A Quote by Augusten Burroughs
Throwing things horrified me. I suffered extreme, paralyzing anxiety when it came to anything remotely athletic. I wouldn't even run to catch the school bus because I knew I'd trip and then get teased for a year.
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I went through elementary school being bullied and teased. I remember someone - I can't recall his name, but I can see his face - who decided on the school bus, when I was ten or eleven, to call me "Percy." That was somehow supposed to connect to the fact that I wasn't very athletic. I was, in fact, also not very coordinated. I was not very masculine, by the standards of ten-year-olds. I remember being on the school bus and everyone chanting, "Percy! Percy! Percy!" at me.
At 14, I was the most disciplined guy around. I would get up at 5 o'clock in the morning and run five miles, and then go to school. Sometimes I would run behind the school bus, and the kids thought I was just crazy. I knew what I wanted.
I liked my skirts short because I wanted to run and catch the bus to get to work.
One of my fun road trips was [when] a group of guys and I rented a tour bus and we started in Orlando and drove all the way around the country going to baseball games. That was an awesome trip because each night we would go to a new baseball stadium, watch a baseball game, get in the bus, wake up [in] the next city, go to another baseball game. We did this for a little while and it was great. We called that trip the Rats on the Bus and it was a fun trip.
Anxiety is so pervasive in my work, it's like it's not even a thing because it's always there. Like air. I have to work through a layer of anxiety to get to anything else. It's embarrassing to me when people point out to me all the anxiety I portray in my work. I don't ever want to write about anxiety again but it'd be like leaving a huge gap in the picture.
Pray to catch the bus, then run as fast as you can.
Now that I think about it, my 40th birthday was the most anxiety I've ever had, and my wedding was also the second time I've had that much anxiety. So I'm starting to realize that I can't be throwing these big bash parties because I need to own that I get anxiety with a lot of people diverting their attention to me.
I can remember being bullied and teased. It was absolutely horrible. I got kicked out of ninth grade for throwing a book at a girl who teased me. It was absolutely terrible.
In high school, I was probably 155 - I wanted to run fast and get a scholarship, so, it was drilled in me that if you lose weight, you'll run faster. So, I went on a diet - I did lose weight, but then I hit a plateau where I couldn't lose any more weight. So, I started throwing my food up, so I became bulimic.
School was a big source of anxiety for me. I hated school. I have social anxiety, and it developed when I was a kid. I had trouble going to birthday parties. It was always there. I begged my mom to let me be home-schooled at one point for a semester because I was so miserable at school.
I was horrified in high school by the fate of the hanged maids at the end of the Odyssey; it seemed unfair to me, even then.
I knew everything a woman hated even before I remotely knew anything a woman liked.
I've been fascinated with gargoyles since I was a kid. I took a high school trip to Europe, the 8 countries in 5 weeks kind of trip. Even then I collected postcards of gargoyles. Then I sort of forgot about it. You flash-forward a few years and I'm at Disney, we're looking for an idea to base a show on. I was running series development at the time at Disney TV Animation. And we came up with the Gargoyles comedy series. Which didn't sell!
It's that stubborn fixation on details that has invariably prevented me from getting excited about celebrating each passing year. Which is why my friends know that doing things such as throwing me surprise parties would only serve to surprise me with an overwhelming sense of panic and anxiety.
There are going to be times when we can't wait for somebody. Now, you're either on the bus or off the bus. If you're on the bus, and you get left behind, then you'll find it again. If you're off the bus in the first place — then it won't make a damn.
I started home-schooling when I was in elementary school because my parents were really busy back then. They didn't have time to drive me there, and we didn't have a school bus or whatever.
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