Archive for June, 2009

V.B.D
Fourth or Fifth Grade

It was the teasing by the other elementary school kids that solidified my shyness, and has kept me from easily making friends ever since. Interestingly enough, I still remember trying to lash back at the kids who teased me.

It was valentine’s day, and I sent a card to one boy, calling him a “regurgitated eggplant.” It must have been fourth or fifth grade; I remember how he read it, giggled and showed it to one of the “prima bulliettes”, and then looked at me, puzzled, as if he just realized the hatred I had for all of them. Almost as if he had joined in the “fun” around him, and suddenly saw that I was not having “fun” with these girls. I cannot remember much more about him, but I think he might even have stopped.

The problem was the girls never did. Maybe they never do, as I have met the same type of girl over and over again. The girls who do only see problems in others, who need to gossip about or ridicule others — do they even know they are doing this because of their own subconscious inferiority? I cannot give them credit for cognitive reasoning. I just leave them to their tabloids and cell phone chatter.

Solveig Pederson Zarubin
Ages 6, 8, and 15ish

Scene: me, a little tomboy-looking girl, with short brown hair which was long and blond fairly recently. Sitting in a first grade classroom, with a worksheet in front of me.

I already knew how to read, and I could read well before kindergarten; it seemed like I’d been able to read forever. Many others in the class either weren’t reading or were reading much more slowly than I was. The teacher had given us a worksheet to do, and was walking around watching us work.

I had already finished the assignment. I was curious what everyone else was doing — and how did they do it? Which parts were they still working on? Nosiness that I still have today! So with nothing else to do, I was looking around…

And heard my name — and then the teacher sternly saying, “Eyes on your own paper!”

I didn’t realize she was talking to me, or what she was talking about.

“Not me!” I thought. “I was already done!” How could I be cheating? I was just looking around to see how everyone else was doing.

I’m pretty sure I got in trouble for that, and one lesson I think I unconsciously got from this was: “Getting too far ahead of the group, being too smart, or otherwise standing out from the crowd — can be trouble!”

Later on in second or third grade, we would be assigned to read a story from our reading books. It always felt like the teacher gave a humongous amount of time to read a story that was only three or four pages. I could always finish it really quickly, but then had nothing to do. Or nothing to do without calling attention that I was done so abnormally early — I thought that if I started reading or doing something else it would be so obvious that I was done way earlier than everyone else.

I didn’t want to seem different or weird. I thought that everyone must notice that I was done and think I had cheated on the reading somehow, like my first grade teacher had assumed.

“She must have been skimming, or just skipping parts. She couldn’t have read it already!”

So I would page back a page or two when I was done -– carefully checking around me to make sure I matched the page everyone else was on. I could be a bit ahead, but not too much. Then I would re-read that page, and then look around and see if I needed to re-read it again, until more people were done. I’d see people triumphantly finishing and then being happy to be “done” — yet I had been done for a long time and felt like I had needed to wait for them.

In upper elementary and moving on to middle school, I realized that raising my hand every time I knew the answer to a question could also be dangerous. I was worried about what people would think: “she’s a know-it-all” “She’s a goody-goody teacher’s pet…”

And I didn’t really want to raise my hand for every single question, that would get annoying to everyone. And isn’t it better for the others to have to answer the questions too?

Even though I knew the answers to most or all of the questions, I would try to figure out how many times I could/should raise my hand without attracting too much attention. Every third question? Once or twice per class? Just wait for the teacher to call on me?

This always felt very unnatural but also much safer.. Eventually I was thinking so much about how to spread out my participation, that I wound up just not participating most of the time in class. Safer, but also quite mind-numbing as a constant practice.

In high school, the grade in several classes, including U.S. History, was based on class participation. The history teacher was also rather intimidating, making it even harder to respond in class, although he eventually became one of my favorite teachers. Because I really wanted to keep a good grade, and I was so used to not participating, I had to really consciously plan that I would raise my hand at least once or twice every class.

Even now, as an adult, sometimes I still need to work on “raising my hand” (especially in a large group) and being comfortable with achieving and showing my talents.

Having good role models at work, joining public speaking/leadership groups like Toastmasters, and increasing my self-confidence by trying new things and succeeding at them has really helped this.

I still have trouble speaking out and expressing myself, especially with new people, but I think I’ve gotten better. (One co-worker told me after I joined Toastmasters – “When I first met you, you were really shy and you really didn’t speak up too much. But something happened – You seem
like a *real person* now!”). Um…Thanks, I think!

I really admire kids I see now, who understand that it is okay to be smart and to let your abilities show, without being afraid of being accused of cheating or “showing off.” Kids who are confident in their abilities and who have been encouraged by their parents and teachers to develop them.

Emily Willingham
Middle and High School

When I was 13 years old, I went to boarding school. My parents, fed up with the failure of their liberal social experiment that involved sending their freakish, too-young, and too-weird oldest daughter to public school for eight years, had given up and opted for a posh boarding school that promised all the best in higher ed.

Public school had been a complete misery for me, starting with a friendless stretch in elementary school that involved daily taunting from the mean girls and continuing into middle school that seemed like a daily existential nightmare that would never let me out alive.

I literally was threatened every single day — every single day — with promises that the threatener was going to “kick my ass.” People called me on the phone at home to make this threat. People left me notes in my locker, whispered it to me in class, accosted me as I emerged from my oblivious father’s car. Girls tricked me with deliberate offers of friendship, only to run away giggling with their friends at what a gullible ass I was. How dare I even believe that they would want to befriend the likes of me?

I lived in complete, daily terror. Why they wanted to kick my ass was unclear. I was small (then). I was a year younger than everyone else, having started first grade at age five because I’d been reading since age three. I was unquestionably strange, reading things no one else would or could read, thinking about things that no one in that school was anywhere near thinking about. I was socially clueless and never could figure out how other children associated with each other. I guess I do know why they wanted to kick my ass. With all that going for me, I may as well have been walking around with a big red target on it.

It wasn’t that my parents didn’t know about the bullying. I was in one of those situations where defending myself invariably got ME in trouble, and my parents got the phone calls. My father went so far as to teach me to box. I guess he thought it would be best to leave me in this godawful, godforsaken public school in Waco, Texas, a middle school so hardened that the principal was compelled to come on the PA system the first day of school to remind students not to smoke in the hallways—and I was being left there to box my way out of it.

Straight from this terrifying milieu to a boarding school full of upper-class snobs? You might think that the latter was an improvement. It’s true that I didn’t have people kicking my ass every day. These better-educated, smarter, richer people simply had slightly more clever ways of messing with me. And it was worse in the end because I actually had to live with them. My daily existential hell of middle school had become a No Exit of an entrapped freshman year, surrounded by people who seemed hell-bent on making me miserable night and day. And even 27 years later, as I look back, the only real reason I can divine, the only trigger for this systematic, targeted behavior, is that they were just cruel people. As we learned from The Simpsons, sometimes, people (and elephants) are just assholes.

I emerged from this crucible of fear and emotional torture at age 14, no longer at boarding school, back at a public school in Waco, Texas. Once again. But it was a “better” public school (i.e., full of kids from the wealthy side of town).

And somehow, from pretty much the day I started, I walked across the threshold with a new attitude best summed up as, “Bring it on. I really don’t give a s*** what you think.” I don’t know where it came from. I don’t know how it coalesced for me at age 14. I don’t know why the onset was so sudden. I wished I’d been able to adopt it much earlier. And it was this attitude that left me alone at the dance during that first homecoming my tenth-grade year at my new school.

I knew almost no one. Homecoming followed soon after school started, and in a fit of…something…independence? self-assertion? hope? … I went, alone. I dressed myself in a nice two-piece outfit. I stood alone in the stands and watched the football game, I went to the dance and sat, alone, through the entire night as my peers, some of whom had been attending school together since kindergarten, danced the night away, locked in speechless, adolescent embrace. I never spoke a word to anyone the entire night.

I held up. I told myself I was happy, it was fine, I was just looking at things, an observer, OK to be on my own. And it was true. It’s how I’d always been happiest, sitting silently with my own thoughts, watching people who were so different from me they almost seemed like aliens, observing their behaviors, feeling more aware of everything around me than any of them.

So, I was happy.

Until I got into my parents’ car after the dance, and my mother — occasionally known for not being the button on the cap of discretion — asked me irritably, “Why did you even come to this dance? You’re all alone, and everyone else has a date.”

With those pointed words, she nailed any moxy I’d mustered up about the whole thing to a cold wall of reality. I crumpled. Inwardly.

Until I remembered that sitting there in those stands, alone, watching and observing and taking mental notes, was just about the most fun I’d had in a school environment in years. Until I remembered that I hadn’t myself made any of the decisions in my life that had dragged me through the mud and terror of daily bullying and torture. Until I recalled that attending this dance alone had been my very first salvo in asserting myself as Me, as an individual, not a fearful, terrorized creature creeping into school every day, hoping to go unnoticed. Until I started saying to myself, like a mantra, “Bring it on. I don’t give a s*** what you think.”