Posts Tagged “isolation”

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.”

by Cheryl Caruolo
Seven Years Old at the Time

Because my parents never made much of an effort to create opportunities for me to be with other children, when I entered school I had no idea how to share or play games. Mom was overprotective and never allowed me to participate in after school games or things like girl scouts. She was afraid of everything. And I followed suit.

In 1966, my uncle took us to visit the World’s Fair in New York City –- it was filled with electric cars of the future, street performers from Europe and Latin America, and a roller coaster that careened through the middle of a building. Mom wouldn’t allow me to go inside any of the attractions or on any of the rides. My uncle finally convinced her to go on the skyline so we could see the whole fair from above, but my Mom was so scared I’d fall out she held a tight grip on the collar of my coat. I wasn’t tall enough to see over the edge of the car and I never saw the view of endless possibilities from the sky.

Once my class went on a field trip and I was left behind because my mother didn’t give me permission to go. Anything unfamiliar terrified me and when my teacher told me to go to the classroom next door, I panicked and started to cry. My classmates laughed. I cried more. I told my teacher that I wanted to stay in our classroom.

“You can’t stay here alone.”

“I’m not alone. The angels are here with me.”

They laughed harder.

My teacher warned the class, lined up at the door, to stop and then they left. Thinking I could stay right in my familiar seat until the end of the day, I remember feeling relieved. But a few minutes later another teacher came into the room to get me.

“Come along now to my classroom.”

At seven years old my choices were limited and so with red eyes and runny nose I followed her into her room.

As soon as I arrived at the school yard the next day the snickers of my classmates surprised me like a splash of cold water.

“Cry baby.”

“No one has imaginary friends anymore.”

I dreaded recess. Usually no one would play with me, so I sat in the corner of the school yard rolling stones under the shadow of an oak tree. The tree’s umbrella felt safe. Sometimes I’d look through the little steel windows of the fence and wish I was in the Mustang Convertible or Corvette Stingray speeding down the main road. I’d watch the girls on the asphalt playing hopscotch, a game I was good at, but never had the nerve to join them.

Whenever the class was asked to choose team members, I always ended up assigned to a team as a leftover. If I was lucky enough to be one of the first ones out the door at recess, I’d run to the end swing and stay on it for the entire time. I loved gliding back and forth through the air, looking up at the sky. Pretending to fly. The higher, the freer.

I remember telling my mother that I hated school, but I never explained why. I didn’t want to admit that none of the children liked me. I understand a parent wanting to protect her young, but Mom’s fears stunted me from developing self-confidence -– I struggle with it still today.

In second grade I tried to start anew. I stopped talking about imaginary friends and pretended I liked all the things my classmates liked. But things fell apart fast.

Unable to participate in after school activities and forbidden to invite friends home my life grew more isolated. I pulled deeper into myself like a turtle retreating into its shell. The unresolved feelings that hung in the air resulted in bouts of anger, depression and confusion. Once I picked a fight with a girl simply because I knew I could beat her up. My young life was out of control and I desperately wanted control over something. I derived great satisfaction from that poor girl’s agony.

My life drudged on until I was finally able to convince my parents to let me get a dog — a six-month old Wiemaraner. Because she was German and I was nine, I named her Heidi. I adored that dog and suddenly I had a companion.

Heidi woke me every morning for school and was waiting every afternoon when I returned. Sitting on the porch together, I’d scratch her ears as she rested her head on my lap. Her gray hair felt like short slips of satin sliding through my fingers.

I felt unconditional love and acceptance from Heidi. We were connected in that unspoken spiritual way humans and animals seem to share. Whenever I was crying she’d place her paw on my hand and nuzzle her head along side me. If anyone was visiting our house and she was unsure of them, she would sit in between us until I’d assure her that it was okay.

Because of Heidi, I started to believe the tiniest bit in myself. And I gradually felt more comfortable talking to kids at school — finding things in common, sharing snacks, even joining hopscotch games sometimes.

Then one day a new girl came to class. My classmates pointed at her and called her weird. I said nothing.

But at recess one brilliant blue autumn day, I noticed her swaying on my safe haven swing and, for some unexplainable reason, I walked up to her and offered one of my beloved Oreo cookies.