When were you at your most insufferable

And when did you realize it?

It always sneaks up on me. No matter how often I think I have done away with the habits and obsessions and quirks that make me insufferable, they always come back to me like a childhood nightmare. Except that they are never the same creature. I think I could write a whole book about the ways in which I’ve been insufferable. I have tried everything to shake the adjective from me, but it usually just goes dormant for a little while before reemerging as something new posing as something cool.

When it first occurred to me I could write about this, I had a pretty clear idea of the moment in my personal history. But as I thought about it, more moments just kept coming up. I want to say this is a good thing. To realize how often you’ve been so dull or cliché or pedantic is to grow. You have hindsight. Unfortunately for me I’ve never had foresight.

Sometimes it comes full circle. For instance as a kid in elementary school, I wore a matching black nylon jumpsuit with neon triangles peppered on it and I had a hot pink fanny pack. I kept all sorts of little trinkets in the fanny pack and would slip into weird little high pitched and cartoon voices. My middle school and high school self found this kid insufferable. So did my friends older brother P.J. who later told me how he hated when I would come over because I wouldn’t curse and instead would say “ah nuts” and I didn’t want to smoke cigars with the other kids, and because I was a “pussy” when we all wrestled. When P.J. told me this, it was meant as a compliment because we had become friends in high school math. He was a year behind and I was two years ahead. I could see how he thought it would be a nice thing to hear, how far I’d come in the eyes of a cool senior, but it didn’t make me feel all that great. Now I think that little kids running around saying “ah nuts” and pulling out micro machines and wearing hot pink are pretty dope. I wish I had that bold preference for style today.

A lot of times it was at my most confident that I later found out I was my most insufferable. In middle school, my friend Ryan told me that no one liked me because I made fun of everyone and wore khakis and a hemp necklace. He was undoubtedly right and it was devastating to hear because I liked my pants, coveted the necklace, and thought being funny was my only advantage over the athletic kids. Ryan was attempting to hurt me and he succeeded but he also helped me out quite a bit. I stopped making fun of people and started making fun of myself. I wasn’t about to give up my sense of humor. It’s not like I could just decide to have better coordination or not be afraid to go off jumps on my snowboard or find the courage and athleticism to do a backflip in P.E. Making fun of myself served me pretty well for the rest of high school. I mean it came at the cost of my self-esteem, but at least I had friends.

In high school, things got really bad.