“I’m great!” I suddenly realized. “I’m fantastic! I’m amazing!” And then the next thought I had was, “Why is it that I take so much shit from people the whole time? Why do I let myself get pushed around so much? Why do I always let people take me for a fool?” At that moment in time I knew that I wasn’t just great, I was awesome. I was better than them all. They weren’t on the same page as me. They weren’t in the same class.

Full of the awareness of my own undeniable superiority, I laughed. I laughed loudly and scornfully, thinking of all the halfwits who had made fun of me and belittled me and how it was them that were the stupid shit-heads not me. Those useless shit-head arseholes. How dare they look down on me, thinking that they knew it all! They don’t know a damn thing! They don’t know shit! I couldn’t believe it. To think that my whole life I have been taking so much crap from those smug bastards when actually they were all just a bunch of fool assholes seemed quite hilarious to me. It blew me away.

Then I remembered my headmaster and how often I had been brow-beaten by him, how often I had been made to feel stupid by him, and my mood abruptly changed. I couldn’t help then remembering all the people who had humiliated me, belittled me, mocked and derided me and in the blink of an eye I was beside myself with rage. I was hopping mad. Those lousy fuckwits, I fumed – those dirty filthy hypocritical bad-minded scumbags. Now that I thought of it I could see that my whole life I had been subjected to a systematic process whereby I had been made to feel that it was me who was the dick-head, when actually that wasn’t the case at all. It had been them all along! They were the dick-heads! As the sheer enormity of the injustice that had been perpetrated upon me became clear it was as if someone had crept up behind me and punched me full-force in the kidneys. I went from being enraged to being something else entirely. I was beyond angry now. I didn’t know what I was.

Before I had been red in the face and hot under the collar but now I was stone cold, like a statue. I could feel every last drop of blood drain from my face. I had gone so far beyond fury that it wasn’t funny. It wasn’t funny at all. I had gone beyond fury into what? I don’t have the words for it, to be honest. It was as if I had gone into some kind of catatonic state and had withdrawn deep into myself, locked up in some icy capsule of pure undiluted hatred.

I don’t know how long I was like that. It could have been hours for all I knew. When I came to I was a pale shadow of my former self. There was no life left in me. I could see clearly now that it had been me who was the fool for allowing all those other fools to get the better of me. If they were fools then I was a worse one! It was me who was the dickhead. It always had been. They were right.

As I stood there thinking this a small brown dog walked up very deliberately to me and pissed slowly all over my leg, looking up at me the whole time as it did so with its insolent, fearless eyes, as if to say, “What are you going to do about it, asshole?”

I knew that I wasn’t going to do anything. The dog knew it, I knew it, everyone in the street knew it. I was a born loser – a world-class loser – and I had no other option open to me other than just to get used to it…