Chapter 2: A New Start

School started for the day and Nicole and I went out ways. Classes were the same as always and at lunch I met up with my friends. I'd go, once I finished eating, from table to table to talk with different groups. I had friends in all the cliques and did not belong to any of them. I could probably have run for class president and won, because of my interconnections. That just was not part of what I was interested in. I saw Brenda and we talked. She told me she was sorry I was hurt by what she said, but didn't know what else to do. She didn't want to get my hopes up. I told her it was okay and I'd be fine, gave her a hug and went on with my day.

That's pretty much how school went for me. Mornings talking with Nicole, lunch with my various friends and, of course, classes. In one class, we were tasked with making a movie. I teamed up with two of my friends. We had two weeks to do it. It may have seemed lame, when we were done, but have you ever tried to do stop motion clay animation? We got an A+ for our film. It wasn't for quality, it was for the work that went into it, the story line, and how well thought out it was. There's something to be said for being gamers and playing games like D&D. With a good GM, which Scott definitely is, coming up with a story was easy. We actually even played the game to create the story and then made it into our little movie. Pretty cool, eh?

Did you know that all hypnosis is self-hypnosis? Even if someone else is doing an induction and you go under, you are doing it to yourself? Yep, that's a fact. It is possible to stop yourself from going "under". The trick is knowing or learning how. And, that's where I started with hypnosis. Learning how to hypnotize myself and to help me "grow a pair" as it were. It wasn't instantaneous, nor easy. Going into the trance state was easy. It was even enjoyable. The problem was with telling myself what needed to be done and how to do it. Eventually, I came to realize that the best way to go about things was to create MP3s that helped me go into trance and then gave myself suggestions to help me be more confident and self assured. I made it so that it was re-enforcing those suggestions each time I listened to it. It was trial and error and took a few weeks to get the wording down. I later learned that my wording was very much NLP structured, even though I had no idea what NLP was, yet.

By the time Spring Break came along I'd grown more confident and assertive. I wasn't an ass about it. I just stopped being so wishy washy. I was still friendly, helpful, and someone my friends could, and did, confide in. The change, however, was noticed and Brenda told me so when we met at the mall one day.

"James, you've changed in the last couple months. Any reason for that?"

"How do you mean?" I asked this as I was getting my order from the pizza place and heading to a table to enjoy it.

"Well, you seem taller," she said as she walked beside me, glancing at me as we walked the short distance. "And, there seems to be a ... determination, but not aggressiveness, about you that wasn't there before. What's changed in you?"