My friend and I got on the topic of high school and our experiences and how it's shaped us into who we are today. I'd like to first say that, this is a topic I could go on for days and months. For the purpose of saving time I'll touch on a few examples.
I had the "pleasure" of having two completely different experiences with high school. One involved complete ridicule and bashing for being poor in a wealthy high school, the other while still not being prom queen or miss popularity, I was accepted and at least left to be ME and still made and kept friends from every clique in the school.
I won't bore you with details and runs down painful memory lane with all the emotional damage left behind by the surreal amount of cruelty I went through in my 3 years of attending a school district that clearly didn't instill acceptance at an early age...if ever. In having this talk with my friend I made a few amazing realizations about myself in how I am now and why I do certain things. One great example: from the time I had my first job I've been obsessed with shoes...not like every girl is obsessed with high heels and the latest greatest shoe...I mean sneakers. New shoes. My shoes stay looking new because i rotate them like jewelry and they never get a chance to get dirty. I never understood why I loved new shoes so much until tonight. We shared stories about all the petty bullshit kids do to one another and I stumbled upon my story about how it got so nicely pointed out to me one day in PE class first week of school in 9th grade that I was wearing the same shoes in gym class that I had worn the previous year in gym class. This may not make a damn different to me in life right NOW, but back then I was humiliated that everyone now knew my family didn't have money to buy new shoes every year for gym class or any other class for that matter. I wanted to dig a hole and crawl so deep into it that I'd never come out. So naturally, as soon as I had my own income, I went for new shoes and never looked back. It amazes me that something so dumb as shoes got buried so deep in my subconscious and emerged as an obsession later in life.
As if going through body changes and emotional changes and all the other pressures of being a teenaged mess isn't enough, there is this stage in life where you are either the bully that attacks the weak (to save your own ass from being bullied, I may add) or you are that poor kid that is just targeted for ridicule and that target never comes off no matter what you do or how hard you try to fit in. You're too tall. You're too short. You're poor. You're white. You're NOT white. You're white but have a funny last name. Your hair is wrong. Your clothes are wrong. Your patents drive the wrong car. Your parents kiss you goodbye every morning. You don't talk to your parents. You're gay. You're straight. You're bi? What are you?? When is it enough?! Who are these kids that decide who gets to suffer through the hardest part of your life?? It didn't matter what I said or did... I was short, flat, poor, had braces, hated skirts and blow dried hair, played sports, was good at math and science, watched nerdy shows, and snorted when I laughed. I also cried every night, wished some boy..ANY boy would notice me, started not caring about grades, drinking and doing stupid shit just to fit in....and none of it mattered. What I did is make it through. And that's not something every kid can say these days. I don't know the percentages, but a good part of kids turns down the choice of life because it's unbearable. Take it from someone who's sat there contemplating life because it was too much, it's a choice we make every single morning to continue showing up to class every single day, knowing that the same kids will make the same comments and make your experience a living hell.
If you're a teenager and you are bullied, know that in the end, you are the one that makes it out stronger. If you're a teenager and you ARE the bully, make a difference in your OWN life by making a difference in dozens of lives by accepting peers for people...whatever their deal is. If you're a parent, talk to your kids...if you know it or not, they DO want to talk and they WILL listen.
At the end of the day, we all go through life with the same goal...to find happiness. Past and present.
Yeah I hear you. When I was younger I used to play a game with myself. I don't think I ever named it, but I guess it would be called "isolate the urge". It's so weird writing about this...or remembering that I did it, it was a very odd game.
ReplyDeleteAnyway, I would notice a behavior (like your shoe incident) and immediately I would stop the behavior and try to think through exactly where it came from--to isolate the exact reason why it was happening. I remember doing this because I needed to stay organized so that everything I did was for a reason. Sounds weird, I know. I guess that it must have made me feel important.
Anyway sometimes it would take me just a few moments to isolate a behavior, other times maybe 30 minutes. I wonder when I stopped doing this. I think there was a threshold where there was just too much information to wade through. Too much history had gone by, and I had started to lose the connections of my early life and how they manifested themselves in my adult life. It became too hard to find all the answers.
Or maybe it stopped after we moved from California to New Mexico, when I was in the 8th grade. Yeah, that makes sense. I was completely uprooted and had to make all new contacts. Once that happened I think I stopped looking backward and just looked forward.
Hm. Good blog Linda keep it up.