest, thorough effort to be understanding and to forgive.

Even if we decide as a society that we have to send someone to prison for the rest of their life because of what they have done, it costs us nothing to say to them, "We forgive you. Try to spend this time to figure out how you can give something back to atone for what you have done." And who knows, it may be someone who we think of as terrible, but inside is so filled with regret for what they did, that just knowing we forgive, they may spend those years in prison and create something that is worthwhile for us all. I firmly believe that while there are many people whose acts abhor me to the core of my soul, I think there are very few people, perhaps no one at all, who lays down their head at night, and hopes or prays that it will be a worse world in the morning.

If someone had raped and murdered a child, and this person was a tortured genius as the worst criminals often are, and we incarcerated them for life, but offered them our forgiveness and acknowledged their humanity and asked them to seek atonement, what if that child murderer was so overwhelmed that we were able to forgive his crime that he could not even forgive himself for, and he spent every waking hour in his cell studying biology for 30 years, and came up with a theory that led to a cure for all cancers? It this likely? Certainly not.  But is it possible? Certainly, yes.  And even that possibility is worth what is not really much risk at all.

If this were to happen, even if it saved the lives of millions, I could never say to those parents that it would be worth the life of their child.  But is it not worth an act of forgiveness and sparing someone's life when the deed is already done and cannot for all our seeking vengeance be revoked?  But just sparing the life alone is not enough.  Someone who we refuse to allow to feel human would never be able to do anything for humanity. They would see themselves as something other than us, so why would they care at all? Why would they even seek our atonement if we offer them no chance of regaining their humanity?  So the forgiveness is an essential component. And of course it is hard. The right thing usually is.  We are all grown up now.  We all know what lies at the bottom of the closet, even when the light is off. We have all learned that monsters do not really exist.

I hope that Kendrick did not head down a path to become a person about whom we have to consider such questions. I hope my vision of his future is wrong. I hope that he has good job that he finds rewarding, a partner he loves who loves him back, and wonderful children that he is enjoying watching grow if that is his desire, and that he never thinks of what I did to him, or more beautifully yet, understands even without my telling this story. But I know human nature, and I know that the chances of this are slim. Things like this haunt people, and often, though it is hard for me to bear to think it, destroy lives.

So even though it may be of entirely no consequence at all, in my effort to take a first tiny step down the road of atonement, I am going to share a few things about myself that I have worked very hard to keep private, and that I would have never imagined myself telling the world in this way. When I thought about how Kendrick may have grown up, deeply insecure about his body, traumatized by what we had done to him, and possibly even somehow blaming himself for it all, I tried to imagine the experiences he might have had, socializing uncomfortably and finding it hard to date. Furthermore, teasing like that often doesn't die and will find a person years later in the most unexpected circumstances.

I imagined Kendrick watching a society that fetishizes Black male sexuality and feeling angry and blaming any failures that he had in dating on the seemingly cool Black guy who walked into the bar and seemed to have everything going for him, and in his mind's eye, through me, had been pushing him around in life ever since the third grade bathroom. Sometimes, perhaps people who had suffered other unpleasant experiences with someone Black looked at me the same way. Over the last many years, they may have seen me in a nightclub or walking down the street with any of several unbelievably beautiful woman that they would have likely presumed I was dating. I never slept with any of them. They may have seen me in Vegas walking through five-star hotels in stylish clothes and expensive shoes with a girl on each arm, and really thought I was having a party. The party you think didn't happen, and both those girls, in their own way, eventually broke my heart.

It may strike Kendrick as a tiny bit of justice to know what has been my reality. As embarrassing as it is for me, I owe it to Kendrick to bear the shame and tell the truth. I have been lonely and sexually frustrated for almost my entire adult life. I was still absolutely and fully a virgin until I was 23 years old. I could still hedge or argue that I was until I was 30. Almost all of my romantic pursuits have been utter failures that left me emotionally devastated. Perhaps all—the jury is still deliberating. Of all the women that I sought out first and pursued in my entire life, none ever chose to date me. None.

I have had only one girlfriend in my life, who I met when she responded to a personal ad I posted. Although I believe she is a good person that intended no harm, and I still care about her deeply, because I was so insecure and I felt that no other woman had ever wanted me, I allowed myself to become a complete doormat for her. In exchange for my almost complete surrender, she made me feel terrible about myself, which I sometimes felt was a ploy to keep me tied to her. I know she may disagree and have a very different viewpoint, and that there is some possibility that hers may be the correct one.  But regardless, several things that she did left me with devastating emotional scars that leave me feeling that, after my earlier experiences, I do not know if I will ever be able to entrust my heart to anyone again.  And whether I or she is correct in the assessment of our relationship, that trauma to me is real, just as Kendrick's trauma was real, regardless of the fact that I didn't intend to hurt him.

I acknowledge that I made many mistakes and I said and did some things that might look unforgivable on paper and out-of-context. However, after reading this, I don't think anyone will be able to argue that I have any fear now of owning my past. I'm willing to untie my knots and forgive first, and I will, but the way I need to do it, I will need to explain some things in depth as I have done with this, and that will take a lot more time than this piece, not in the elapsed time before beginning, but in the actual time writing.

I feel as bad for the things I did that hurt her as I do for my own pain, possibly worse, but I still think that my view is right that the far bigger mistakes were hers.  I would welcome a hearing in open social relationship court, under legally binding oath and subject to proper rules of evidence and procedure. I feel so certain that my view would prevail, I'd even sit in front of a jury of only her friends and family. This would be a great project for law schools to start up as a teaching tool for students and a resource for society, because these issues can never be settled in the way they are usually litigated, with both parties telling their own version of the story to their own friends behind closed doors. But I have digressed again...

One of the things that I was teased about in school was the fact that I had large man-boobs—larger ones than you normally have just as a result of being fat. This of course made me deeply insecure, so much so that after being humiliated during a basketball tryout in middle school when we had to play "shirts and skins", I have never taken off my shirt in public since. And in thinking about becoming intimate with any woman, I had a deep fear of how she would react upon seeing, to the point that I sometimes abandoned talking to women who might have seemed to be interested in me if they made only the slightest negative comment about another person's physical appearance that made me feel she would be too picky to accept my flaws. This made me all but incapable of pursuing romance with any woman that I didn't already know and trust, since I assumed that a woman who knew my value as a person would be accepting of my physical flaws. But women hate it when their male friends decide that they want something more, or at least they universally hated it when I did, so that made an already difficult equation even harder to solve, and even resolving never to fall into that friendship dilemma again, I did.

My insecurities were compounded by the fact that over the course of my life a lot of people perceived me as possibly being gay. Although I felt no such inclination whatsoever, I knew the reasons at the root of this perception. I am very into fashion and own a large collection of Italian and Spanish shoes.  For many years I held jobs in a position in the legal industry that is almost always held by women, and I have always thought acting macho was stupid. I'd seen so many guys lose their lives over dumb posturing growing up, I took these things more seriously and didn't ever poke out my chest or try to make any over displays of masculinity. I did all I could to avoid physical confrontations, not out of any fear, but because where I'm from, if you start a fight, you need to be prepared to go all the way if that's what it takes. And very few things are worth that.

Furthermore, although I have my sports interests, I've never been particularly interested in football, and in recent years that interest has waned to near zero. I would stay educated on it to discuss with friends, but I haven't even watched three out of the last four Super Bowls. My closest male friends and I watch sports, some of us drink beer, but we see each other when time permits around our pressing business, and when we talk, we are largely discussing ideas and philosophies, planning and sometimes working to carry out business ventures, discussing arts and entertainment, or simply sharing interesting stories from our pasts. But I don't think any of those who are attached would ever be avoiding their wife or girlfriend to try to see me.

I've just never related at all to the mass media depiction of male culture, confirmed by a lot of guys I see, where countless hours of every week are spent swilling beer, watching games, and engaging in acts of deception to get away from beautiful women in order to get together with other guys to bump chests and slap asses while watching large, sweaty muscular men in tight pants crash into each other and wrestle around on the ground. I don't know, I always thought it was weird that I was considered gay because I'd rather spend a Sunday at the mall looking at clothes with a woman and having drinks with her watching the sunset while discussing life, even if I had already done the same Monday through Saturday. I don't know, call me crazy. Or wait, no, call me gay.

But whatever people's reasons, I heard about it enough times that I'm sure it was whispered twice that much and that there were those who felt sure it was true. I tried to keep my private life out of work completely, because I thought it was unprofessional, and didn't regard myself as having much of a margin of error for professionalism in the office. So I'm sure the suspicions went double for people in my jobs because I never mentioned any romantic entanglements. But it was only because I rarely had any to report, did not go out of my way to date co-workers unless my interest was very serious, and didn't think there was any reason to be talking about my humiliatingly failed dating efforts.

Since in my mind it was a complete certainty that I was attracted only to women…a lot…, and since I wasn't homophobic I didn't really consider it a slur, I didn't really care enough to make any great effort to dispel the rumors.  My only real concerns were that a woman that I was interested in might think it, or that an embarrassingly awkward situation might arise if, over an extended period of time, I was being friendly with a man who happened to be gay and had assumed that I was, and we both misunderstood the context of what was happening and we both ended up feeling bad about the whole thing.  But I knew human nature well enough to know that anything I tried to do to change perceptions would likely only make suspicions grow. As frustrating as my dating efforts were, and having heard how freely and easily at least physical intimacy flowed in certain parts of gay male culture, if I'd had ANY interest or ability to cross over to the other side, I would have done it long ago at certain points of extreme frustration and loneliness. So no, just not my thing. I think there might even be bets that have to be paid off on that now.

But the combination of my physical insecurities and this perception made me chronically feel that I would never be perceived as masculine enough by any woman. I was advised many times by friends that I might consider changing my fashion choices, but as troubled as I was, this was something I would not do.  Not only did I feel my clothes were a fundamental part of my self expression, but it was also for me a sense of a connection to my mother and older brother who I did not get to see very often, both of whom had similar interests in fashion, my mother at least in her younger years. Deciding what to wear in the morning reminded me of going to the mall and shopping for clothes with my brother as a teenager, and reminded me of my mother's younger days in my family's now-long-lost glory years before I was born when my mother was like the Black Jackie Kennedy of Wichita. This I would not change for any price. Not even for the love I so desperately craved from women, because any woman who was meant for me would love the way I dressed as much as I did, even before I told her why I did it.

My general shyness and not wanting to be the guy women always complained about who put uninvited moves on them also made things harder. I'm sure some women probably mistook for disinterest my over-abundance of respect for their personal space that I maintained until I felt absolutely certain that I was being invited in. Regardless, success in dating continued to elude me, sometimes in dramatic and remarkably heartbreaking ways. The girl that I think I loved the most in my life, the one with whom I lost what I will call my emotional virginity, we had shared letters expressing our love for each other, but the next time I saw her, 8000 miles from home, for some reason all of her intimate feeling for me seemed to have just somehow evaporated in the months we had been apart. This was a fact that I did not learn until I had traveled across the world, expecting us to fall into each others arms and begin a life together, even if then put on pause until she returned home.

Other failures turned to differently painful incidents where, according to what sources I considered reliable would tell me, a girl that I had been friends with and fell in love with who rejected me went on to sleep with what felt to me like every guy but me in our social circle, including multiple mutual friends…at once. I don't know if that really happened, but I felt no real way to find out the truth, and I trusted the two unconnected people who both relayed it back to me, so I moved on recognizing the doubt but suspecting it was true. It was like a unique, custom-designed torture each time, and I've told you only a tiny fraction of it all.

Even what might have been successes failed in bizarre ways.  There was a girl I went to high school with named Angela.  Angela was a Black girl, quiet, shy, a bit nerdy and quite smart.  Many would say that she was in many ways a reflection of me, and this was not something that appealed to me inherently. I wanted to be with someone who had things in common with me, but where we each brought major qualities to the mix that the other did not have. That was why Angela had never caught my attention in that way. I did not know her well and we had probably just spoken here and there, but never had a serious one-on-one conversation that I can recall.

One afternoon on the schoolbus, completely out-of-the-blue and as the first thing to start a conversation, Angela offered me a small stuffed animal as a gift.  It was so unexpected and seemingly ill-timed, that with so many others around, I thought that she was poking fun at me.  That was the depth of my insecurity—I though even this quiet smart girl who was probably even more shy than me, who had probably taken what was for her a huge leap, was actually poking fun at me.  I reacted with an unpleasant expression and I think I said something like, "What for?".  When I saw her response, I immediately realized that I had misunderstood.  I could see that she was hurt, and she said "nevermind" and withdrew the gift. Once again, I wished there was something that I could do, but I figured if I tried to take it after that, she would think it was just pity, which would only make her feel worse.

Even though I don't think Angela would have been the right girl for me, had I understood her intentions, I would have taken her gift graciously, and perhaps taken her out to a movie or for ice cream and taken the time to get to know her.  Perhaps I would have discovered that my initial impressions of her were wrong. But even had that initial moment not gone so wrong, I still would have had reservations.  Perhaps we could have become friends, but given that I felt that the chances of my developing a romantic attraction to her were slim, and knowing how unfair it felt to me when women offered me friendship in exchange for my love, I would have feared risking doing this to her.

Every time a woman showed any interest in me and I did not feel interest in return, I felt guilty, as if I was a hungry child being picky about the meal being offered. This self-perception was fed by the fact that a couple of the girls that I had spent long periods of time pursuing were the type that were sought after by many men, and thus, my friends and my sisters felt that my problem was that I had too-high standards. But this was not true.  There had been many "ordinary" girls that I had approached, but strangely, these girls seemed less interested in me in general, and fewer of them joined the small group of women who I talked about often, or happened to get far enough down the road that anyone I knew met them.

I wasn't chasing only pretty girls and appearance, while not at all irrelevant to me, was probably about fourth on my priority list in what I wanted in a woman.  In fact, there have been only a few situations in my life where I approached a beautiful stranger to pursue her romantically.  The beautiful girls that I had pursued, I had somehow ended up being in some situation where we were in close proximity for an extended period of time in a social or professional situation. Of course, I had been initially attracted to them as I was to so many women, but it was only getting to know a woman that made me really interested in dating her and not simply appreciating her from afar as a work of biological art.

This was why I generally only rarely introduced myself to strangers. It seemed like a scatter-shot method unlikely to succeed for someone like me, and the strategy being endorsed by professional "pick-up artists" and other men who I saw as the worst womanizers, I wanted nothing in common with them, not even an effective strategy implemented to achieve different ends. I typically only approached a woman in public when there had been something that caught my attention beyond just appearance--a clever comment overheard, a unique expression of style, or something that hinted at intelligence and the type of personality that attracted me. But there was an almost Shakespearean air in how things seemed to progress the furthest before failing with the women who were most attractive and most alluring to me. It was as if Kendrick's avenger was at work any time I was in the company of a woman.

The avenger visited me again when, about seven years ago, I met an amazing woman at a party at the house of a mutual friend.  We talked for a few hours, sometimes in conversations with a larger group, sometimes just the two of us.  It was one of those conversations where, within just a few minutes, she felt like someone I had known for years. And even though I of course did not know the history of her as you would with someone you had known a long time, I instantly longed to learn it.  She expressed commonality with ideas of mine in which I'd always felt isolated, and most amazing in all this was that she seemed to be feeling the same way. I felt so comfortable with her, so drawn to her, that had the party lived on far longer, and in the early hours of the morning we found ourselves alone, I might have told her all that I have written here on that very night.

When the party was ending, she came to me and suggested that we exchange phone numbers and get together.  It wasn't the casual thing that I had experienced with so many women where you know it is not likely to happen, but in this case, she was insistent and direct, and it seemed like she and I were thinking and feeling the same.  It was one of the rare times in my life that I told all my friends and my family about someone I had just met, and how excited I was.  One of the e-mails I sent had the subject line, "I Think I Just Met My Future Wife" and this was during a period in my life where I was generally disavowing marriage.  A few days later, I called her. She did not answer, so I left a voicemail message just saying how much I enjoyed meeting her and that I was excited to she her again.  When after several days she had not called back, I called again, and there still being no answer, I left another, slightly more muted message.  She did not call back.

Ordinarily, I would have just shrugged and moved on, but the intensity of the feeling of our first meeting had been such that I asked our mutual friend to find out what had happened.  The answer I got back, presumably after she was contacted was, "She met somebody else". There seemed to be only three alternatives. The first, that I had been mistaken in thinking that she felt the same intense connection that I did and thus my ability to read the level of a woman's interest in me was critically handicapped.  The second, that the universe was so brutally conspiring against me that she really had, totally by chance, run into someone else in whom she was even more interested within just a few days of meeting me. Or the third, that my life was such a romantic wasteland that this amazing thing that had happened only a few times in my life was something that happened for her every day.

Over the years, I have cleverly disguised this history of utter romantic failure, although I generally did not conceal with people I knew even casually that I had done little dating. I evaded giving details to people I didn't know well almost always without actually lying, but by simply rarely introducing the subject myself and then being trying to keep things short when it came up. I would talk vaguely about women I knew who were strangers to whoever I was talking to, usually without mentioning a name, and say things in such a way that I knew the other person would likely leap to the assumption that I was talking about a girl that I'd dated or at least slept with. I never claimed to have slept with any woman that I didn't, nor even allowed the false presumption to exist to any person that might ever come in contact with the woman mentioned.

Instead of saying "I'm single", I'd say, "I'm not dating anyone seriously", or I'd say "I'm single right now". All strictly true statements, but obviously, deceptive, and I take ownership of that. I was generally unfailingly honest otherwise in life, but I felt that these insecurities and frustrations were private and I had a right to keep them to myself. Hiding that you are not having sex is a completely different ethical matter than hiding that you are having it when you aren't supposed to be, in case any dull brains should seek to make that accusation.

I did not talk much about the intimate details of my physical insecurities, or the details of my failed dating pursuits with even with my closest friends, but those who spent any amount of time talking to me I would assume knew that I was very frustrated and felt that I might never be successful in dating. And then I finally found a girlfriend, and that is a story all its own and I have digressed from my mission of saying that it might be the view of some that it was my karma to suffer this as Kendrick may have been suffering similar frustrations.

For various reasons, I was at times in the close company of a number of different beautiful women, and seen with them in situations where people would have probably assumed without question that I was dating them. When you see a man and woman around the same age and obviously not related walking around together in social situations, even if they are not necessarily acting intimately, we assume they are together. This has created a few awkward moments for me because I have two sisters who look so different from me that I don't think people would assume we are related. We need a little social symbol we can agree on, a lapel pin or bracelet or something, that two people can agree to wear to let others know they are not attached to the person they are with.

I even wondered too how much my race was a factor, if any at all. The women that I have been interested have come from many different backgrounds and every different ethnicity.  Before my late 20s, I never even really considered that any of the non-Black women I became seriously interested in might have been deterred because I was Black. It was not because I was ignorant to the fact that many people felt this way. I just generally had such a high opinion of these women that it never even crossed my mind that they wouldn't share my view that, while of course there were harsh realities in our society that could make being in such a pairing difficult, love was so much bigger that, the discussion need not be entertained.

Although I had equal futility in my efforts to date Black women, I wondered, while the Black male seemed to be fetishized in nightclubs, my being a person not really looking for nightclub love, was there a broad reluctance to take someone like me home to meet the parents, regardless of the content of my character? I didn’t want to believe this could be true about the women that I became interested in, but the statistics showing the astronomical percentages at which people marry someone of the same race as they are make it hard to deny that we as a society still stick to our own in romance and at home even as professional and social worlds become more multicultural. But back then, I failed to consider the message I often preach to others: never assume that the people close to you are so good or so different that what tends to be true for most people in society can't also be true for them.

One White woman that I had danced around the possibility of dating one day sat with me after it seemed clear nothing was going to happen between us and told me a completely unsolicited story about how her uncle and aunt had said some horribly ugly things about her bi-racial niece. The story was largely a non sequitur in our conversation and in no readily discernible way related to what we were talking about.  She didn't comment on the story or explain why she was telling me, but I took the message to be that while she might have been interested in me, she'd never want her children to be ostracized by the older generation of her family as had happened with her sister, and that she was letting me know this had been at least part of the reason why things had never worked out between us. And you know what, I get it.

I am the type of person who would tell my entire family to get their mind right or go to hell if they were against someone I loved because of their color. I love my family dearly, and in recent years, I have come to appreciate and cherish them all even more, but I am not this way. The two should never be in conflict unless one side or the other chooses an immoral position.  Whether it be my family or my partner, I would always side with the right thing.  But I know many have the philosophy that family comes first no matter what, and while I disagree and feel this ethic is why so many negative social influences are able to survive, I respect everyone's right to live their life as they wish.  But still, the whole thing makes me want to go out a burn a flag.

As much as we like to pretend to be more progressive than we are, we are a long way from Martin Luther King Jr.'s dream in that particular respect more than any other. A long way. We love to fetishize and hunt for the new experience, but outside of a few selected combinations that society seems to endorse, we are collectively still very uncomfortable with two people of a different race really loving each other, and just as much of that, if not more of it, comes from the side of the minority groups.  So we all have some changing to do there, and I'll have more to say about that another time.

Whatever the reasons for my failures in my romantic pursuits, the biggest frustration was that I really didn't know the reasons, so that if there was any room for me to make changes, I could try to do so. Had there been an answer, had the women I'd pursued ever even given me explanations for rejecting me that sounded plausible, it would have been easier. I felt humiliated that this thing that seemed so easy for other men, seemed like an impossible puzzle for me to crack. Other guys would give me advice and I would be bewildered because their advice so often seemed basic and obvious and was stuff that had been failing consistently for me for literally decades. This fed my feelings of lack of masculinity, because I saw guys who treated women like dogs, and constantly lied to them and cheated on them, abused them emotionally and even sometimes physically, and these guys practically had a line of women at their front door. But perhaps these were just perceptions bred from my own insecurities.

In any event, I spent day after day and night after night alone. And as much as I blamed my weight, when I gave up all the foods that I loved for over a year to the strictness of a religious practice and exercised obsessively, while I saw a change in how much I was noticed, the end results of loneliness and failure didn’t change. I felt like I was a good person, and women kept telling me this right up until the point I expressed any romantic interest in them, so I just couldn't figure out what it was that was going wrong. Kendrick's avenger was always at my side.

Although I make these repeated allusions to supernatural intervention, I have never been a religious person, not even in the soft Eastern sense of karma-I have seen to many good people suffer and too many bad people prosper to even believe in that.  But that is how uncommonly dramatic my failures in love felt, as if a random universe could not possibly produce such repeated near-misses while others, even without trying sometimes, seemed to stumble upon passionate romances. I tell these stories only so that if Kendrick, unlike me, does believe in bad karma, he can take some solace in seeing that it worked for him on me.

Sometimes you remember things from long ago that you know as a part of your past, but think of rarely and perhaps don't connect with related events. One afternoon a few months ago, I reflected on a rarely thought of day from my youth, and I think I finally recognized why I had bullied Kendrick. It is no excuse, but it may be a reason and I will tell it to you now only because Kendrick knowing it might help take a bit of the sting out of what I did and those considering the situation might be able to look at seemingly cruel things that other have done to them, and take a more empathetic view.

My family was generally very poor when I was growing up. My father's construction work and preaching brought in erratic income, such that in some times, he would have some money on hand, and in those times we were able to travel, and buy a few nicer things. Not that we ever lived in any kind of luxury, but I would say our lifestyle fluctuated between lower middle class to needing the Salvation Army to help get our electricity turned back on. This cycle was not due to any level of irresponsibility, but rather because my mother had a chronic illness that had run up hundreds of thousands of dollars in medical bills, and because the illness was recurring, the bills never stopped coming and we were not able to get health insurance.  In cases such as hers, health insurance usually falls short of covering the bills anyway, so it was never really possible for the family to do anything long-term with the occasional relatively big paydays, most of which were probably still smaller than the average monthly paycheck of those who will read this. So we were trapped where we were. 

I was grateful for the good times because it allowed me to see a bigger world outside of just our neighborhood and what was written in books, and that motivated me to build a better life and escape.  Even if my father had practiced extreme belt-tightening when he got money just to keep us pegged comfortably just above poverty, I think the end result would have been worse.  If the electricity was always on, but I didn't get to see 20 of the 50 states before I left home, didn't get to occasionally know what it felt like to eat at a nice restaurant, to own a nice article of clothing, or to be able to buy something I really wanted, I probably would have been satisfied with just a decent job, a slightly better place to live, and never would have possessed the drive to pursue the enormous hopes and dreams that I am still holding on to. And although at times they have seemed to be only dust in my hands, I cannot bear to let them go.

Our day-to-day reality was that there was often no money to buy things or take care of basic needs. There was one occasion where my family lived without electricity for over a month, using candles, and in the last couple of weeks, a generator that we would run for a few hours each night. There were maybe a dozen other occasions during my youth when our electricity would be shut off for a few days until my father could scramble together the money to pay the bill. I remember the shock on the face of one kid at Stanford when I told this story. It was a completely foreign revelation that they would turn off your electricity if you didn't pay the bill.

From the time that I can remember, we always had food, although on just a couple of occasions, we had to stretch a relatively sparse amount over longer periods of time than it probably would have served ordinarily.  Allotting funds for things like clothes, shoes, often gas, car repairs, and certainly any bigger expenses, was usually a "juggle-and-wait" exercise. That was how things were. And I was very young, so although I was smart, could read at an adult level and was always paying attention to what adults were saying an doing, it is possible there were bigger financial struggles than I knew hidden out of my view.

Around that time when I was 7 or 8, I was trying to learn independence and I had, on my own initiative, decided to try to do my own laundry. My parents had bought me two new pairs of jeans for the just-started school semester, so I put them in the washer and started the cycle. I almost got it right, except that I didn't know the difference between detergent and bleach, so I put bleach in with my dark navy blue jeans.

The result was not a nice even stonewash, but rather, large orange and grapefruit-sized splotches in random locations. With the fashion shifts that have taken place in the last several years, it wouldn't be a problem today, but at that time, it was ugly and embarrassing. But the jeans were still structurally sound, and we didn’t have money to waste on replacing them, so I had to wear them anyway. It wasn't the worst teasing I ever took, but it was the most constant, because nobody would see it without saying something. Finally, I started trying to color in the spots with magic marker. It made them look worse.

Finally, my mother called some social services office so they could give me some clothes, and a social worker came to school to give them to me. I knew enough to understand without being told that this was a humiliating thing for a mother to have to make such a call, to admit to someone else she couldn't afford to clothe her own child, and I already felt ashamed of being poor myself. I remember dreading that other kids would find out that I was getting hand-out clothes. I don't remember for sure, but I probably didn't want to take the clothes. I likely would have preferred to wear my splotched jeans, but I had exceeded the threshold of complaining to be allowed to reject a solution.

I had just started to become really overweight. The social worker brought out jeans and underwear for me, and I went into the bathroom to try them on. Nothing fit. I was too fat for all of them. She came back another day with larger sized clothes for me to try. This particular memory is vague, but I had an emotional sense of remembering feeling bothered that the social worker was so matter-of-fact that it seemed insensitive. I try on the new jeans and underwear and they are still too tight. I remember dreading going back into the room where the social worker was to let her see that even the bigger clothes didn't fit. When she looked at me, she said something like "These are the largest we have, so you'll have to take them."

I'm standing here in front of a stranger that I recollect as being insensitive, stuffed like a sausage into clothes that my mother had to beg for from the state or the city or whoever it was, and even though I don't have the clear photographic memory of the images of it that I do for most instances in my life, nor much of a memory of the exact words spoken, I have an emotional memory of feeling deeply ashamed. I went back to class wearing the new clothes, and assumed other kids would know why I had gone out for a hour and come back wearing cheap brand new clothes. And in no time, I was being mocked again even worse than I had been over the bleach spots. It was later that day when I assaulted Kendrick. When I walked in and saw him standing there alone in the bathroom, it was the first time I had been back in that bathroom since I was there to try on the ill-fitting, hand-out clothes that I was wearing when I did it.

I had never before recollected that the day I got the clothes was the same day.  Until then, why I had acted as I did was a complete mystery to me, and I just couldn't figure out what to say, and thus, I had told only one person in my entire life, and that was more than two decades later.  I lived with it alone in silent shame for more than 20 years.  It was only when I remembered this that I made the decision that I had to tell this story somehow, especially if it turned out that Kendrick was somewhere in life scarred and filled with hate because of what I had done. I had planned to tell it as a part of my own personal literary masterpiece so that it would be hidden amidst my retellings of some of the terrible things that happened to me, where I could be the victim, and accompanied by an accounting of my most spectacular achievements that make me look good. But, if its not too late already, Kendrick may not be able to wait for that, and my friend's crisis may not be able to wait either, so as hard as it is, I need to publish this now.

There is one last embarrassingly personal thing that I have to share. Strangely, just because it is so private, and in my upbringing the type of thing you just don't talk about in public, it is actually one of the harder things here for me to discuss.  But because I would not want Kendrick to read this, if he is somewhere out there as a still single man, and think, "Great, this guy is apologizing to release his own guilt, but now if this gets traced back to me, I have to walk around with everybody in the world knowing I have a tiny penis from the moment they meet me". So I have to embarrass myself one more time before I go, but that is really an important part of this story anyway.

How can I say this artistically? When there is nothing happening around me that my body is intrigued by, you might think that I'm almost just like Kendrick. However, when my body decides to pay attention to something, quite the opposite becomes true. With my limited sexual history, I was never really aware that there was anything unusual about my…unintrigued state…until one of the few women I have been intimate with lightheartedly teased me about it. It was a funny joke between us, and I am now extremely grateful that she mentioned it, because I had never thought at all about that connection to Kendrick until she did, and I also then thought about another obvious connection that I had not contemplated: Like Kendrick, I am also uncircumcised.

Having shared the type of private detail that is very hard for a shy, private person like me to have immortalized in the public knowledge base, let me explain, if it is not already clear to you, why I feel I owe it to Kendrick to take this leap as well.  I only ever saw Kendrick's penis once in that bathroom, and then it was unusually small.  For all I know, or you know, he might be just like me, and when he has something more interesting presented to him than a bunch of guys teasing him in the bathroom, he may the Frank Sinatra of whatever social environment he is now in. If you don't know the Frank Sinatra custom underwear story, Google it. It is...I hesitate to say hilarious when we are talking about how physical traits can impact a person's psyche, but it is, well...interesting.

So, any woman (or man if that happens to be his preference) who might meet Kendrick, if he is still alive and healthy as I hope and pray that he is, you already know the strength and courage that he must have to have made it through the hellish gauntlet we all set in front of him.  So by the time you get to know him and get close enough to find out what I've now given you good reason to be uncertain about, if people are at all true to what they have always said about caring most about the person on the inside, what he shares in common in that private department with Frank Sinatra, me or you, shouldn't really matter.

It's funny, apparently no one ever noticed these things about me when I shared the same urinal with Kendrick and everyone else. Having been trained to be very sensitive about these things by my religious parents, I did usually try to do all I could to turn from view, but the way the geometry of the situation was, I could not have avoided a purposeful gaze. Perhaps my entire life, and his, might have been different if the other boys had paid more attention to me. Then he would not have been alone, and perhaps there would have been no teasing at all if his traits did not seem so unusual, or perhaps I could have shared that burden with him, and stood up against it more effectively since the way my parents had trained me to respect decency, I would not have taken teasing over that.  And then perhaps instead of him living with the pain of what I had done, and my living with the guilt and shame of it, we might have instead been friends.

That leads me to why I chose the pseudonym Kendrick for the boy I bullied. When I was born, my family was in such a state of chaos that I did not have a name chosen for a year. I was told when I was young that there had been several candidates for names, but that I was within a whisper of being named Kendrick. For years, I have felt that if I ever needed to publish something anonymously, I would use this, along with my mother's family name, to construct a pen name that I loved: Kendrick Eagleton. I felt a great attachment to this, for a lot of reasons that will be the subject of other stories in the future, and I had at times had considered that I might use that rather than my real name permanently if I ever got published. But of course, having revealed it, I can never use it anonymously now.

In writing this, I tried to think of a name to use that would be something that people would not be able to cipher to figure out Kendrick's real name, but would have sufficient meaning that I would connect it strongly enough to minimize the risk that I would accidentally say his real name if I found myself discussing this piece. I tried for a long time to think of something that would work but I could not. Finally, I chose Kendrick, sacrificing at least the anonymity of my beautiful pen name that I was all but certain to put to use one day if my career as a writer were ever to take flight.  I chose Kendrick to remind myself that if things had been a little different, if a particular person's glance had turned a different way on a particular day at that urinal, Kendrick is, in two ways, a boy that I could have been.

I have told all of you a lot about myself, things that will make is hard for people to ever again see me as they once did.  But I really wrote this to talk to two people directly...

Kendrick, I hope that you have managed to make a good life for yourself in spite of all that happened, and if you have, you are a stronger man that I could even imagine. If instead you have struggled in any way, and even if, as a result of your pain, you did terrible things, I can understand. I hope that understanding your story, something that you may have never told, the world will find it easier to forgive you if you have done anything that needs forgiving. As for my own forgiveness, there are no words that I can express to convey how deeply sorry I am for what I did—and I am gifted to possess a mastery of words that is known to few others. I know that there is nothing I can say or do to erase how horrible you must have felt in not just the moment that I assaulted you, but all the other moments where I could have stood up for you, and knew that I should have, and did nothing.

All that I can offer you is that I was a tormented, confused kid myself, with more chaos going on at home than I have even hinted at here and I hope that knowing my story, you can have a measure of greater understanding of my actions, even though it does not excuse them. It was never my intent to hurt you. I wasn't even thinking at all in that moment. I was, I believe, just being driven by my own pain of walking back into that bathroom again after feeling so humiliated and ashamed when I was there last only a short while earlier. In all the things I've done in my life that I have wished I could take back, this has always been at the very top of the list.

I hope that you will grant me whatever forgiveness that you can, and blame only me for what I did and no one else who might share any trait of mine. And I hope that you can stretch your mind to accept that although I may have the gift of being able to write these words, I am probably no more innocent than the other kids who bullied you. Every one probably has a story in some way like mine, trapped untold inside their mind, even if it was just that they always caught a beating at home if they didn't follow the crowd. I know it is easy for all of us to have our excuses and reasons now, and that probably doesn't mean very much to you, but perhaps to understand that what we did was never because of any fault of yours will mean at a little —and that at least is something.

There is not much that I have to give right now, but I want you to know that if I ever have the success that I hope to have, there will never be anything that you will be in want of if I have the power to provide it. Even if you were to say that the only restitution you would accept would be to take my life, although I will not pretend to be so noble that honoring such a request would be easy or automatic, I'm not sure that I would be justified to refuse you.

I hope that you will not feel that way. I hope that you survived, and that you managed to overcome us all, and I hope that I will be able to meet you, give you a hug, and offer you these words directly. I hope that the world can meet you and admire your strength, and that I can give you the honor of your true name.  But if you should choose not to wish to reveal yourself publicly, I would ask anyone who reads this and might know you to respect your silence. And if there is any dignity at all left in our media, I would ask them to respect your anonymity, and not seek you out. But I at least would like to know that you are alive, and that you made it, and that if what I have shared only serves to make a single day of your life more pleasant, it was worth whatever price I will pay in revealing my terrible secrets.

I don't know how I will show my face to anyone that I have known after this. It is hard to imagine looking into the eyes of a single person that I can think of. Except one. There is only one person in the world, including my family, that knows everything that I have shared here, in whom I have entrusted all of these secrets, every one. She is my friend who is in crisis now, and I hope that she will read this, and understand what she has to do in her own life, even if she decides that I can no longer be a part of it and as a consequence I have looked another person in the eye without shame for the last time. I owe this to my friend...even if it does not make a difference. I owe this to Kendrick…and it is still so far from enough.


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