I get it, I wasn’t the easiest student to deal with when I first entered public school with only seven weeks left in the fifth grade. I was weird, culturally and socially awkward, and painfully clueless about how I was supposed to behave.

But, in truth, I was just a scared little kid trying to navigate something completely foreign without any real guidance. My mom had wanted me to stay in home school because the cult encouraged its members to keep away from “worldly” associations of any kind. Her advice to me was, “you’re going to go to public school and you’re going to hate it and then you’re going to beg me to let you come back home”.

Those first seven weeks I cried almost every day after school, but I made sure my tears were dry by the time mom got home from work an hour later.

Sure, the kids were mean, but my teacher was far worse. I can still remember the first time she mocked me in front of the whole class. “What, do you have a bladder infection or something?” she sneered at me.

I had attempted to quietly leave the classroom to go to the bathroom when she asked me what I thought I was doing. My only compass for this sort of situation (needing to pee, but not wanting to disrupt adults while they were speaking) was through my experiences in church. I thought I was making the right choice. “No, you need to return to your seat and raise your hand and ask to be excused if you want to leave the room,” she finally explained after finishing any chances I had at making friends that year.

So, I returned to my desk and raised my hand. She ignored me for a good long while, only to deny my request to use the bathroom. Actually, I use to get a lot of urinary tract infections when I was a kid…

But, it wasn’t until I tried to learn long division that she made me feel like I was truly stupid and worthless. With a weak background in math (my mom, a ninth grade dropout who claimed to be bad at math herself, had been my only teacher) and my late arrival in the semester, I was set up to fail.

I can still remember her yelling the order of operations for long division (though, I didn’t properly learn them until years later) while my vision tunneled and my ears pounded.

I feel the same anxiety, two decades later, when my college trig professor asks if I understand what he meant after answering a question for me. My mind empties of logic, numbers blur into alien symbols, and I hope my head nod and “uh-huh” seems convincing enough for him to move on. Why did I ask any questions in the first place! I think to myself over the drum of my racing heart.

The next year I moved school districts (spoiler alert: emerging theme here) and started fresh. Things were better at my new school, and I managed to make several friends. But one day in seventh grade, due to the fact that I was a member of an evangelical cult, I made the mistake of knocking on a classmate’s door, unannounced, on a Saturday morning.

There I was, Bible in one hand, and religious pamphlets in the other. With my church clothes on, and my mother standing beside me, as a popular boy from school came to the door. I weakly stammered “w-would you like to hear about the good news of Jehovah’s kingdom?”.

The next Monday, just after first period roll call, the popular boy spoke up. “Jenee came to my door suuuuuuuper early on Saturday and woke me up! She was with her mom and they were trying to convince me the ‘end of the world’ was coming and I could only get saved by converting to their cult.”.

I sat mute as my teacher joined the conversation. “Oh, I didn’t know you were a Jehovah Witness Jenee! Those people are insane, they think only 144,000 are going to heaven! What about the rest of us, we’re all going to hell?”.

I tried to use my many years of training and indoctrination to defend against his (only partially correct) claims about my ‘faith’, but wasn’t able to form the words before he continued. “They came to my house once, and I told them never to come back. I can’t believe they’d invade my privacy to try and get me to join a cult!”.

Regardless of your opinions about what a child claims to have faith in, it is never appropriate to mock them in front of their peers about it. I was, like most kids, really just going along with what I had been told was right at home. I had no real capacity to argue theology or doctrine in seventh grade, nor should I have been expected to.

When I got the same teacher a few years later for honors biology, he treated me like I barely existed. I decided to hate him for other, valid reasons. Like the fact that he was a racist, who told us (blondes) not to “interbreed” because everyone would end up “gray”.

In eighth grade, for one semester, my mom decided that we should move to Denver. I attended a school with a drug and violence problem in Englewood that has since been shut down due to low enrollment.

While there, I was threatened every day by a girl in my english class. Her name was Ellie-May and she would say, “meet me outside after school you little bitch, I’m going to kick your fucking ass” and I’d say “that sounds unpleasant I think I’d rather just go home” and she’d say “fucking pussy”.

But it wasn’t so hard to avoid Ellie-May. I sat on the other side of the room, stopped sharing my writing with the class, and let her angst slide to other students. One threat per day was tolerable.

And I understood why nobody liked me at this new school. I was a rural kid who owned two pairs of jeans, three t-shirts and two sweaters — all boys clothes, including my (cheap) sneakers. My sense of style hadn’t evolved yet, and my dental work was still in progress. There was nothing “cool” about me, and I had to leave the room for every christmas song, cupcake, or birthday celebration.

I could understand my peers reactions. I don’t think it’s an excuse for their behaviour, but when we’re young we’re often poor judges of character. It was the teachers who hurt me the most, though.

Like my science teacher, who didn’t even try to get the other kids in my group to work with me on the toothpick bridge project, so I sat alone instead. Like, the assistant P.E. coach who watched as the popular girls chanted “rat girl” at me in the gym, and said nothing. The same assistant coach who accused me of saying “fuck you” when I had said “forget you” to the girls mocking me, who then gave me detention for a word I wouldn’t use until I started college (no, really, that’s why ‘fuck’ is my favorite word now, making up for lost time).

When I moved back to my hometown, and back to the school I had better luck in, I took several classes where I learned almost nothing. My honors history teacher refused to tell me what the war of 1812 was about, or answer any other questions outside of the curriculum (our book supposedly ended on the war of 1812, which I learned about years later from a Canadian friend — spoiler, we lost). I began catching up on sleep in that class while she took extended breaks to visit the art teacher (it was a small school, we all knew what was up).

In my final math class of highschool, which I think was geometry, my grade was decided by a cheerleader teachers assistant. Our teacher, Mr. Barrow, claimed we had to learn to write proofs to pass the class, but he said he couldn’t explain how to do it, we just had to figure it out. I never figured it out. The cheerleader gave me a B, but I deserved an F.

Whether through neglect or outright aggression, I have had nearly as many teachers attempt to foil my education as further it. Of course there were moments of hope, and teachers whose enthusiasm and kindness kept me going. Without them I may not have even graduated high school.

My own mother tried to scare me into staying in home school, where I was rapidly falling behind in math and spelling (thank the lawd for autocorrect). She later forced me to turn down a major educational opportunity for the approval of her cult. Had I followed her “righteous path”, I would have devoted my life to God and his ministry, taking an unspoken vow of poverty and secular ignorance.

Today, I am fighting to reclaim my education. I am struggling to fill in the gaps in my foundation, and focusing heavily on math and science.

When someone asks me about my intended major, I still hesitate to say “bioengineering”. It seems so lofty for a kid who never learned their multiplication tables, who avoided math like the plague for most of their life, and grew up believing that evolution was a myth.

The hardest part of this journey (so far!) has not been the coursework. The hardest part has been overcoming the fear and shame that has been intrinsically connected to my education for so long. Like the myth that I’m “just not good at math”.

It takes a lot to dispel the darkness and undo the damage of the past. I am certainly not done, but I’ve come too far to let the bullies win.

So, even though the numbers still go blurry sometimes, I keep looking until they start to make sense again.