One May, a boy was born that nobody wanted.

He wasn’t planned, you see. There had been three, two girls then a boy, before him, all planned, all wanted, born one after the other so that they would all be as close in age as possible without being triplets.

They formed an ungainly but cohesive sibling unit, and no thought was given to adding to the family unit at all.

But then, four and half years after the last one was born, a surprise failure of a tubal ligation brought into their happy little world a little redheaded boy that, well, just didn’t fit, really.

Mother had already gone back to work after putting three little ones into the world and getting them to roughly school age, and she certainly wasn’t going to put her life on hold for a kid whom nobody had intended.

So our little redheaded tyke was raised by babysitters. Mostly, a very nice lady from the other side of the tracks (literally) named Betty, who had just the right mix of tenderness and toughness to raise an almost frighteningly bright but extremely sweet little redhead.

That rather nicely left everyone to get on with their own lives without having to give our boy any thought at all.

So they didn’t.

Still, he made friends with the girl next door and the girl across the street, and was a little sad when his whole family left every day for school and work, but they were not all that close, so it was okay.

And to be fair, his family never told him he wasn’t wanted, or that it was really inconvenient to have him around, or that they had been better off before him.

They just treated him that way.

He got the message, and tried to stay out of everyone’s say and make himself as small and easy to care for as possible. That was, he figured, his job in the family.

To try his best to just disappear.

Then school happened, and things got considerably worse. Turns out, being raised by a babysitter and a well-meaning but distracted family, and having had only girls as friends, had left him ill-equipped to deal with the rough and tumble of the schoolyard.

The kids at school behaved nothing like everyone he had known up until that point, in that they acted like normal children and not the products of a highly intellectual and individualistic family where people more or less did their own thing.

He couldn’t relate. Plus, he was somewhat sloppy in appearance (because nobody was there to make sure he looked OK before he walked alone to school) and arrived at school already reading and writing far above the other students.

So he couldn’t relate to them, or they to him, and he rapidly became the lowest on the totem pole for his whole school.

Even the retarded kids had friends, and laughed at him.

He was bullied constantly by other students, never had healthy friendships, and went through the school system ostracized and alone. But at least his parents had promised that he would have the same college education his sisters had already had, paid for by them.

Then college came. And for the first time in his life, he had healthy friendships with a group of other nerds who came to collectively refer to themselves as The Pit Crew, because they met and hung out in a small cafeteria known as The Pit.

For two glorious years, he was truly happy. He enjoyed his courses, he hung out with his nerdy friends, he had his first apartment, he lived the college life.

Then his parents decided they wanted to take early retirement and abruptly withdrew their funding, breaking their promise and suddenly throwing their unwanted child into limbo. He was forced to moved back to his high-unemployment small town, unable to return to school for two years or more because the student loan laws in his province made no provisions for parents who could easily afford to send their kids to college, but just didn’t feel like it.

Without himself as the anchor, The Pit Crew drifted apart. Once solid friendships simply dissolved without him.

And so he went back to being alone, and spending most of his time in his room, and sank deeper and deeper into depression that as of the writing of this article still claims him.

And as of this date, he is 38 years old.

Depression has no exit signs.