Finding My Voice

Chapter Five

By the time I reached high school, I was still trying to figure out where I belonged.

The classroom did not always feel like a natural fit.

Catholic school gave my days structure, but sitting still and studying quietly were difficult for me. I tried. I honestly did. Every afternoon I would leave school fully intending to study that night.

Then the bell rang.

And suddenly I was free again.

The moment I walked out those doors, school disappeared from my mind almost completely. I would get home and immediately drift toward the things that actually made my brain come alive. Music. Electronics. Television. Poetry. Computers. Taking things apart just to understand how they worked. Anything visual. Anything alive.

Homework felt impossible.

I would sit there staring at assignments while my thoughts scattered in ten different directions. The boredom physically hurt. Then the next morning I would walk into class and feel that horrible sinking realization all over again.

I forgot.

Again.

At that point I would try to look more confident than I felt.

I was still learning how to ask for help.

I had plenty of questions, especially in religion class. Looking back, I can speak to my own restlessness more easily than I can know what my teachers thought. I was trying to understand things in my own way.

Even back then, my brain approached belief scientifically.

I believed in God. I still do, in my own way. But I also believed the Big Bang happened. Evolution made sense to me. Honestly, the idea that existence itself exploded into reality almost strengthened the idea of a higher power in my mind instead of weakening it.

Something had to start all of this.

Something had to light the fuse.

I sometimes struggled to connect what I was learning about faith with all the questions running through my head.

My brain did not work that way.

I thought deeply about everything.

Probably too deeply.

Especially for a teenager.

At the same time, I carried around feelings I did not know how to explain. I did not yet have the words for what was going on inside me.

So instead I disappeared into music.

Music felt bigger than school. Bigger than church sometimes.

My tastes were all over the place. Air Supply. Billy Joel. Styx. Then harder stuff like Pink Floyd, AC/DC, Twisted Sister, Bon Jovi, and Judas Priest. Some nights I wanted romance. Other nights I wanted noise loud enough to shake thoughts loose from my head entirely.

I loved all of it.

Comedy too.

Every Sunday night I listened to Dr. Demento in my room while the weekend slowly faded outside my window. Novelty songs and absurd humor floated through the darkness, giving me something to look forward to before another school week.

That strange late-night radio show became part of my ritual somehow.

The weekend ending.

School waiting again Monday morning.

Music and comedy temporarily quieted the noise inside my head.

My brothers belonged to different generations inside the family.

I always thought of them as waves.

Mike and Frank were the first wave. Already adults by the time I really understood the world around me. Their stories opened a window onto years I had been too young to remember.

Mike was different.

Mike went to college, repaired copiers for a living, and remained committed to his faith. He was also one of the biggest scientific influences in my life. I used to go over to his place and sit beside him programming his Commodore 64. In the setup we used, I remember typing programs and starting over when they were gone.

I loved it.

The computer responded logically in ways school never seemed to. You typed commands and the machine obeyed. Systems made sense if you learned them correctly.

Those afternoons with Mike became an important part of my growing interest in technology.

Then there was the second wave.

Eric. David. Tom.

That generation shaped my teenage years the most.

Eric was a big influence in the house for a while. When he eventually joined the Marines, it marked a new chapter in his life and in the life of our family.

Mostly I remember David sitting in his room listening to albums on his stereo system like music itself was sacred. Eventually he got married and started a family.

Tom was another part of that second wave. Each of my brothers had his own personality and his own place in my memories.

Then there was me.

Too young to fully belong with them.

Too old to remain a child.

Mostly just watching.

Music became a connection between my brothers and me. I remember them listening to albums, and I wanted to share in that feeling of getting lost in a song.

I wanted connection.

I wanted quiet.

Sometimes I would lie there listening to albums while thinking about God, existence, the universe, mythology, love, and whether any of us were here for a reason at all.

I wanted to understand something bigger than myself.

At school I had fallen in love with writing by then. My English teacher actually encouraged it. That class felt different from everything else because imagination mattered there. I kept journals constantly. Wrote poetry. Learned mythology and Homer’s journey. I was in love with love itself back then. Any girl who showed me attention immediately became important in my mind even if I could barely speak back to her because I was so painfully shy.

Being number eleven out of twelve children, I often found myself watching and listening.

I learned to observe.

I learned to take things in.

Sometimes I kept more inside than I knew how to say.

I wrote a poem once called Death of a Poet.

I still remember pieces of it.

At the time I really believed that.

I believed nobody wanted to read my writing anymore.

Looking back now, I think I was becoming older and trying to understand how writing would fit into the rest of my life.

But maybe the poet never really died at all.

Maybe he just went quiet for a very long time.

And maybe these pages are proof that he finally found his way back.