So it seems that a hot button topic for the age is the subject of Bullying. All varieties of bullying. But these days in particular, Cyber-bullying, which encompasses cruelty via text, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and probably a dozen or more online outlets that I've never heard of because I am currently the positively ancient age of forty-five.
Back in my day (just a phrase to prove the point of being positively ancient), bullying was expressed by pushing you into a locker, stealing your lunch money, snagging your street clothes from your gym locker and tossing them out a window, and even switching your shampoo for Nair hair remover. It was embodied by writing ugly phrases on your hallway locker in permanent marker, smashing your lunch bag, putting gum in your hair as you sat unawares in your bus seat, or the more passive-aggressive practice of picking you last for teams at recess or in gym class.
To my recollection, none of these cruel incidents befell me. As a matter of fact, from the age of eight to approximately ten-and-a-half, I was the Golden Child. I was the Girl Who Could Do No Wrong. Every teacher from the second to fifth grade acted as though I hung the moon and strung the stars from the moon to the earth. I made straight A's with minimal (often zero) effort. I could draw any cartoon character posed to me, thus prompting me to create my own and feature them in stories and comic strips of my own devising.
I made a friend in my second grade class named Eric during my first year in Pennsylvania. He possessed the same sarcastic sense of humor and precocious sense of irony that I had. We both embodied a boisterous creative spirit which carried through in our writing and artwork, and our combined work ethic was anything if not industrious. It was Eric who inspired me to write stories morning, noon and night, and often during class time when I had already finished my homework. We even embarked on co-creating a publication, hemmed together with oak tag and magic marker, glitter and glue, pipe cleaners and sticky stars, and gave it the very ill-conceived moniker of The Monthly Cramp, if you can imagine it; "Monthly" for its timeframe of production, and "Cramp" for the little cartoonish creature comprised of what appeared to be a right angle filled with teeth and perhaps a googly eye or two to lend it an anthropomorphic/bestiary quality that formed the letter "C". I can only imagine our teachers in the second and third grade stifling a snort when gazing upon what we considered to be a work of unparalleled brilliance. I mean, we featured articles, comic strips, stories, you name it. I often wondered why my mother made a weird face whenever I would babble about it, trying to convince me to change the name of the magazine. We were eight, for godsakes. Back then, we didn't know anything about that stuff. That would come about a year later.
While I was still fairly new, I was quick to observe and navigate the social complexities of my surroundings, a practice that sounds odd for an eight year-old to comprehend. I picked up very quickly on the cliques that were already forming, who was cool, who wasn't. I initially didn't give any thought to my friends being "cool" or not. I had friends who were odd but creative ducks like myself, like Eric. I had other friends who liked my drawings and my writings. I had a friend I'd made in class who was definitely one who marched to her own internal band. Her handwriting and housekeeping were equally atrocious-- so much so that our second grade teacher, Mrs. Ross, once made an example of her by tipping her desk upside down and dumping a cascade of crumpled papers, dull-tipped no. 2 pencils and index card onto the floor, punctuated by the startling crash and shatter of a small glass elephant she had brought in to class one day for show-and-tell. The poor thing just stood there, red-faced, as Mrs. Ross coolly pointed out that if she had only kept her desk neat, then perhaps her precious knick-knack might not have been broken. My friend held it together, didn't pitch a holy fit, wouldn't give anyone that satisfaction. Because even though she wore hand-me-down threads from three sisters ahead of her, and her hair wasn't combed, and her grades weren't the best, she had something many kids didn't have: street smarts. And a truly goofy sense of humor.
I really liked her. She was one of my first girl friends in the second grade, who lived in the same subdivision as I did, and was only a short bike ride away. We often played at each other's houses, and attended Brownie troop meetings together. I remember listening to the Rocky Horror Picture Show soundtrack one afternoon in her bedroom, not having a clue what a "Sweet Transvestite" from Transsexual Transylvania was. To be fair, we listened to the Muppets' The Frog Prince LP, too. We could laugh about farts and create weird sculptures out of Play-Doh, and sing songs until we were hoarse.
But not all of the kids in my class liked her.
There was a growing contingent of "popular" girls in my class, yes, in the second grade, the last bastion of childhood. They made fun of her well-worn clothes and her messy hair, and who knows what other faults they found in her. I unearthed a memory when I was in my thirties dating back to this period, an afternoon spent on the playground at recess, when this group of girls was making fun of my friend. I was standing with them, not so much participating, but observing and making what could have been a fateful judgment call as a result. I remember walking over to my friend, and cupping my hand by her ear to whisper, "If I'm ever with them, and I make fun of you, don't believe me. Because it's not true."
This memory came out of no where, just one of those things triggered by god-knows-what. But it sent shivers down my spine, the calculating coldness of the words making me slightly sick to my stomach. If I had been my friend, I would have told me to kindly fuck off, in some second grader's way of expressing said sentiment.
But, amazingly, she didn't.
As a matter of fact, we remained friends throughout elementary, junior high and even the end of high school. I never did make fun of her, at least, no memories have been triggered to believe otherwise, but the fact that I knew enough to balance my social comings and goings at the age of eight is pretty chilling to me. I was always on the lookout to keep myself safe, first and foremost. It was a shadowing of things to come, I guess.
I floated through elementary school without a worry in the world. These were those wonderful years you hear about, when we all played TV Freeze Tag until the sun went down and the fireflies came out. When backyards all ran into one another, unfettered by fences, and the one next-door neighbor's pool was open to all whenever there was a block party on Memorial Day or the Fourth of July. The parents drank beer and jug wine, and the kids drank artificial fruit juices in those little plastic barrels with the foil-sealed tops and ate Bomb Pops while running through the sprinklers half-naked. We rode our bikes everywhere, bought penny candy and pizza with our allowances, and stayed up late on Saturday nights playing games on the Atari 2600 and watching The Love Boat and Fantasy Island and the occasional scary movie. Life was really good. It was classic Suburbia. I wouldn't change a moment.
I was blessed with two parents who loved me and fostered my creativity whenever they saw a spark. When I showed an aptitude for playing music by ear, they bought a piano and lessons. When I wanted to play softball or do gymnastics, they signed me up. I was active and had tons of friends, but they also recognized my artistic, introspective side, and gave me my space when I wanted to stay in my room and create, write, draw...
Not an awkward child by any means (though by all means certainly quirky and imaginative), I had no shortage of friends, and plenty of acquaintances in my classes. I enjoyed entertaining them with my drawings and stories, and they would always tell me what I was going to be when I grew up. "You're going to be a famous artist!" or "You're going to be a writer!"
While it was commonplace for me to earn A's during every marking period and win creative writing contests, I never bragged to anyone. Even though receiving said grades and accolades had become almost old-hat to me, bordering on expectation, I never completely understood why, or how they all came so easily. I was never the last to be picked for kickball teams. I loved running around with the boys, getting down in the dirt, playing with Star Wars action figures... My teachers all parroted my friends' praises, and I was no doubt a Teacher's Pet, helping them put together display case decorations each month, and earning good grades on tests and homework assignments. You would think these precocious traits would make me a target for cruelty doled out by disgruntled students in my classes, but they simply didn't.
Until the fifth grade.
We had a burly teacher named Mrs. Jacobson. She didn't take any shit, basically. And kids in 1980 were just starting to get to be a little more than unruly and obnoxious. It was the calm before the shit-storm of hormones that was about to hit most of us. And Mrs. J. just didn't suffer fools. Or ten year-olds with attitude. After all, back then, the teacher was still the authority figure, and we were expected to behave.
This of course branded her a complete bitch, as she had a scary, raspy voice and thought nothing of raising it to a frightening squawk if you were carrying on. There were consequences to your actions back then. But I was blissfully immune to the rabble-rousing and resulting punishments. I just flitted around, drawing my cartoons, writing my stories, dreaming of working for Walt Disney Productions, maybe writing a series of novels, or studying sharks as a marine biologist.
Enter Deirdre and Lauren.
Deirdre was a short girl with a brown bowl-cut, a little pointed nose that was dusted with freckles. She declared that she had a "boyfriend" (yes, at the age of nine and ten, we really had no clue what that meant, back in the Dark Ages of the tail-end of the Seventies), Patrick (a perfect match made in white trash Irish under-aged heaven, no?), and they proved all of this to the class during indoor recess when the two of them made out in the coat closet. I mean, I knew what it was to have a crush-- I'd been crushing on boys since the age of five-- but my crushes went no further than Shaun Cassidy, and Shawn Ortman, who skated a couples dance with me at the Rollerama in the third grade. But, I digress.
It was right around this time that Deirdre decided to point out to me in a very public way that I really needed to get myself some designer jeans.
Recall again that this was 1979-1980-1981, the end of a period of inflation in our economy, and that a ten year-old asking her parents for $50 jeans with Gloria Vanderbilt's signature, a Jordache horse head, or Calvin Klein emblazoned across one buttcheek would likely be met with horror or, even worse, laughter. Add to this the fact that even if my parents had dispensible income like that laying around, I probably could not have squeezed said buttcheeks into the jeans, as they were of a very straight slender cut, and I was not. This is probably why Deirdre made the less-than-subtle suggestion about my wardrobe. There was no way I could possibly slithered my J-Lo behind and hips into a girl's pair of designer jeans.
Lauren, as I recall, was a "new girl." She started at our elementary school in the fifth grade. There was no history there between us. I had no reason to dislike her. I didn't even know her. You would think the same would be true from her side of the fence, where I was concerned.
This was clearly not the case, for reasons that I could never, to this very day, figure out.
She always seemed to have a smile on her face. But it wasn't a friendly, happy smile. There was something else behind it that I could never quite put my finger on-- it was like she was sizing me up like a shark would while circling its prey.
She was a good deal taller than I was-- probably the first girl, or classmate in general, who was. I was always one of the tallest in my classes. So her form was rather imposing. She wasn't a skinny girl by any means, not one of those ballet/gymnast bodies that resembled a stick figure as was common at age ten.
And yet she had the audacity to call me out as "fat."
She did this during music class, when she got her hands on a pair of drumsticks and, while I was kneeling on the floor doing something, she got behind me and proceeded to beat a drum solo on my ass. When I whipped around to face her, she had the same stupid wide smile on her face, all innocence. "What?" she exclaimed, to what to have been my guppy-mouthed expression of shock. "I was only playing your drums..." This was apparently hysterically funny to several of my classmates.
I don't know if it was during this same music class, but I had a very bad cold and case of laryngitis. Why our music teacher picked me to sing a solo in front of everyone is beyond me. On a good day, I would have nailed it, even with my chronic nasal congestion at that age. On this day, however, with Lauren sitting right in front of me still wearing that big stupid smile on her face, all I could do was weakly squeak out a few notes, and probably turn several shades of Embarrassment.
The drum solo incident seemed to spark similar teasing from other classmates, mostly the boys. One of them write in my autograph book that he wished me luck in the Miss Piggy Contest. He delighted in telling me that he was going to grow up to be a great writer, and I was going to be home eating bon bons. Another kid used to sing "Blip, blip, blip, blip" at me, from a commercial for an electronic game that was popular at the time. He also addressed me as Blip, both in person and in my autograph book.
Then an anonymous brat decided it would be fun to take my sand painting I'd made during a vacation in San Diego and shake the jar so that all the colored sand layers were jumbled together. I never learned who did it, or why.
Lauren led the charge when it came to making fun of my drawings, particularly my cartoons. Why? I don't know, maybe she couldn't draw a stick figure and was jealous? I had no idea, but I certainly never made fun of anything she'd ever done.
She rode the same bus that I did, clear on up through high school, and whenever she would see me (I would witness this out of my peripheral vision), she would turn to whomever was sitting beside her, and then proceed to loudly recount some ridiculous tale from the fifth grade about me, and erupt into hysterical laughter.
The pivotal year of sixth grade was the first year we took part in a middle school setting. Instead of getting to "rule the school" in elementary school, we were instead plucked from the near-top of the mountain and dropped back down to the bottom rung of what used to be called junior high. We were the little kids again, divided into "teams," along with two other elementary schools' worth of kids, so we were mixed with many people we'd never met before.
It was between the fifth and sixth grade that all of my previous teachers had gone against the school board to insist that I be admitted into the Gifted program. Even though my standardized tests were off the charts, and my performance in class was beyond above-average, when it came to taking the IQ tests administered by the district's school psychologist to determine placement, I always missed the Gifted range by a point or two, and was never admitted into the program. I was still in the highest reading and math groups, but the mysterious Gifted program eluded me. All I knew about the Gifted program was that a handful of kids got to disappear for an hour or so one day a week to some other classroom, and do really fun stuff like create filmstrips and learn things like Logic and Problem-Solving.
So here I was, in a new school, with a locker that became my mortal enemy (could almost never get it to open), with new kids I didn't know, a face full of acne, thick glasses, braces, stringy brown hair, and I'd not only grown three inches over the summer, but I'd gained about 20 pounds. I loved unicorns and science fiction, and a couple of new friends had introduced me to a game that their older brothers played called Dungeons & Dragons (even though I never actually played it). I was the epitome of Nerd.
And I was also no longer the smart kid.
I don't know what I missed out on from not being in the Gifted program from birth, but clearly my brain worked differently than the rest of these kids, because I could not get a grade higher than a D to save my life. This, from a kid who formerly had never seen a grade lower than an A. I was also shoved into a higher math group to boot, and that's when things really got messed-up. More D's and F's. My parents tried to get me taken out of the level I'd be shoved into, but were told by the District that they "had quotas to meet" (my school district was among the top 10% in the country). So I was stuck in accelerated math courses until my senior year of high school, when I was no longer required to take math.
So I was ugly, chunky, no longer smart, and clearly all the things that I once cared about were now stupid. You can probably imagine where this introspection took me. Right down the rabbit hole.
And through it all, the bitchy girls were there at every turn. I managed to still retain actual friends (how, I have no idea, as my attitude was morphed and twisted by an influx of hormones and an intense self-loathing from the inside out). No matter what I did-- from a Halloween costume worn to and made fun of during a dance to a body-wave perm I got which was loudly derided during chorus practice in the seventh grade by a gaggle of Jewish girls who pretty much ruled the school-- I couldn't win.
And there was Lauren, on the bus, or in the hallway. It wasn't an everyday thing-- but she would always appear when I least expected it, to say something moronic in completely non sequitur fashion, for no reason at all, to bring me right back to our fifth grade classroom and make me feel like a powerless squib of a girl.
I never found my voice at the right time and place. I had a mouth on me, to be sure, and I knew how to pick a fight-- but the people who received the brunt of my unpleasantness and ugliness were those who never deserved it: my true friends, and my family. I was perfectly hideous to my parents, and later in high school, I made a sadistic game out of pushing my friends away, having them crawl back to me in literal tears and confusion as to what they had done to make me so angry, only to smack them down again.
Looking back on my actions decades later, I can only deduce this, in reviewing my Self back then as a separate entity completely: I hated myself so very much, that the best way to do damage to myself, without doing actual physical damage, was to hurt those that I cared about the most. It was almost like going out-of-body; the ugly, damaged, pissed-off half of my being would take over, and it would essentially hold the good, kind, empathic portion of myself hostage, as if tying her to a chair and whispering, "Watch this..." and then being cruel and heinous to those who actually knew the "real" me, and more importantly, those who cared about her a great deal.
I could only get down a hallway by putting an invisible mask on my face and never making eye contact with those I might run into. The cliques of black girls who would gather and line up by the lockers would shout out things at anyone passing by, but would grow silent when I came by. The cheerleaders and the jocks no longer noticed me. The smarter-than-thou honors society kids didn't see me. The artsy punk and goth and theatre kids didn't know I was alive. Despite my aloof appearance, I took careful note of all of them. I knew their uniforms and their haircuts, their style of dress and the music they listened to. And while a teenager's grandest desire, second only to being "understood," is to be accepted, I was content to flit in a very surface manner between these "groups," barely making a ripple, knowing just the right things to say, the right things to comment on or to bring up, and then glide away, untouched, unscathed. I became a Social Chameleon.
And by the end of junior year, I had no idea who I was. And I no longer cared.
I no longer cared about social convention and the bullshit politics of belonging. All I cared about was the music that brought me joy (anything by Duran Duran-- particularly their Rio album, David Bowie's Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars LP, Cyndi Lauper and her original band's debut Blue Angel, Blondie's Plastic Letters), the quintessential Eighties' novels of Bright Lights Big City and Less Than Zero, the books and magazine articles about Andy Warhol, CBGB's, the birth of Punk and New Wave, and the colored pencils, paints, and charcoal that I used to fill my sketch books with portraits of models and rock stars. Long-gone were the sketches of Disney and Warner Bros. cartoons, of Snoopy and Marmaduke and Garfield, or the creations of my own design. Gone were the piano lessons when I no longer bothered to practice-- though I would sit at the keys and bang out my emotions after having a shitty day.
I remember befriending a girl in my senior year creative writing class. I remembered her from as far back as middle school. She was picked on by others, kept largely to herself except for maybe one or two friends. But in class, as I sat beside her, I noticed she was always scribbling in a small notepad-- either writing that was too small to read, or else little cartoonish drawings. Over time she and I would talk, and I discovered that she was quite humorous and kind, and she reminded me somewhat of myself from several years ago. One lunch period I asked her to sit with me, and later one of my supposed friends asked me what the hell my problem was, inviting such a dork to join us. I went off on a rampage, asking who the fuck did she think she was to decide who could sit where, and that if she had ever bothered to take the time to get to know this girl, she would realize she's really quite cool. I didn't care what anyone thought of me any more. I was done.
For some reason, I tend to trace my sense of self and lack of self-esteem back to Lauren, to this very day. Even though I am far into adulthood, now approaching middle age, I don't know why all of life's experiences since that time have done nothing to diminish completely how I feel about myself and my abilities. I used to still have dreams about her picking on me well into my 20's and 30's, never realizing in my dream that I could just walk up to her face and tell her most emphatically to fuck off, or perhaps devolve into violence and punch her square between the eyes.
In this magical universe of connectivity, I have found her on Facebook. I find it mildly ironic that her posts are all about her precious kids, a couple with special needs, and what a warm, empathic mask she has crafted for herself. She has posted several things about kids' cruelty to other kids, and it makes my blood boil. Instead of being smugly pleased that she has obviously matured since my experiences with her from age 10-18, I am incensed. For whatever reason, I have never been able to let go of the anger that I have toward her, perhaps because I never directed it at her 30+ years ago when and where it was needed. As supposedly intelligent as I am, I do not know how to move past whatever "damage" I allowed her to do to me, to literally change who I was as a person overnight.
I look around at those with whom I went to school, and all of them-- the "ugliest," the "dorkiest," the "meanest," the "shyest," the "rudest," whatever slots they fell into back in the day-- are married, some several times, most with kids, with families, with careers, with family vacations and interests and accomplishments and accolades.
I feel like an alien, in comparison-- as I always have.
This -- post-- is a work in progress.
