Friday, December 3, 2010

When I was a child, I hated children

Day 08→ Someone who has made your life hell, or treated you like shit.


The kids I went to school with treated me like TOTAL shit. I was the champion nerdgeek outcast-face in all of the land. Kids are fucking cruel, and a lot of times it goes completely unchecked. The recent rash of suicides among teenagers has made me think about a lot of this crap, actually.

I got made fun of for pretty typical stuff. I had freckles, I was a little chubby, I didn't have 'the latest' anything. I went to a Catholic school. A lot of my classmates' families had considerably more money than mine did, and were also different in a lot of other ways.
I didn't know my dad at the time. Don't get me wrong, I wasn't poor or suffering. I was just an easy target in a lot of ways. On top of the stuff I already mentioned, I was incredibly uncomfortable in my own skin, which made it even easier. I hear other people say they had such-and-such awful nickname. No one got that creative with me, really. They just called me FAT!. Or Miss Piggy. (Sidenote: I ran into this guy I went to grade school with a couple of years ago and he told me that the older boys in his grade, which was sixth I believe, that started the Miss Piggy thing did so as some juvenile flirting thing, because one of them had a crush on me. I found this fascinating because I thought everyone in that school thought I was the ugliest human being on the planet.)

When it was school picture time one year, and everyone signed the backs of their pictures and traded them, I remember giving mine to a couple of the girls in my class. They laughed at me and threw them away. We wore uniforms, and when we had gym class, we had to change clothes as a group in the bathroom. My body was ridiculed so often that I started hiding in a stall to change. Sometimes people openly made comments about me in class. I would answer a question and someone would make a snide remark about me, people would laugh, and the teacher never did a thing about it, outside of perhaps saying, "That's not nice." Thanks a lot, that helps. I would turn bright red and wish I could seep through the cracks in the floor. It was so bad by fifth grade that I was seriously contemplating transferring schools. I can't remember now why I didn't, but I didn't. I could go on and on with horror stories about grade school. It was outrageous. I actually got punished for something that was done TO me once.

When I left that school I knew I had a chance to reinvent myself and not take that kind of shit anymore. My attitude completely changed. I think people started to be a little bit intimidated by my quirks instead of feeling so comfortable mocking them, which was fine with me. I spent one year of high school in Catholic school and then FINALLY escaped to public school, which was one of the best things that ever happened to me. A totally new group of people that didn't know where I came from, what I was like in grade school, how I was treated... It was great. I still kind of hated everyone, but I did make a solid group of friends, and I was certainly much less miserable than I had been before.

2 comments:

  1. "I was incredibly uncomfortable in my own skin". How do you feel about yourself now?

    ReplyDelete
  2. Generally speaking, I think I'm a pretty kick ass chick.

    ReplyDelete