Moving out of elementary school and into middle school seemed like a scary step to me, at first glance. I mean here I was going from a world where my grade had about 90 students in it and stepping into sixth grade where there were 310 students merging together. Running through my mind was fears of the torments of elementary school expanding from 60 students or so to 300 students.

But, at first, it wasn't overly bad. Everyone was nervous, and all of the social barriers had come down because of that fear. There were no niches, and there was no harassment of any kind towards anyone. However, that only lasted for the first few weeks of school. As everyone settled in and became comfortable with middle school, those walls went back up and the whole cycle restarted.

By this time, my ADHD and OCD had been heavily documented by the school district, and I was placed into the Learning Disability (LD) program with the problems of organization and focus. This had actually began back in the forth grade, but I refused to acknowledge it and participate because it was just another portal for the students to use against me. It wouldn't be until later on in middle school that I would be able to partially escape that fear.

My case-manager, the person who tracks me throughout the year to make sure I'm staying on-track, was Al Lindau. Mr. Lindau was a man in his early-30s and always joked about he had gone bald by his mid-20s. He was a graceful man worthy of the respect of the world because of his extreme dedication to not only his charges by the students of the entire school.

Come sixth grade I had began to stop seeking adult help for the troubles I was having with students. The prior three years had proven that to be worthless. A child who does not care about punishment will simply take it and pick up where they left off. So having adults get involved only proved to worsen the situation for me. So instead of seeking adult assistance, I began trying to ignore everything and/or fight back in my own way.

By mid-way through the sixth grade, I had been shunned. The only time most other students would speak to me would be if they wanted me to answer a homework question for them or if they wanted to insult me in any way. It was then that my self-conscienceness began to severely grip me and take control of my actions. Tugging at my shirt, my pants, and anything I was wearing became an all too common habit that follows me to this day.

The way I could describe the self-conscienceness would be easily described in that I wanted to be invisible. I didn't want people to see me because I feared what they would say about me. I didn't want people to touch me. I absolutely HATED to be touched. Crowded hallways would typically put me into an internal, but controlled, panic attack. It would happen every day.

Gym class was especially painful for me to take part in. Sure, I could jog, run, do the work-outs that they wanted us to do, but once again: I could be seen. I would be teased and tormented just because of how I looked in any way, shape, or form. Furthermore, the gym lockers were open-group changing. I couldn't do it. I couldn't change in front of them because I was afraid of what they might say. Did I look weird? Was there something wrong with me? No. I was just completely scared of them ever seeing me. So I pleaded my case with Mr. Platts, the gym teacher at the time, and he would let me change in the closet. However, the closet didn't lock. So at first, students would randomly open the closet door just to laugh and yell at me. They knew that it upset me, and that was their goal. My way around this was to get in there before the rest entered the locker room and leave after they all had left. I was lucky, however, in that for the first six months of sixth grade, I couldn't participate in gym. Why? I had broken my left wrist in 40 spots (completely shattered it).

About mid-way through seventh grade, I had forgotten my gym uniform one day. Mr. Platts refused to let me not participate that day because of it and told me to wear whatever spare suit he had left. It was too small, way too small. It was skin tight. My biggest fear was showing myself to anyone, and this did exactly that. During the pre-class laps around the gym, I made it around twice before I began to lose control of my fear. By the start of the third lap, I ran into the locker room and locked myself in one of the bathroom stalls. I was completely freaked out, I was having a panic attack, I couldn't speak, I could barely breathe, and I sure as hell didn't want to move from that spot. Mr. Platts came in five minutes later to figure out was up, and I tried telling him what was happening. When he heard me crying, he called Mr. Lindau who came to help me. He got me my clothes and took me back to his office. I spent the rest of the day curled up into a ball in the small conference room attached to his office. It became obvious to him how severe my fear was. The next day, Dr. Brown evaluated me to figure out what happened, and he determined that due to my self-conscienceness, it would be too traumatic to keep me in gym. I never participated in another gym class again; this includes high school.

As a replacement for gym, I volunteered my time in the Cognitively Disabled (CD) department of Marshal Middle School. The program allowed me the opportunity to help teach and take care of mentally retarded students who were spending their lives in the school systems. I participated in this group for most of the seventh grade and all of the eighth grade. It gave me insight to how intelligent the CD students really were despite the popular stereotype all of the students had. The lessons I learned and the experiences I gained because of my time working in the CD department was nothing less than invaluable.

Throughout all of this, David and I had also parted ways around the end of the sixth grade. David found his way into hardcore drugs, and I just didn't want to have anything to do with drugs or people who used drugs. So now I was separated from virtually every friend I had ever had. Vicky was on a different grade team than I was, and so was Ashley and Matt, so I would never see or hear from them except in the mornings before school. I was always a good kid when it came to alcohol and drugs. I never smoked and I never drank.

Starting in the seventh grade, I befriending a student named Jason Coon who would end up leaving his footprints in the history of my life. Jason has epilepsy, and typically would have three or four siezures per week during school. Every now and then, he would have to be taken to the hospital because of the severity of his siezures. I met Jason through the LD program because he had severe memory issues due to his siezures. He would end up teaching me patience and understanding as he and I always worked at two totally different thinking speeds. He would also teach me that I wasn't the only one caught in the hellfire of torment and torture by other students.

Throughout all of the hell that came from middle school, I was given one opportunity to escape through home. This came in the form of a personal computer running Windows 98. It was a Proteve Intel Pentium 333Mhz computer, and it would open up a door that I would never have had possible, otherwise. After discovering the Internet and chat rooms, I would soon come across a website titled www.tuxedomask.com at the young age of 11. At the time, and for the first year I was there, www.tuxedomask.com was nothing other than a website where I would chat in the Volano chat room and talk on the Matt Wright BBS forums.

At this site, I would eventually meet a man named Igor Bass, aka Kaitou Ace. Kaitou took control of the website and the server it was running on in late 1998. At the same time, I had a small website titled Zelda Source, in honor of my insane obsession with the Zelda game series, and it was hosted at a then small company, HostRocket.com. Kaitou and I began speaking in mid-1998 after his persistant attempts to avoid me. He would respond to me maybe once every two weeks or so for a time. However, as we began talking more frequently, an opportunity arised that would prove ground-breaking for a very bright future. HostRocket, at the time, had only 30 or so clients, and they had a bad spell for about a week where they went offline. Being the annoy kid I was at the time, I would bug the crap out of Brendan Bradly, owner of HostRocket, to the point where he cancelled my account. So in 2000, when I was 13-years-old, Kaitou offered me a hosting account under his server.

Within just a couple months, Kaitou had allowed me root access to his server, and thus because my adventure to learn how to manage Linux servers as I do for a living today. It would have an obvious impact on me that will never be forgotten because of how much of my life has been dedicated to it. By November 2001, Kaitou had offered me ownership within his name-only company, Neoservers.

Neoservers is now known as Neoservers LLC. It is my brain child, and contains the past 5 years of my life dedicated into it. But throughout middle school, it was nothing more than a private web host with me learning how to manage the software and hardware through trial and error. It wouldn't be until my sophomore year in high school that Neoservers would begin to grow into an actual company. However, this would open up a doorway to me that would teach me many critical skills and allow me to know some of the people I know today.

But back in middle school, things weren't doing so well. From my issues with focus came my inability to witstand math class. As good as I am with math today, I could not handle it too well at that time. The teacher who taught seventh grade math went so fast that I couldn't keep up with him. I ended up switching math classes by floating to another grade team and joining in their math class, which went at a slower pace. This would open me up to more ridicule and crap, but it was at least bareable.

In eighth grade, my strong suits became to show through the clutter and mayhem of my life. My ability to lead, my skills as a writer, and my abilities in science all emerged through obvious shows of skill. My musical capabilities had also been revealed by the musical director for the orchestra. However, I was criticized because I never took those abilities seriously while in middle school.

All throughout middle school, my mother had taken a back seat on life. With Dean's death, she was mostly a closed woman and didn't have much to do. It was at this time that she began to ignore the problems in our household and the problems I brought up. She would try to ignore it by getting mad at me and she would yell at me. No matter what the problem, she just didn't want to deal with it. Furthermore, as I broke into my teen years, she began fearing the loss of me and up until a year or so ago she didn't really want to give me much independance.

Her constant ignoring of problems was only made into a bigger problem with my OCD. I've always needed resolution to major conflicts in my life, and without that resolution I do almsot anything that I could think of to try and get that resolution. My way to handle her was to try to push through her wall and get her to listen to me, but I've never truly gotten her to listen. Instead, I came out of those years with a mother who was both cold and distant, and then the next day kind and caring. But no matter what her attitude, she never wanted to face her problems and acknowledge that the world isn't what she had hoped it would be. Sometimes I pity her, but it is only because she keeps herself locked up in the house all the time now, but there isn't anything I can do but let her wade through her own self-pity.

At the end of the eighth grade, I had no good friends that I could confide in. I had spent the past three years invisible to the every day world that I was apart of simply because I wasn't liked. So what would high school bring? Would the harassment that would bleed from student to student continue there too? Would the pool of students participating in the harassment that had from from 60 to 300 now go from 300 to 2000? I would soon find out.

One thing I could have never predicted, however, was how trialsome high school would end up being for me emotionally. The gym incident in the seventh grade would fail to compare to some of the trials I would face in high school.

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