Some cultures have rites of passage, we have junior high

Oh thank you for this website Caitlyn. I appreciate everyone’s story, so I feel like I owe you mine. I have told it many times over the years, but I never have written it. At first I told it experimentally, while feeling humiliated, with fresh pain each time. But now the story has become an old friend, like Much-Afraid’s worthy companions in Hind’s Feet on High Places. My biggest hope is that everyone here will someday be able to see their own stories turn into a sources of strength. This website allows a place for people to turn experiences into stories. When you tell your story, you become an author. And when you are an author you gain philosophical control of many aspects of the story. You reinterpret. You go at your story from new angles. You even get to enter into the mind of others, into the minds of those who hurt you. Without being a liar you can mess with the truth!

Like Caitlyn, for me 8th grade was not exactly the best of times. It was sort of the worst of times. In fact, I wouldn’t wish 8th grade on my worst enemies. Yet the only enemies I’ve ever had were right there with me in 8th grade, 25 post-traumatic-stressful years ago. It was a super-metamorphicalistical year - the year I learned a great deal about the fun use of suffixes (loved English class) and suffering. In my 7th grade picture I look like a caterpillar in a turtle neck, and in my 8th grade picture I look like a butterfly, or some kind of moth in grungy bell-bottoms and a waffle shirt under my Green Day t-shirt.

I had to switch schools after 7th grade due to a district boundary change. I had been exposed to so much during 7th grade, so much that my parents had no idea about. I was mostly a witness, but witnessing is a kind of experience of its own. Since so much experience is new at that age, I had very little ability to make judgements about why kids might be doing the things they were doing. The logic probably goes “if it is happening then it must be normal and so I should just sort of deal with it.” Surrounded by 1200 strangers from families with any and every history, many confused children themselves, the hallways felt like the streets of New York City. If you came without friends, you sort of just glommed onto whomever was nearby that you “clicked” with. “Best friends” were made over things as shallow as a way of rolling one’s jeans, or a certain patch on your backpack, or the way you said “wassup?”

The word “popular” had a magic feeling for me. There were popular people? This was so new to me, but it dazzled me. You either were it or you weren’t it. Yet Popular was sort of a self-appointed title. The masses of sweet kids minding their own business definitely didn’t have a say in it. In my school it mostly had to do with how loud you were, how much make-up you wore, and how much you cared about cool clothes and kissing. At my new school I felt I had a fresh start, socially. I had seen so much, and thought I must know quite a bit about the world. I didn’t as much care about “being popular” as about having “popular friends.” I have to put it in quotes because it’s my way of communicating that the word had its own particular meaning for me at that time. As an adult I can now talk about a popular song or a popular restaurant. But that old word was its own thing, and it was powerful and desirable. I was a logical kid at times, but I didn’t even try to define popular, I just felt it and went with it. I was downright superstitious about that word: I remember wishing, while touching a screw on the school bus as we went over railroad tracks, to become friends with “the most popular girl.”

Well, it happened. I do not know how. Maybe it was because I was seen as an interesting new girl with a super short hair cut, who acted self-possessed, and wore cool grungy clothes (a style I had picked up from a friend at my old school). And then that got me into a whole big extended group of friends. The first months were glorious. Boys even liked me! My friends and I passed notes behind teachers’ backs and we felt so clever. There were even parties, in 8th grade! I felt like I kind of fit into the YM magazine life I had read about. Then when I had a little boyfriend (nothing serious -but I sure liked him), he was liked by another one of the girls. She looked for an opportunity to destroy me to get me out of her way. She saw one and took it. She started untrue rumors about me and that made my friends shun me and the boys run away from me laughing. I saw my name written on desks, spray-painted on bridges, and mentioned in notes being passed around, all of it coupled with words that were confusing to me, but which I knew were a death sentence regarding my in-status with the popular kids. I heard my name whispered in the hallways, followed by laughter and pointing. I didn’t have the heart for it. I had panic attacks alone in the bathrooms. I suffered in silence at home, crying all night. I had suicidal thoughts constantly. Going to school was psychological torture. I dropped out of my high performance classes in 9th grade. It felt like the pain would never end.

I eventually became friends with a couple of other girls (bless them! Like Tobi, these girls were kind to me. Because of me they were made fun of too). Their friendship was a daily help that distracted me from the feeling of complete rejection which had come to haunt me. I never fully appreciated those friendships at the time, always aware of how “low” I had fallen in the eyes of my previous “friends.”

I also had a history of seeking information about God through reading many sources. This search renewed itself in all of my spare time. Not long before I had wished, like a fool, for popular friends. I now called out in prayer, like a drowning girl, for help; eventually my prayers started having less to do with myself and more to do with trying to understand the nature of the one I was praying to. This helped to turn my eyes outward. Some pain can be lessened by looking away from the wound.

I started reading many other books too, mostly 19th century English literature - (I only mention that detail because it’s also a recommendation). The stories put me into other people’s shoes - people who had experienced far more painful things than I ever had, and who had philosophy to deal with it.

My parents never knew what I went through until recently, but they were also sources of strength. My dad once said “you know, when you grow up, you just don’t worry about what others think any more, it just changes somehow.” That meant a lot coming from him, because back when he was a high-schooler in 1970, he had been one of those lovable, kind, old-fashioned popular kids that like everybody and whom everyone loves. He is my definition of integrity and contentment. I hang on good quotes, and that one from my dad was solid.

Another girl’s story helped me: my mother’s. My mother is such a sensitive and sweet woman, you wouldn’t think she could hurt a mosquito except by accident. When I was very little she told me a story that I never forgot. She moved around a lot when she was a child. Making friends was always a chore at every new school. In one school she made it into a group of friends with relative ease. The other girls decided that they should all pretend to be friends with another little girl. They told my mother about the plan. They would all say they were going to wear bright red nail polish to school the next day, and then they wouldn’t, but the little outsider would. My mother went through with it. The girl was humiliated. Don’t ask me how being the only one wearing bright red nail polish could humiliate you, but I didn’t go to elementary school in the 60s, things were different then. Of course, really, it’s not the thing itself, it’s the state of being outcast from anything, of knowing you were singled out to be hurt. My mother never forgave herself, and she probably moved before she could have made it up to the outsider. I swallowed that story whole, digested it, and stored it away until I needed it. It was a source of insight for me. In my own pain as an outsider, I realized there was the possibility that my “enemies” didn’t know what they were doing, and that they might even live the rest of their lives regretting it bitterly. This passive forgiveness gave me the ability to not lose hope and to never turn my hurt into anger or revengeful thoughts. I would look at myself in the mirror and force myself to smile through my tears. FORCE I tell you. I would say things like “in 10 years this will be ok.”

Through some traveling in high school I also learned how to be alone again, and to enjoy it. In several places I met or heard about others who had experienced unbearable hardship and loss, poverty, the after-effects of war... and I saw unbelievably great resilience in those people.

All of these influences- new friends, God, books, my parents, some physical distance, and the resilience of hope – helped me to keep my head above ground as time buried the past. Now, 25 years later, the only thing that makes me cry in relation to all of this is when I see someone else hurting in this way. I would take it from them and live it for them a million times if I could. Even though I am grateful and I feel like a better person because of this experience, I still would never wish anyone to go through it, not my own children and not my worst enemies, that is, if I still had enemies.