in 7th grade i was "emergency expelled" for a week https://twitter.com/SaraBWarf/status/1216915289385971713

i used to be a very angry kid and in 7th grade i

1) fashioned a "knife" out of a metal ruler, magnets, and construction paper and occasionally waved it at some 6th graders who pissed me off

2) brought a swiss army knife to school and waved it at my friend who had annoyed me

during 2) there was a girl in the room who got scared, told her parents, her parents told the school, and the school called a cop in to talk to me about 1) and 2)

they decided to expel me for a week while they investigated how much of a danger to the other students i posed

this was by far the most trouble i'd ever gotten in. for context, i was in the gifted program and was one of the best students there. usually i'd just get detention for talking too much in class. i was excitable but not in any way a delinquent

i don't remember much about this part but i think my parents were too worried about what would happen to me to even be mad at me which was a first. the whole thing was very surreal, i couldn't really take in that it was happening

it was the first time i really thought deliberately about what effects my actions were having on the people around me and whether i wanted to change. i was scaring the other kids, and i realized i didn't want that. so i decided to stop being angry and start being friendly

and it *worked*. in 8th grade i started talking to girls for the first time (i'd heard you were supposed to listen to their feelings and let them talk a lot and i did and it worked), a girl told me she liked me for the first time (i was *over the moon*), i made lots of friends

and, deciding to stuff down my anger came at a cost. it would explode out about once a year. i've only just in the last few months started reclaiming and reintegrating it. turns out anger's really important!

there's also a lesson i learned from that experience that i didn't even realize explicitly until literally yesterday - i learned that to get girls to like me i had to pretend to be someone else. that's cost me a lot. still unraveling this one