I was in junior high school (that’s middle school for you New Englanders) and I had just gotten a new haircut and braces. It wasn’t pretty. It wasn’t cute. It was back when we didn’t have curling irons and flat irons and blow dryers and hair products in our homes (back in the middle ages – you remember – when we wrapped our wet hair around rocks and then tied them with vines and used tree sap as styling mousse). I was no raving beauty in junior high on a good day.
Add to all my goofy, gawky, geeky grossness a fresh new, shiny set of braces – and, well, I was just plain uglier than homemade sin.
I went to a friend’s house (whose name I can no longer remember) and I was grumbling about how everyone teased me about my braces and my haircut. Truthfully, I was probably crying about it. In my mind I’m sure I was swearing and yelling and hurling venomous threats at the perpetrators of the embarrassing onslaught of insults, but one doesn’t share that with one’s friend’s mother, after all.
My friend’s mother said to me, “You know that their teasing is not about you, right? It’s about them and their insecurities. It takes courage to be different at your age and courage is something you won’t appreciate until you’re much older. The differences that make you a target today are the differences that will set you apart from all of them some day. I’m sorry you have to wish away these days to get to those days.”
She also told me the next time someone teased me I should say “Jealousy will get you nowhere.” She said that they probably won’t know what to say in response. Okay, that was not good advice, because junior high kids [bullies] know what to say to everything and when I tried out “Jealousy will get you nowhere!”, they just roared with laughter and pointed out that there was absolutely NOTHING about me which could possibly warrant jealousy.
But the other advice she gave me, although cold comfort at the time, has always stuck with me. Usually when people do mean things and you feel like you’re the target, it’s not about you. It’s all about them. She taught me that it’s not usually personal, even when it feels like it is.
And it did take courage to survive being bullied in junior high for being different. And I do appreciate courage today.
And I’m pretty sure that all of those terribly mean girls (and mean boys too – my bully allure crossed gender lines) are now big, miserable, banal, homogeneous, boring, lonely, stupid, insipid housewives (or househusbands?) whose children can’t stand to be near them and whose spouses left them for younger, better people. I’m fairly certain they will all die alone in their recliners and no one will know until the neighbors smell something funky and call the police.
At least that’s the way I imagine things.
Evolution Happens . . . 