Previous entries in this series about my experiences in middle school:
1. Autism and Boundaries Pt 1: Losing Friends
2. Autism and Boundaries Pt 2: The Double Standard
4. When School is a Systemic Failure
5. Sober Reflection About Sober Reflection
7. Closure Pt 2: How School Failed All of Us
8. Closure Pt 3: What Could Have Been Done
9. Running Saved Me Pt 1: A New Support System
10. Running Saved Me Pt 2: How Running Saved My Brain
* As always, names and details have been changed to protect people's privacy.
Over the course of the past few months, I have written ten blog posts in which I revisited painful experiences in middle school, running the gamut from losing friends to being bullied on a minute-by-minute basis; this eleventh post closes the series. The previous two entries discussed how my experience running track at the end of 9th grade gave me new friends, a supportive coach, and the chemical boost in my brain that enabled me to stand up to the bullies. With such a positive resolution and a high self-esteem at the end of the year, how is any of this still relevant-- especially to someone just a week from her forty-fifth birthday? I must have put it completely behind me, right?
Honestly, I thought I did. But let's address that elephant in the room-- or, as a more apt metaphor, that television in the bar. Upon recent reflection, as illustrated in the first post in this series, I hadn't put this nonsense behind me. Not completely. The events of middle school were core memories, created in the formative years of my life when my brain was still developing. As I only recently realized, they impacted how I would think about friendships throughout the rest of my adolescence and well into my adult life and, to a lesser extent, to this day. Even if I wasn't thinking intently about these memories, they were a constant backdrop, akin to a television playing in a bar. When you're at a bar, you are not directly focusing on the television, but you are constantly aware of its presence in your peripheral vision and hearing. My experiences in middle school largely taught me to expect friendships to be tenuous, and that any minute someone who once genuinely liked me could do a mental hairpin turn and abandon me, unless I learned to rein in multiple aspects of myself.
And let me just say this: if life were a Hollywood movie, after running track in 9th grade I would be consistently confident and have tons of good friends for the rest of my life, starting with high school that fall. That is, a perfect movie ending wrapped up in a neat little package. But that isn't how life works. Over the decades, I have gone through multiple cycles of confidence and self-loathing, depending on whatever obstacles and setbacks I encounter. Wash, rinse, repeat.
When I entered high school in the fall of 1996, fresh off the track team (where I made new friends) and my second rewarding summer at Camp Negev (a progressive and open-minded environment where I felt people really appreciated me for the first time), I was pretty optimistic. Most of the kids from middle school were zoned for the other high school in the district, and the new kids I encountered seemed very nice-- and for the most part, they were. With time, I felt, I would make some new friends. That isn't what happened. I had trouble connecting with people. But why? I had easily made new friends with the 7th- and 8th-graders on the track team the previous year, so why couldn't I make new friends in my high school? Sadly, it was probably because those friends from track were two and three years younger than me. Because I had repeated first grade, I was a year older than all the kids in my grade and, at age fifteen, these new friends were mostly twelve and thirteen years old. Like me, and unlike my agemates, they were still largely into "kid" things-- just like Ivy had been when we first met in 7th grade.
Now that I was in 10th grade, I could not find common ground with my peers. The conversations I would start with other kids felt forced and awkward. By the end of the year, it was clear that I wasn't going to make any friends. And when I could see that I was starting to annoy people and weird them out for a variety of reasons, I feared that I would be bullied again. So I did the only thing I could to protect myself: I withdrew and mostly remained quiet-- something people who know me well would find difficult to imagine. My strategy worked: I wasn't bullied in high school, but I didn't make any friends either. I had a few friendly acquaintances, but we we never became close enough to get together outside of school. I was scared to let them in on aspects of me that I had been repeatedly taught to keep hidden. The way high school unfolded suggested to me that my positive end to 9th grade was, like my experiences at Camp Negev, a tiny anomaly in a world that largely rejected me. Looking back, my decision to withdraw socially in high school is the biggest regret of my life. I know now that there had to have been other neurodivergent kids I could have become friends with who, like me, were hiding, because there wasn't yet a word to describe them.
I think of my yearslong friend, Andrea, whom I met in the fall of 1999, during my freshman year of college. Andrea remembers trying to get to know me and feeling like I wanted to be left alone. Nothing could have been further from the truth. It was just that I was so afraid of putting her off or coming across as demanding that I forced myself to seem quiet and reserved-- no easy task since when I am comfortable I can be quite uninhibited, for better or for worse. Fortunately, Andrea was undeterred. We were both animation majors-- most of the others who planned to go into animation were guys, and Andrea wanted to get to know me, since I was the only other girl in animation she had encountered so far.
Even well into adulthood, the proverbial television in the bar is still on in the background. A couple years ago, at a family gathering, a bunch of us were playing with an AI generator. Because of how nonsensical and surreal the resulting images were, I joked that the computer was on drugs. One of my relatives, who had once had a drug problem, got upset and yelled at me in front of everybody. At the time, I thought he was upset because a little kid was in the room (I was unaware, as the kid was behind me). I only learned later that he was upset because the joke touched a personal vulnerability.
When I discussed the situation with my parents a couple weeks later, I lamented, "If this had happened with someone outside of the family, that would have ended the friendship." Mom replied, "Someone who ends a friendship over something like that wasn't your friend to begin with." I realized she was right, but that metaphorical television that played constant reruns of my middle school memories was still in the periphery of my life. Of course, I now also wonder why Mom and Dad didn't say the same thing after the fallout with my middle school friend, Kat, over my joke about old people smell in 8th grade, and when I was kicked out of the lunch table in 9th grade. Unfortunately, my parents don't remember their responses to either incident, or any of the others in which they seemed to blame me for friendships ending. They insist they never intended to blame me when these types of fallouts happened, which is puzzling because that is absolutely the message I absorbed. I guess I'll never know.
And, of course, most recently, there was my fallout with Lisa over my joke that she should stalk famous actors on her trip to Los Angeles, which she thought I meant as a serious suggestion. Although that situation is different because Lisa is autistic -- the hyper-literal, black-and-white-thinking type-- I still saw and heard that metaphorical television in the background. As you saw in that blog post, my mind reflexively went back thirty years to my fallout with Kat.
It's incidents like the aforementioned that made me realize how much the bullshit I went through in middle school shaped me and how I never completely moved on. It became clear that to truly put it behind me, I would have to radically reframe the past and deconstruct-- similar to the way someone might when leaving a cult or a high-demand religion. Contacting Ivy and Torey and clearing the air with them has helped me to do that, and I wish I would have done it twenty years ago. Perhaps addressing that television in the bar sooner would have made it easier to turn off. Unfortunately, it is still on decades later, and so it is that much harder to silence.
I want to end by saying that I am honestly glad to have reconnected with Ivy and Torey beyond getting closure. Ivy no longer lives in or near our hometown in Pennsylvania; she has long moved out of state, so I have no idea if I'll see her at any point. However, she has said that she is glad we reconnected. Torey, who for years had been living in the Midwest, recently moved back near our hometown, and we are going to try to get together when I visit my family for Thanksgiving.
Reconnecting with Ivy and Torey also gave me closure in that our discussions helped me realize that none of the kids in our ragtag group of eight were ever truly "bad." As I've discussed, we were all kids in a broken system in a more ignorant time. Ivy said it best: we were perpetually in fight-or-flight mode, constantly reacting and not yet mature enough to take a step back and see the big picture. For years, I thought if any of the girls in the group ever contacted me, I would only be receptive to hearing from Ivy, and possibly Torey, provided that they apologized for turning on me. I always knew that Ivy was a good person at her core and, as I've said, I do recall Torey acting genuinely sorry towards the end of the year after the parents and principal staged an intervention. However, after having talked to both women, I realized I would be open to hearing from the other five kids in the group. I could contact them, but I was honestly never really close to them (one girl, Rosie, I didn't even mention in any of the posts!), so I don't see the point. But, in the off-chance that any of them are reading this, I absolutely would be receptive to hearing from them.
Onward.
