Bullies

For almost as long as I can remember, I have struggled to fit in. I've always wanted so badly to be a part of the "in" crowd, but it seems that I've always fallen short. I believe that it is that deep desire to be one of "them" that has made me vulnerable to the bullies that dogged me through most of my adolescence.

I was in the 5th grade when my family moved to Dayton from Alabama in the middle of the school year. The social networks in our tiny, 16-person class had already been established. With such a small class, there really wasn't a lot of room to move around in the social stratosphere. If you were popular, you were popular. If you weren't, you simply existed.

The queen bee of the 5th grade was a girl named Kelly. I'm not sure what made her so magnetic, but people flocked to her. Maybe it was her powers of manipulation, and no one wanted to piss her off so they did whatever they could do to keep her happy. But regardless of what made her popular, we somehow became friends. I felt so lucky; here I was, new to town and already I had a friend and she was the most popular girl in the class.

A few months before the end of the year - I remember that it was spring, and that it was sunny - Kelly, our friend Teresa and I were crammed into the bench of our school bus, being transported from our tiny Catholic school to the public school, where we would mesh with the public school kids for the short ride to our respective neighborhoods. Teresa was against the window. Kelly was in the middle. I was painfully relegated to the aisle, my heavy book bag still on my back, struggling to balance against the sway and pitch of the bus as we rumbled towards the public middle school.

I kept asking Kelly to move over a little, and she kept refusing. I was half-sitting in the seat, half-hanging in the aisle. So I wiggled into the seat a little more, scooted a little closer to Kelly in the hopes that I'd be able to stabilize myself for the rest of the ride. Bad move.

I sat there, shocked, helpless and confused while Kelly repeatedly hit me over the head with her fist. "Stop scooting over! There's no room for you in the seat!" she kept saying. Her punches pushed me farther into the aisle. By the time I even thought to cover my head, we'd reached our destination and Kelly shoved past me on the way to her next bus.

Thinking that there must be something I could do, I reported Kelly and her actions to the bus driver. But there was nothing she could do except write Kelly up, give her a demerit of sorts. She hadn't seen it... therefore, it hadn't happened.

And so rather than risk further humiliation, I simply let it go. I didn't even tell my mother until years later, when it was too late for her to do anything except cry for the little girl who was too hurt and embarrassed to admit she'd been beaten up at the ripe old age of 10. Surely she would have done something... I suppose knowing that she would is what kept me from saying anything in the first place.

That experience with Kelly marks the start of a long and difficult journey through middle school. As if bad bangs and braces weren't enough, I was often humiliated and made the butt of cruel jokes in order to satisfy the senses of humor of my "friends." I was routinely tricked and made to cry at sleep overs. I was the recipient of more than a few crank phone calls. And that first experience was not the first time that Kelly beat me up. All this, despite my very best efforts to fit in, to MAKE the other girls like me.

Certainly whenever there was a chance to turn the tables and give one of the other girls a taste of their own medicine, I took it. Those chances were few and far between. And it's not like my entire childhood was intolerable. In fact, by the 8th grade, the two other social "rejects" in my class and I had formed our own little happy, unpopular group. We learned to fight back by assuming an air of superiority and indifference. The act was even marginally successful. But a lingering sense of self-doubt and vulnerability still left the door to our self-esteem ever so slightly ajar; and as a result, despite our best efforts, we were still occasionally flattened by the mean girls in our grade.

The cruelty bestowed upon me in my formative social years has never fully left me. To this day, I worry that when I walk into a room of close friends sharing a joke, the joke is at my expense. My friends are all warm, funny, amazing people and I consider myself lucky to have them in my life. But sometimes, I find myself doubting or disbelieving that they would pick me. I immediately turn into that insecure 5th grader.

Luckily, my friends put up with me when I get neurotic and feel unloved.

Regardless of the way those girls treated me, I think I've turned out okay. As for Kelly and her merry gang of marauders... I'm not sure where they've ended up in their lives. A small part of me hopes that their lives are miserable. Concocting all the ways that they might be miserable, however, would take more energy than they are worth.