When I was a Freshman in high school, a song was made up about how fat I was. They tried to make me sing it on a band trip. I was warned about this ahead of time and didn't go. In fact, I let the situation convince me that my mom was right and I should transfer to another school.
When I got to that other school, they made up a different song about how fat I was.
My home life was terrible. Mom was married to one of her more awful husbands. I was old enough to stand up for myself but not mature enough to gauge when to do so. She had isolated me from my grandparents, my friends from the first school, from her. I had never felt so completely alone.
At this new school, I would walk straight from the bus to the bathroom and hide in a stall to avoid people. I would go straight from my classes to the bathroom and hide in a stall at lunch. No matter how hungry I was, I could not face that lunchroom full of people. The bus came so early I wouldn't have time to eat before I left so it was usually five or so in the evening before I ate my first meal of the day.
The bus rides were the worst. I was insulted. Sexually harassed. Threatened. I would just close my eyes and be elsewhere in my mind. One guy got really bad about the sexual stuff and I reported him. After he was disciplined (what little there was of that), he threatened to rape me. I said something in bravado like "bring it" though I'm sure it wasn't that exact wording at the time. I knew he wouldn't do anything.
And yet, despite all this, I never even considered bringing a gun to the school and shooting people. I mean, even after I'd been in situations myself where I HAD been shot at, I didn't even entertain the idea of that being an option to handle my problems.
Instead, I found some other outcasts and befriended them. They became my little tribe at the new school. I took up smoking and listened endlessly to my new friend's stories about fucking her boyfriend. We would listen to Salt&Peppa and talk smack about the popular kids. I stopped hiding. I would hang with her, her boyfriend, and some other outcasts and we'd say shocking things to keep the little bastards away from us.
In the matter of a few weeks, I scraped myself up from the floor and remembered to own my own weirdness. By that point, I knew I could go back to my old high school and be fine.
Is there a point to this? Oh yes. I read some jackass article about how everyone should befriend the loner kids so they won't go shoot up the schools. Maybe the author meant well, but it came off as this blame game thing "oh it's your fault that everyone is being killed because you won't be nice to that weird guy." It pissed me off because the author made some comments about how the people reading this had great support systems.
That isn't always the case. Some of us, many of us, have been in some dire situations where we had to hide and starve and cry and face all manner of hell just to get through the day. We didn't shoot up schools. We didn't sit around WAITING for someone to be nice to us. We did the social work of finding people who would accept us and befriending them.
Yes, it sucks when you're in the bad social position. You have to be the one to get you out of it though. Even though it seems like friendship and companionship and social acceptance come easy to some people, everyone has to work for it. It's a problem to be solved and it can't be solved with violence. That just makes people dislike you moe.
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