Strong Enough Not to Chase
In my last post there were a couple things that I wanted to expand on since it plays a lot into what I’ll be talking about here. The first being those three people I mentioned who went to my school and were also part of my church. They were also three of the worst bullies I’ve ever had. One in particular was by far one of the cruelest person I have ever known. And that’s counting my adult life. Think Rachel McAdams in Mean Girls, but the meaner Hispanic version.
Her name was Elena, and if she had only been in my life for one school year that would’ve been amazing, because she would’ve simply been classified as a one-year-bully with the rest of the assholes. But she wasn’t. She was in the same class as me for the third, fourth, and fifth grade. It. Was. Awful.
And before any of you think that this was just some ordinary teasing, it had started off that way, but by the fourth grade it wasn’t anymore. It all began with dirty looks out of nowhere in the second grade. But by the time I got to the third grade I already knew that I was somehow different from all the other girls, so I was already very self conscious. I didn’t like dresses, I always wore jeans and a t-shirt. I liked hanging out with guys but I didn’t like them or have crushes on any of them like all the other girls were doing already. When I thought about kissing other people, thinking about kissing guys felt strange to me. But again, my parents were super religious so having thoughts of anything other than heterosexual thoughts meant that you were unclean and that God hated you. Thanks man. So I always felt strangely out of place and odd both in my body and in my own head, mainly because I didn’t know I was gay yet. In the third grade I hadn’t figured that part of me out or even understood it was an option. Because according to my parents, and God apparently, it was either you were straight or you were wrong. So I couldn’t figure out why I wasn’t drooling over the latest hot guy like all the other girls did, but could stare for hours at Jeanette while she played four square at recess.
Mix up all that inner turmoil and add that until the third grade I only had one friend. Yeah, I know my previous post was about how I didn’t have any friends up until high school so let me explain. There was a short span of time where my parents had kind of moved away from the church they were in. It wasn’t a complete break, it was just more lax. We didn’t go to the required three meetings a week, we didn’t do the required service that was supposed to happen in addition to the meetings. We still went circuit and district conventions that happened every four months but that was pretty much it. So there was about three years from when I was in kindergarten until the second grade where I still wasn’t allowed to have “worldly” friends but I was allowed to do things that normally would have been out of the question. Like play soccer. Oddly enough there was a point where even though I was allowed to play soccer, which was super cool, my parents still didn’t want me to have friends so I wasn’t allowed to go my teammates house or hang out with the other kids I played with, except for one kid. His name was Chris and he was my first venture in what a friendship was. And when I say friendship, I mean my definition of a friendship which was basically I was on the same soccer team as him, I went over his house and he came over mine once. I did a bike fund raiser and spoke with him on the phone once or twice. This was over the span of about a year and a half. This wasn’t the first time while I was growing up that I had a large amount of inconsistency with regards to my religion, but that’s for another post.
I gave you this bit of backstory about two very important things about me because when I hit third grade I was once again agonizing that I would have to go back to school and have no friends, and get bullied, and I was practically in tears weeks before the first day. But then…then I found out that I’d have not one, not two but THREE girls that went to my church that were my age in my class and I was soooo excited! I remember on the night before the first day of school I stayed up thinking about actually being able to hang out with some friends, and all the things we’d do together. I remember thinking in all my baby gay ignorance that maybe somehow, if I just managed to have friends, then I could look at boys like all my would-be friends did. And God wouldn’t hate me cause I’d be drooling over boys just like all the other girls. So the first day of school rolls around, I walk in, and we’re all dressed up in our best First Day of School outfits and I remember that I walked in the classroom and the desks were set up in rows facing each other, and I had to sit right across from her and that was a good sign right? Well I sat down and I waited patiently for eye contact or a smile, and then she turns to me and says, “What are you looking at?” I blinked in shock because in my head I was thinking, I was looking at you, my soon to be best friend what else?? Of course me staring in shocked silence was met with, “Are you stupid? What are you staring at?” I had no idea what to think. I mentally rechecked all the boxes like, she’s in my church? Check. She’s my age? Check. So what the hell?
I would love to tell you that this introduction was enough to warn me that she was not a nice person and to stay away from her, but it wasn’t. I wanted a friend sooo badly.
A part of me looks back on that time in my life and thinks that when it came to her, it was my continually trying to be her friend that ironically made the bullying worse. Like by the end of the month it was pretty obvious that Elena was one of the popular kids. And it wasn’t that I was unpopular, I was just the tomboy all the guys hung out with. But the guys didn’t act the same with her as they did with me. With me I was one of the guys, with her, they all clamored around her fighting for her attention. Everyone seemed to like her and think she was funny and she in turn seemed to make people gravitate towards her and there was always laughter in whatever group of people she was around. Except for me. And I had tried. I really, really had tried to get somewhere with her. I tried talking with her multiple times each time getting rebuffed immediately. I even tried initiating conversation with her after school cause I thought maybe she didn’t want people to know she was the same religion as me. She would literally roll her eyes and run away from me. I remember the first time I tried to sit with her and the other two girls from my church after school in the court yard where you waited for your parents to pick you up and she immediately sneered, “Goodbye James!” So I’d go and sit by myself. Listening to my hypothetical best friends make fun of me while I walked away. On one occasion I think both our parents were running late because it was only me and the other three girls left. I remember they made up a song that was called, “The Jamie sits alone” and sang it over and over as they threw rocks at me while I sat there…alone. I didn’t understand what was going on. These were kids from my church where it was hammered into us over and over to only associate with those in the church. And kids were given scriptures on repeat like, “Bad association spoil useful habits” And I was not bad association. I was part of who we were supposed to hang out with. So…what. The. Fuck? I cannot tell you how many times I came home, went straight to my bedroom and cried. My mother would get upset with me and ask, “Why do you care so much about these friends? If they don’t want to be your friend, then don’t try to be theirs.” And I get it. I totally understand where she was coming from to some extent. But not to others. I think she failed to understand how much having a friend translated to me being normal in more ways than one or how much those reasons meant to me. I don’t think she understood how incredibly painful it was to have bullies that didn’t just go to school with me now, but that I would see at church conventions and no, I didn’t sit there with them either.
Well as the third grade went on, so did the bullying. It was never physical. It was always emotional. It was teasing at recess, at lunch, and after school. Getting the boys that thought I was a cool tomboy to suddenly keep a distance from me because now I was somehow weird to them. Then they would inevitably join in when the girls teased me about sitting alone. The girls would cheer on other people if they pushed me around physically, but they were never the ones to do it. Only encourage it. Until sometime over a year later when we were in the fourth grade I couldn’t take it. I remember how it happened. I was in the lunch line and I made a joke that made the teacher laugh as she walked away. Instantly I saw Elena get a few others to point at me and the whispers and giggling started. We started moving forward and before I even thought about it the words, “I’ll give you a dollar to be my friend for the day” just came out of my mouth. A dollar. It was my lunch money. I was giving her my lunch money to be my friend. I remember her face slightly change as she looked at me and without missing a beat she responded, “Ok.”
So I sat across from her at lunch and didn’t get teased. She wasn’t particularly nice to me, but she didn’t tease me. Which was amazing. Well the day ended and the second the school bell rung she reverted to not being my friend again. She leaned over my desk while I was still putting things in my back pack and said, “Give me the money and hurry up!” Flustered and suddenly very anxious I tried to open my pencil box which had all my quarters, nickels, and dimes that I had painstakingly saved up and dropped them all over the floor which immediately caught the attention of my fourth grade teacher. She walked over to us and asked what was going on. I…I cannot tell you how embarrassed I was. For dropping the money. For getting Elena kind of in trouble. For having to explain that I paid someone my lunch money to be my friend for a day. When I was done explaining, Elena ran out of the room without the money but my teacher asked if my mother was picking me up. When I said yes, I was mortified that she waited with me in the school yard, and when my mother arrived she asked me to wait a moment while she spoke with my mother.
By the fourth grade I had grown to be pretty preceptive about my parents looks and moods. I think every kid does by the fourth grade but more so if there is any kind of abuse going on because facial expressions and little things like the small wrinkles that form in the middle of your father’s forehead when he’s getting upset, or the fact that he creases his lips together when he’s pissed are warning signs. Yet, when I got in the car that day I remember that my mother just kept looking at me in the rear view mirror, sighing and shaking her head. I remember feeling so very small because as any kid knows sometimes your parents being disappointed in you is the worst feeling in the world. But I couldn’t understand why she was mad at me. Wasn’t I the one who was getting bullied? For years?? Wasn’t I the one who had just wanted one fucking day where no one laughed at me? When I got home I remember my mom told me to go to my room and wait for her. I remember almost every detail about that day. I remember when my mother walked in, she sat down on this really soft pastel green chenille rocking chair we had. I remember I was wearing my dark blue jeans that I thought were pretty cool because they had neon green stitching, and a white long sleeve shirt that had aqua colored sleeves. But most of all I remember what my mother told me. I remember she told me that I had let her down. That she was disappointed in me because I wasn’t strong like I used to be. She liked to retell this story of when my older sister who had enrolled in softball, asked me why I wanted to play soccer? Because in soccer you could get hurt. And my response was, “Well then I’ll get hurt.” She told me that she was so proud of me then. But now. Now I had let her down. Now I wasn’t that strong little girl anymore. Now I was acting like some wimpy kid who paid people to be their friend. I remembered she brought a bible with her and showed me the scripture about, “casting pearls before swine” and said that I should be smart enough to not do that because it says not to do that in the bible. Because apparently disappointing her wasn’t enough, I somehow had ended up with the disappointment winning lottery ticket where I wasn’t just letting my mother down, I was letting God down too.
Then she cried. My mother cried because I wasn’t strong. After enduring years of being bullied and sitting and listening to sermons and lectures at church that made me feel like I hated my own thoughts and body, I felt like I was the weak daughter she was ashamed of because I was no longer the strong little girl she had once been proud of. She told me that I was not supposed to initiate anything with anyone. Sure you say hello, but after that, you don’t chase people. Ever. And even though I had not been bullied that day, I still cried alone on my bed when she left.
To this day, I feel like that’s partly why it’s so difficult for me to reach out to people. To friends. I feel this overwhelming sense of being small, so even if I want to call people or be invited to a game or a party…I won’t. I can’t chase anyone.
That would make me a disappointment. And weak. Also, I feel like God owes me a winning lottery ticket.