WHAT FREUD GOT RIGHT

The following passage is excerpted from Andy Nowicki’s collection of essays, Ruminations of a Low-Status Male, Volume 1, now available on Kindle and in paperback.

by Andy Nowicki

For me, an essential part of growing up was realizing and accepting that I wasn’t, and could never be, my father.

SEXUALIZATION AND HUMILIATION: THE SUZANNE AFFAIR

The following is an excerpt from "Welcome Back Chaos," Andy Nowicki's upcoming memoir/manifesto.

by Andy Nowicki

My mind also flashes to a different memory, of events which took place during the school year which followed the summer of WarGames.

There was a girl in my seventh-grade class named Suzanne, a skinny, beady-eyed girl who always faintly repelled me. I had no idea why I felt this way at the time, but looking back now, I think it was because she was, in general, a pretty scary child. In today's parlance, one might call her “psycho,” or perhaps more benignly, aver that she “has issues.” I do not mean to be unkind in my assessment of Suzanne, who perhaps was the product of a broken home, or the victim of child abuse. Some trauma had surely warped her psyche, to the point where now, on the brink of young womanhood, she had become prone to bizarre fixations and obsessions which would take root suddenly, as if from out of nowhere.