Self Analysis V
On friends, because, despite appearances to the contrary, I've actually had quite a few in my life. Also where they all went and the perils of school. Warning, get a bucket of popcorn first if you want to read. It's much longer than I anticipated.
I'm going to try to remember all the friends I've had because it seems right to remember them. When I first started school, I was very active and it seemed everyone agreed I was a natural leader and came up with the best ideas for new games. Mona was the girl I spent time with when I didn't feel like being in a large group. I can't really remember much about her personality, though I can see her face clearly in my mind. She moved away sometime after first grade. Other than a love for playing on the swings, the thing I remember was saving her from some second graders who were picking on her. I don't know why they singled her out, though my guess would be because Mona had brown skin and we were a 98% white school (I have no idea now if she was a light-skinned black girl, or a hispanic girl. It wasn't important to me then, and I can't remember her last name now). She and I had already separated because we were in different classes, I didn't know they were harrassing her, and it took me a while to decide to do something about it. Since I wasn't afraid of them, they meant nothing to me, the bully girls didn't know what to do. One of them stole my jacket from where it was hung up outside the classroom, unfortunately for her, she then hung it up outside her room. I spoke to the teacher and then the principle. The coat had a frickin' pin on it that Nana had given me, so there was no mistaking it. I got my jacket back. I never heard from the two bullies again, though I saw them on occasion (It just jumped into my memory that the ringleader girl was heavily involved in Girl Scouts. It may have been her mother that was running it. I remember seeing bully girl there when my mother and I went to check out that activity. I still was interested in joining up, but my mother thought it was a clique and disapproved.) My friendship with Mona just slowly died from lack of effort.
I apparently had an early flair for selecting friends who could have posed for a United Colors of Beneton ad. My next close friend was Mai, a Vietnamese immigrant girl. She joined us during the middle of a school year, and was so obviously scared of us all. I was the one who got up from the circle when she was looking for a place to sit because she had this panicked look of not knowing where to go. I spent a week or so making sure she had a place to sit and wasn't alone. She told me much later that when she'd met me she'd thought I was fat and scarey. She eventually became best friends with a girl named Andrea, who sort of wandered in and out of our friend group.
My other close friend was Yvona, an immigrant girl from Yugoslavia (no, I don't know which country she'd technically be from today. I know she was Catholic, and that's the only clue I have). I met her in 1st grade, and we hit it off, though she already had an especially close friend, Laura. Yvona, Mai, and I spent a lot of time together, though I spent a good amount of that time feeling left out because I had no best friend. It was like having an eternal second prize and knowing you weren't good enough to ever come in first.
I can remember conning Yvona out of some of her small things. Sounds heartless, but remember I was a child and Granny had inadvertantly taught me that toys = love. So I was a greedy child, largely because I wanted the attention. Giving things away also never occurred to me because I never felt like I had enough stuff.
In second grade, I joined the catechism classes. I ended up a year behind everyone who was in my grade. I don't know why my mother did this, I just know I felt like a dunce because I was left behind.. I was not impressed with these teachers for the most part. The teachers at my school I loved and tried very hard to please. I gave up on the catechism teachers in second grade. The woman had brought in ornaments to color for Christmas. I didn't get the one I wanted. I had a fit. Rather than teaching me to be less greedy, the teacher promised to have another box of ornaments for us next week. She lied. I never forgave her for lying to me when I trusted her so completely, and I never felt quite the same about church again.
When a new girl, Sarah, joined our elementary class, Mai took up with her and stopped speaking to me because Sarah told her not to. Sarah would encourage her to play the harrassing game where children just repeat back the same phrases you've just said, and they would whisper about me and such. I'd say Sarah was jealous of me, but there wasn't much to be jealous of other than my being a good student, and I certainly wasn't the only one. She was just generally hateful, and I never knew what was behind it all. I pathetically didn't give up, but the friendship between Mai and I cooled quite a bit.
In fifth grade, we were all split up. Yvona went to England with her family for a year. I'd encouraged her to go this year so she could be back the next, as the family was discussing this all together. Mai went to the advanced fifth grade class, which just increased our drift apart. I qualified for the advanced class, but my mother wouldn't approve my joining it because it was an experimental combination of 4th and 3rd graders. This left me at the mercy of the less mature students my own age, which was likely a grave error. I never did get my friends back after that. I don't know what happened to Yvona, she came back for 6th grade and then disappeared again. Mai went through school with me, went to U of M, became an engineer (I believe that's what I was told, it might have been doctor) and married a guy with the same profession. I know this because my high school group of friends ran into her there. I'm happy for her.
I should probably talk about the guys before I go on. I had two boys I was friends with in kindergarten, but the relationship ended there. Andrew, whom everyone loved, and Dave, whose sense of humor and intelligence matched mine. I also acquired a boyfriend of sorts, or at least a crush. I don't remember how it happened, but I was always together with Adam in class then, and this persisted pretty much through my entire elementary career. My feelings were not returned, and, though a child, I tried to respect that by keeping my distance as the years progressed. I sometimes wonder if he hated me for loving him, since it left him open to being picked on, though he was plenty admired by others that this didn't seem to be a major problem.
Round about second grade, there was some kind of commotion over my crush. I don't remember how or why it started, only that Danielle was behind it, and made it a point to embarress me. She was a very bossy, controlling girl, and I was certainly also prone to being bossy, so I suspect for her it was a matter of taking down a rival. I never saw it coming because I was off playing in my own little world and leaving her totally alone. I ended up almost totally outcast about it, and didn't see any of my friends as much. This was when I became the class scapegoat. I can remember other girls snickering and verbally abusing me a lot, and I can remember them setting the guys up to yell at me or physically attack me with rubber balls.
I should also add that at this point I became a horrible cheat when it came to school work. It wasn't that I needed to cheat, but that 98% wasn't good enough for me because I wanted desperately to impress my mother, and thus be loved. My younger sisters were taking all of her attention, and while I couldn't make myself physically different, I was rewarded in school for my smarts and I tried to translate that to home. The results were not as good as I hoped, since I was forever lacking in Handwriting and Spelling, and for the longest time I was in remedial reading not because I couldn't read, but because I couldn't read aloud very well, which was just incredibly frustrating.
Let's see, I was actually very alone in 4th grade, I guess my friends ended up in other classes. I befriended another overweight girl with acne problems, Marcy. Marcy had a crappier family life than I did. My mother didn't like her, and Marcy was occasionally harrassing to me. I was lonely, but I eventually that relationship after that year. When I was in middle school, Marcy joined a gang and they all tried to pick a fight with me, but I wouldn't give them the satisfaction. I had studied Tang Soo Do at that point, and I did not want to get into trouble for hurting them. I came home in tears, wishing for some peace and quiet, and my mother spent the night harrassing me until I would tell her what happened. At a general breaking point, I did. She called the cops. While I was never harrassed by the gang again, I'm still somewhat annoyed that I never had the chance to take care of things myself, even if my eventual plan was just to pull myself together. The final chapter of Marcy's influence was that she pulled herself together sometime around when she was 20, called me up, apologized, and wanted to try to be friends again. I accepted the apology, was glad to hear she had a better life with her husband, and didn't let her back into mine. My high school friends ran into her as well, not knowing we had ever been connected. Apparently she does charity work and she and her husband are pretty much in charge of the JCs, whatever that is.
A last chapter on my old nemesis Sarah. Somewhere in there she dumped her BFF, Diana, who decided to come to ME and ask for advice on how to put things back together. Diana had been Sarah's henchwoman as time went on, and had been just as cruel. Rather than take revenge, I decided to give her good advice. I helped her come up with a strategy to patch things up with Sarah, which fortunately got them both out of my life pretty much permanently. It also made me realize how good I was at anticipating people and knowing how they worked. I'd learned how to manipulate situations to keep myself safe, and had developed many psychological warfare strategies for use during gym class since I sucked at physical things. It was really my only high point in elementary school after the 2nd grade.
5th and 6th grade I spent pretty much alone. I was friends with Jessie for a bit, since we were both outcasts. Jessie was a very wierd little boy. In retrospect, I think it likely he was gay. Wait, not just gay, the gay best described as flaming. Except we were 11, so that kind of thing probably didn't apply to his thinking then, and I wouldn't learn what gay meant until sometime around when I was 16. Anyway, we weren't close, though he clung to me. I felt sorry for him. And we played together quite a bit because it was better than being alone, though I found him often annoying. I don't stand for clinging too much, and the things that interested him (the TV show Out of Control springs to mind most, as he did his impression of Diz about 5 times a day) were not things that generally interested me. I eventually dropped him as a friend because it was so artifical, though I practically had to shoehorn him off of me. I'm occasionally upset with myself for having to do things in a way that was so painful for him, but he just would not leave. I know he took up with a couple of girls after that who had always been relatively neutral to me, so I thought of them as nice, and at least the guilt didn't last.
Let's see, 5th grade was also the year I nearly committed suicide. My life at home sucked. My life at school sucked. No one loved me, and I was alone. I had been seriously considering running away as early as 2nd grade, but I didn't have anywhere to go, and knew I would eventually starve for lack of money, so I never tried it. I was a practical child. I wasn't bright and shiny like I had been when I started school, and now largely kept to myself and had no friends rather than playing with everyone. I knew killing myself was a sin, and that life was supposed to be "God's Gift," but it sure seemed like a crappy gift. It seemed like all of the attacks and the hatred wouldn't end until I died, so I considered arranging to do so. At Easter, I was setting out the steak knives, all by myself in the kitchen. The knife itself turned in my hand and landed poking into my chest over my heart. I decided to choose then because dragging my feet and making excuses and whining weren't going to fix anything. I chose to live only because I couldn't stand the tought of letting THEM win. Everyone seemed so intent on destroying who I was, that dying would be giving up and letting them have their way. After all the pain and misery they'd caused me, I refused to make it easier by destroying myself for them and condemning myself to hell. I took all my anger, scrunched it up all together, and swore I would find a way to escape.
My escape plan became simple. Instead of fighting, I let myself fade and retreated. I hid in my room and was quiet. I never invited another friend over to my house (a rule only broken for my graduation sleepover party). I didn't let anyone else in, never told anyone any of my secrets, and particularly not my feelings since those were so easily trampled. I only fought with my sisters as an impartial judge when my parents weren't home, and not on my own behalf. I let Steph pinch me black and blue and learned not to feel it even when she drew blood. I would wait them all out and escape by getting a scholarship to college and then getting a good job so that I would never have to return. I was smart. I could do this. I just had to hold on. If winning or death were my only choices, I didn't have anything left to lose.
I suffered from really severe depression 5th-8th grades. We had a project where they insisted you write an essay comparing your life to one of those spiralling shells that sea creatures just keep building more rooms on. I thought that was an awful metaphor. I wrote an essay comparing my life to an old vase. It had been dropped and broken and glued back together many many times. It had a pretty pattern, and the cracks themselves made the vase beautiful. It was just also fragile, and you never knew what would break it.
I made friends with the class chemealons, which we had for a science project. I then ended up dropping my favoriate one on the floor and stepping on it in sudden shock. He held on for several days before he died, and one of the guys played taps as we buried him on the playground. Children from other classes raided his grave, dug him up, and then left him lying there, decomposing. I collected his body and took him home with me. My dad buried him under the wood pile. I'd felt so guilty for the accident, and there was nothing else I could do to make it up to the chemealon except see him safely buried. Knowing other children weren't flinging his body around as a toy made me feel a tiny bit better.
I found the class clown, Jon, tolerable company through the rest of 5th and 6th grade. We weren't friends, we didn't spend a lot of time together, but we did work on projects together, and he had never made fun of me. He mostly made himself or the teachers the butt of his jokes, and I needed a laugh. Maybe that was why he was nice to me, I was a challenge. He was also easily bored, and I was still good at coming up with new projects at that point. Gave us both something to do.
In 7th grade, I met Michelle, who walked the same route home from the Junior High that I did, so we talked together and became somewhat friends. She was sweet but dim. She also already had a majorly possessive BFF, Eva. We parted ways far before the end of the year. I also met Tracy in French class. She was also already attached to other people, first Tiffany, and then after Tiffany disappeared from the picture it was Julie. I liked Tracy though because she also made me laugh, and we ended up having to do lots of partner work for French class, so we were together for that.
Tracy was being harrassed by a guy named Waheed. He just would not leave her alone and kept trying to get her to do his work for him. The school delinquent at that time was named Chris, and we labeled Waheed Chris #2 in honor of his inability to do his own work. We would talk about him, referring to him as Chris when we were in class and I was asking her how things were going. We weren't purposely being mean to him in the beginning, we were basically developing a code to avoid him and fill our time. Waheed eventually figured out that when we said Chris, we meant him. This seemed to bother him creatly, and he tried to get us to stop that when we were just talking to eachother. Which just resulted in us calling him Chris to his face. I don't know what Tracy's complete history with him was, but, looking back, I suspect she'd wanted some form of ward or revenge for years, and she finally had a weapon. We tormented him with it in class until he finally backed off and left us alone. Though this didn't seem to satisfy Tracy, who ran into him far more frequently than she liked. She just called him Chris when she saw him, and would show up the next day with stories about it. A number of them ended with him screaming "My name isn't Chris" at the top of his lungs in front of a teacher/crowded store/security guards/other school mates who started calling him Chris. I sometimes feel sorry about that, since it feels like bullying. At the same time if he had ever just done what we asked (Pleas just leave us alone, we don't want to do your work), then he wouldn't have been in that position in the first place.
Tracy and I were together through high school. I know every else says their years in high school sucked. Mine were pretty darn good compared to what had gone before. When we finally got to high school, we made up a lunch group. Aside from me, her, and her BFF Julie, there were Diane, Marilyn, and Heather.
Heather was rich, kind of snobby, and also rather dim, but she was very outgoing and friendly. I think much of the snobby came from being rich and an only child so that she just didn't think about other people. She eventually got into some kind of kerfuffle with Tracy and Marilyn, right before graduation, and I haven't seen her since, though I'm told she married a con artist and is currently working as a cashier because her parents lost a lot of their money.
Marilyn is an adorable sweetheart, very soft-spoken and gentle. She wanted to be a social worker and she became a kindergarten teacher, which also seems very appropriate. She was engaged to be married, but apparently she and the fiance called it off, deciding they were better friends than as a couple. We were in social studies class together, and it was one of the few partner work setups I've ever been in that worked out. She wasn't a good student, but that was largely because she was terrible at writing essays. I always loved rearranging words, so we'd do the research, she'd do the tedious typing up the paper, then I'd take the notes back and make it actually make sense. She got As so long as she worked with me, and I didn't have to do the long writing all by myself.
Diane was an ultra-conservative Catholic. It was often my job to reel her in or keep her from getting offensive with her rhetoric. Other than that, she was fun to be around, and a soap opera nut. There were a couple of years where she wasn't in our classes, so Tracy and I and whoever else we ran into would spend all day writing conversation notes during class and then giving them to Diane at the end of the day. Those are probably the things most like a real journal that I've ever written. I would bet you she still has them somewhere. Her parents favored her younger sister over her (they bought the younger sister a car, and paid mucho money for her education), and she was often beaten up and had things stolen by said sister, though she would only mention it if something like that happened over the phone while we were talking. She wanted to be a flight attendent, but at the moment she's apparently out of work, aside from having joined the ROTC. Which surprised the heck out of me when I found out. I just never pictured her in the military. I'm extremely proud of her though, sounds as if she's at least sticking up for herself.
Tracy and Julie went on to U of M in journalism. Tracy lost contact with Julie afterward. Tracy herself is now working at Bed, Bath, and Beyond and trying to establish a reputation as a freelance journalist specializing in the music scene around the Detroit area. I haven't talked to her in a few months, but we've only recently reestablished contact.
Having a group of friends agains is when I really started putting myself back together. I became less depressed and more stable. I loved school. It was so much better than home. I also learned how to get aways with wandering around the halls whenever I felt like it, irregardless of the security guards, who never ever stopped me. The head of the year book committee had a permanent pass, and I remember hearing him complain how he couldn't get out of the room on legitimate business without being stopped at least once, often three times.
When one of the guys tried to push me around in the halls, I stopped walking. When one of them pushed me on the stairs I kicked backward and hit his crotch. And when the All City Track Champion nearly suffocated me at one of the only two school parties I ever went to, I grabbed him, holding him while I wiped my face off, in spite of all his struggles. When he twisted out of my grip, I ran after him, vaulting over every obstacle he jumped over, until I caught him. No one bothered me after that. I think they were completely frightened since I was always overweight and non-atheletic. I was simply done with putting up with their crap.
In the end, I learned to keep to myself, that feelings spoken aloud were a target, and even feelings hidden could be a target. I learned to read people and intentions, to ferret out things before they bit me in the ass. I got left many many times, and learned a little about leaving fake or abusive relationships. I learned how to live with always being in second place. And in the end I defeated a number of villains, whether by physically defending myself, or being untouchable. Everyone in my high school class knew my name, though I don't know why. I doubt that's true of most of the rest of them.
I felt cheated when there wasn't a high schoool reunion. Other than wanting to get back in touch with my friends, I wanted to show off how I HAD escaped them all. I fit in my high school clothes, I have two degrees, and I have a job I enjoy and my name in print in a number of different projects I've worked on over the years. I succeeded and am relatively sane. And that won't be enough for me until I have the chance to go back and face them all. I hate unresolved things, particularly when the things have caused me pain.