The Worst

[mishalak]

A Pointless Story
I realized recently that my livejournal has become rather boring. So I'm bringing back the pointless stories starting off with one of those incidents that made me who I am today. I've not told anyone about this for years.

I had a tendency to want to say away from school. Not just for the usual reasons of being a lazy little bugger, but also because I felt tormented while at school. True I brought a fair amount of it upon myself or was just in my head, but there were a few genuinely horrible moments.

The worst single incident was something that happened to me in the spring of 1990. That year I was in the 7th grade and it was just a bit before my birthday so I was 12 years old. That year we were started on more serious physical education classes so we were instructed to shower after class. Plus the whole hitting puberty thing.

Being shy (with perhaps just a bit of subconscious knowledge of being gay) I tended to wait until everyone else was done, shower of quickly and get dressed before rushing to class. That day I had worn on of my favorite sweat shirts, one with a what I thought was a witty quote about books that I had bought out of my own money from lawn mowing. I can't remember what it said now, but I remember that it was blue with bright yellow writing and I bought it out of a catalog called Wireless.

Well so I showered off quickly with no one else around and went to get my clothes, but I found that my gym locker had been broken into. My stuff was in disarray and my favorite shirt was no where to be found. My pants had been pissed upon, when I found my shirt under a locker it had been similarly treated and ripped up as well. I didn't know what to do so I cried angrily for several minutes before going to the nearby councilor's office so I wouldn't have to see as many of my classmates as if I went to the school office.

That was the worst single moment of my school years. Even the time I was beaten up didn't compare with how hurt I felt then.

Comments

[crazysoph.livejournal.com]

*ouch*

Well, I don't see this as pointless - one of my touchstone books talks about old stuff coming back, not to ruin your life but to be healed. I hope that sharing this helps lighten your load.

And, I can't see in any way how you "brought this upon" yourself... I know that's the first conclusion many of us make, to entertain a notion of still being able to affect events, but it's a poison chalice. You in no way brought this on or even deserved it. The people who did this made a decision, it's their responsibility.

(And I hope you forgive me for talking as if this just happened, when maybe you yourself have managed to resolve this all long ago... but the intensity of your tale is moving.)

My own locker room experiences, as a rather dull straight girl of average physical development, still give enough of a guide of how terrible an experience this was for you. For what it's worth, (uhm, squick alert?) I realized several years after a particular incident (a girl trying to embarrass me by describing the supposed contents of my underwear on the school bus), that she was talking more about herself at age 12 than me at age 8. As maddening as it can be, with all the personal trauma that inflicted, it really was more about her.

Please, keep sharing your perspective!

Crazy(and how else is there to be?)Soph

The Self Fulfilling...

[mishalak.livejournal.com]

The way I brought this sort of thing upon myself was by being arrogant (I really did think I was smarter and better than anyone else at school) and by acting out the part of the tormented loner that I learned from books. I think I may have been a bit more social if I hadn't had it in my head that being smart meant not having to deal with anyone else. Plus I was really bad about letting every one of my emotions show broadly so it made great entertainment for someone wishing to torment me.

Re: The Self Fulfilling...

[armoire-man.livejournal.com]

No, you don't bring this kind of stuff "on yourself". It sounds horrible. It also sounds like just the kind of nasty thing people of this age do to each other and grow out of later (or end up in jail for later if they don't).

I can see you being a less than perfectly magnaminous person in seventh grade, but I don't really remember knowing any completely sane seventh graders. I know I wasn't one. It just doesn't come with the territory. It's the time of life when you're moving from being the "senior citizens of childhood" and knowing exactly how to be a kid, into being the youngest and most completely confused proto-adolescents around, and it's just sheer freakin' torture for everyone.

[cakmpls.livejournal.com]

In my 56 years, viewing my own childhood and my younger brother's and my children's and hearing about lots of others', I have seen so many examples of the cruelty of children and teens--but also of kindness, understanding, and general decency.

I think that the answers lie in the combination of nature and nurture. But if I had to generalize, I would say that kids who do these kinds of things learn them somewhere, which is a clue that many of them probably suffer at someone else's hands at least as much as they inflict on their own victims.

Some of life's true heroes are those who are badly treated and don't pass it on. I see you as one of them.

Snot Nosed Genius

[mishalak.livejournal.com]

It's probably universal, and that's the thing that I couldn't seem to realize when I was a kid. That everyone around me was just as tormented, and in my arrogant smarter than thou way I probably inflicted a fair amount of pain myself, though not of a physical sort. And thank you for the complement; I do try to not be the brat I was as a kid. I was truly awful to some teachers I didn’t like, I delighted in showing them up in class.

Re: Snot Nosed Genius

[cakmpls.livejournal.com]

IMHO, any teacher who can be "shown up" in class by someone who is supposed to be the student probably deserves being shown up.