Blast from the past
Last week, I joined a group on facebook that is dedicated to the Sierra Vista Junior High School class of 2002. I still don’t know why. I hated middle school. I know most people say that, and they have every reason to; middle school is awkward and isolating and full of hormones and general yuckiness. It’s fair to hate those two years of your life. But I had an exceptionally rough go of it. I can’t count how many times my parents had to see me come home in tears. I was not cute by any stretch of the imagination. My short hair was very unflattering, I had braces with the rubber bands, you couldn’t see my forehead or my chin under all the pimples….it was bad, guys. Really bad. Not to mention that I had the personality of a cactus, and had no problem telling everyone exactly how I felt at all times. Needless to say, I was not well recieved.
I my eighth grade history class, there was a boy who we will call Shawn. Very large. Tall, yes, but also obese, with a deformed eye. He wasn’t very nice, but I tried to protect him anyway. I was of the opinion that the regets should stick together. One day, David asked me why I had not said the Pledge of Alligence. I told him that, as a Wiccan, I didn’t feel comfortable saying “under God”…the convictions of a thirteen-year-old, what can I say. Without any other questions, Shawn proclaimed, loudly, that I worshipped the devil. My teacher did nothing. And a group of boys who sat behind Shawn, and who usually chose him as their target, started in on me ruthlessly. I cried in class that day, and many others after. I was the Satanic lesbian for the rest of my tenure at Sierra Vista.
I mention this as a roundabout way of getting to my point: today, one of those boys contacted me. He said he felt bad about how he and his group treated others. Without prompting from me, he remembered the above incident, and how much it had hurt me. There wasn’t an apology, but after all this time, I don’t really care about that. I’m simply floored that he remembered. When you’re the one who is bullied, you assume that the people hurting you could not possibly care less, and they will live their lives without a second thought about the spirits they crushed. Today, I discovered that that isn’t true. It warmed my heart. It’s just an extra bit of reassurance that people do grow up to be better people, and that we aren’t static creatures…a person doesn’t have to be an asshole forever.
Thank you for the reminder.
February 28th, 2010 at 9:16 pm
I came home crying almost everyday of Junior High as well. It was so awful!
Thanks for sharing this. It gives me a little hope that there are still good people out there.
March 22nd, 2010 at 7:56 am
I had a mustache and a uni-brow. Not a good time.
You know me and you know that I’m generally a pretty kind person, but I did something mean to another girl in Middle School and I have regretted it ever since. I dream about tracking her down and apologizing. It haunts me, so I wouldn’t be surprised to find that other people who had been unkind feel that same regret.