When I was fifteen years old, the world was my enemy. And why shouldn’t it have been? It was 1996. Up until that point, the world had done its best to drag me, sometimes screaming, through metaphorical gutters of the worst kinds of waste. At that young age I had already been half-starved, covered in lice and fleas, abused in the worst kinds of ways. I was a victim, but also a survivor. The constant battling only made me harder, scooped out the soft spots in large chunks so what I was left with was a veritable chitinous exoskeleton, impervious to the outside world. As a result, when I moved to the middle-class neighborhood in New Hampshire, filled with anxious folks living in high-end…