Lily’s New Strange World Today

I was bullied throughout my school years. Maybe the other kids could sense something different about me. I was a shy child and though I always treated others kindly, I was, perhaps, slow to warm up. I had a lot of fears. Fear of the dark, fear of large dogs, fear of suffocation and strangulation, even fear of large insects. I was nervous a lot of the time, and maybe that played a part in my being targeted for bullying.

I can remember sitting in the lunch room, too sick from fear to eat. I cannot remember if any of the teachers ever pointed this problem out to my parents, but if they did, the net result was that I got in trouble. I always seemed to be in trouble, even though at that stage of my life I tried very, very, very hard to be good–but never felt like I was at all good enough.

At the school I went to from first until fourth grade, I was in the racial minority. Most of the children at the school were Latino. I was one of the few Caucasians. And it did not help to try and explain to the kids who were throwing punches at me that I had some Cherokee blood. All they saw was a white face, and they took out their anger at being considered second class citizens on me. I hated being beaten up for being white, but I could actually rationalize that this was racism and it was stupid even at that young age. It was when people teased me for being ME that hurt far more than when they targeted me for the color of my skin.

Before the fourth grade, my family moved from New Mexico to Colorado, which is actually my birthplace. I thought things might be better and was relieved to see more of a racial balance between Caucasian and Latino at my new school. I thought things would be better because I wouldn’t be such a target any more. But while I was no longer being beaten up for my skin color, I became a target due to my shyness and my accent, which was something of a weird hybrid. My parents are both from New York, and although I was born in Colorado, I lived in New York between the ages of one and three, which are formative years for speech. This New York accent blended with the New Mexico accent (which is sort of an off-Texas drawl) and this, combined with my buck teeth, made me the target for a lot of teasing.

 To this day, I am very nervous about talking to people for the first time, and would prefer walking through a mine field to doing public speaking. Interestingly, if I am acting in a play, I don’t care what anyone thinks. I just let go. I always enjoyed doing the little talent shows at school because that was the one time that people didn’t pick on me. I became a bit of a “class clown.” I decided that I wanted to go into acting because people seemed to like the me that was onstage. The real me was still very much an outcast, but I dreamed that one day people would love me  at last because I would be a well-known actress. When I was feeling like an alien, I would daydream about being part of the Star Trek crew. My daydream friends liked and respect me, so I spent a lot more time aboard the Starship Enterprise than I did in the classroom. My woolgathering got me in trouble more than once.

By the time sixth grade rolled around, I had grown nearly to my full height. I was not in any way pretty and was reminded of this daily. I did have a few friends, whom I was grateful for, but for the most part I felt ugly and alone. I walked slumped to hide my developing body. I was ashamed of my height, which at this point is not particularly striking (5′5″) but to be 5′3″ at twelve did make me stand out to a degree.

What strikes me as humorous in retrospect is that there was one very big girl in the class who was built like a football linebacker. The one thing that united me and my classmates was our fear of her. I remember her slamming me around–and me laughing at her even as I was terrified almost to the point of pissing my pants for the ass whuppin that I was going to get for mocking her. This may sound strange, but even though I was scared to death of her, my memories of her are not anywhere near as traumatic as the memories of being teased about my voice, my buck teeth, and my hair, which was beginning to become quite oily as puberty onset. I also remember hating the fact that I was growing hair in my armpits and on my crotch. My mother didn’t really want to acknowledge that I was growing up, and thus didn’t want me to shave my legs yet. I would get called “gorilla legs” by the other kids and thus feel even more like a freak. I started wearing shorts under my dresses for fear that the boys would end up seeing the hair “down there” when they were trying to look up the girls’ dresses and I would be branded even more of a freak than ever.  I also defied my mother and bought deodorant and started shaving my legs and armpits. She wasn’t really angry. I think that even though she didn’t think I needed these things yet, she realized that I believed I did, so she let it go.

The onset of puberty issues probably affect most girls to a fair degree. We just all think we’re alone in our feelings. My mother was actually quite good about letting me know about the physical changes I could expect. What she failed to let me know (and I don’t fault her for this) is how tremendously awkward they can make a person feel. But even this is nothing by compare to how ugly and left out the teasing of the other kids made me feel. Even then I didn’t expect anyone to fawn over me like I was beautiful when I wasn’t. Knowing that one is not beautiful or even a little bit pretty causes quite enough of a blow to the self esteem.for a young girl. But I didn’t understand why they had to be so cruel to me when I did try very hard to be nice to them in hopes that if I was nice, they’d finally accept me. It didn’t work. I was nothing but a nerdy, awkward alien who would never be accepted.

I hoped that things would change in junior high. But that is another chapter of the saga.

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