I don’t know why this incident has been on my mind, but I’d like to share it with you guys, /r/aspergers.

As you could probably imagine, I was not the most popular person in school, quite the opposite. Safe to say that I was the most bullied person in late elementary and all of middle school.

Middle school. I would go weeks without speaking to a single person in my school simply because I did not have many friends and I was deathly afraid of talking to anyone. People called me names all of the time. The big three was “Terrorist” because I would carry a musical instrument on my back sometimes because I needed to take it home. I was also called the “Terminator” or “Exterminator.” The names were used interchangeably, and to this day, I have no idea why I was called that. The last is “The Pen Guy.”

My older sister entered high school the year I entered middle school, and she got this package of these Papermate felt-tipped pens. I remember seeing my father wince at the price. Eleven dollars for four pens. Quite a bit for my family at the time. But he bought them nonetheless. However, my sister never used them and they remained in its pristine packaging for a whole year.

Whenever seventh grade rolled around, I took a liking to these pens which were long since forgotten by my sister and father. So I took them to school with me. I opened up the package and took the pen on the farthest left out of the package and held it in my hands. The pen felt good to touch and it looked beautiful. Jet black, but it shined in the light. Plastic, I know, but I loved the look of it.

I took off the cap and tried to write something with it, but I stopped when I wrote the first letter of my name. My handwriting made it look awful, but the pen itself wrote beautifully. I got out a fresh sheet of paper and tried to write my name again, this time in cursive. Not the best work in the world, but I was proud. In the end I decided to only use these pens for writing my signature.

It got to the point that every time I had free time in class, I would open up my binder and take out the pen on the far left just to look at it. Sometimes it would keep me entertained for the whole time, hours. Whenever I felt confident, I would take the cap off and practice writing my signature.

One day before class, I made the mistake in leaving my binder unattended while I talked to one of my only friends I made a couple of weeks prior. We talked, we laughed. It felt great. But it came at a cost. When the time came for the class to take their seats, I sat down and checked on my pens. One of them was gone. The one on the far left. As my teacher was calling roll, I looked all around my desk for that pen. Nowhere to be seen until I caught a glimpse of it in the hands of a girl who sat several rows back from me.

I turned around and tried to get her attention. She looked up whenever I called for her the fourth or fifth time with an impatient expression. I told her that she had my pen to which she said that she did not have my pen.

She went back to writing with the pen which made me feel sick. She was using the pen to write notes which she passed to her friends around the class. That pen shouldn’t have been used for such a task. It should only be used for signatures. This actually made me freak out, I told her that she was messing up the pen and using it wrong until my teacher hushed me.

Wait, my teacher! I thought. Of course, I’ll just tell him that she stole my pen. And I did.

My teacher took off his glasses looked at me with the most deadpan expression. She stole your pen? To which the thief shouted out, claiming that the pen was hers. I brought out my package of pens and pointed at the empty slot, thinking it would be enough evidence to get my pen back. But my teacher said that I had three more pens and I should have just used another one.

It wasn’t going to feel the same, I knew it. Rage started to fill my vision as I stomped over to the girl and grabbed her wrists and took the pen back by force. I was taller and had more muscular than her, it was easy. With my pen in my hands I went back to my seat and inspected the plastic to see if it was damaged in any way.

As I was doing that, the thief shouted out in the classroom, “Mister, he stole my pen!”

My teacher, without looking up told me to give the pen back. She walked over to my desk, hovering over me, waiting for my pen. I exhaled with a growl and threw it at her.

For the rest of the day, I was borderline meltdown. Whenever gym class rolled around, my friends asked what was wrong to which I would tell them. They would then tell me that “it was just a pen.” But it wasn’t just a pen. I got an obsession with that pen. Some might say it had some sentimental value to me. Nothing was different from the other pens, but I just loved it.

Word got around and I was then called “The Pen Guy.” The kids taunted me, freaking out about their pens. Because, you know, why would anyone freak out over a pen? It’s silly and childish to be freaking out over a pen when you have three other ones. That’s what those other pens were there for, for replacement.

But I missed that pen. I got angry at myself because I obsessed over that pen. I kept repeating to myself “it’s just a pen. It’s just a pen.” It did not help me. That pen was lost, and none of them could replace it. Why couldn’t I get over it? It was just a pen! I never took one of the other three felt tipped pen out of its package.

I could see it in myself now. I was different from everyone. I was a person who obsessed over a pen. I knew something was "different" with me. It did not really make sense, but I knew that I was different some how.

I was diagnosed with Asperger's Syndrome a couple years later.