Closure Part 1: Reconnection

*As always, names have been changed to protect people's privacy

I've spilled a lot of digital ink about my horrific experiences in middle school of losing friends and being bullied. If you read my post from November 2024, "Autism and Boundaries Part 1: Losing Friends," you saw that the recent fallout with my (admittedly newly-acquired) friend Lisa over a joke that fell the wrong way was the inciting incident that made me revisit middle school in that entry and ultimately write a few follow-up posts over the past two months. However, a few other important things also happened during that time.

When I was visiting my parents this spring, I was flipping through my yearbook from 7th grade, the year I had first met my middle school friend group and was still a welcome part of it. There were some warm messages from the girls who signed my yearbook, such as, "You're a good friend," and "We've become such good friends this year." Ivy, who was my best friend at school, ended her message with, "B.F.F. 1994." 

That year, Ivy and I truly had a genuine friendship. We hung out at each other's houses, played games, wrote funny stories, and drew pictures while an Animaniacs song tape played in the background. One time, we ran into each other at a toy store, and I ended up going to her house for the rest of the day. In the summer of 1994, between 7th and 8th grade, we even had a double sleepover: I spent the night at Ivy's house, and the next day she spent the night at mine. Our friendship had such a genuine undercurrent, which made the memory of it ultimately fell apart in 9th grade all the more painful.

Then I thought about Torey. While I wasn't ever as close to her as I was to Ivy, we did have some fun together. We went to each other's birthday parties, spent summer afternoons at the swim club, and one time I even slept over at her house. We watched Mrs. Doubtfire, and that night as we were going to sleep, we confided in each other our frustrations over some of the mean girls at school. Although I knew that whatever she was dealing with was probably not as intense as the bullying that I was enduring, I do recall in that moment feeling good about being able to talk about it and knowing that I wasn't completely alone.

Whenever I looked at my yearbooks over the years, I had brief, fleeting thoughts about how I had started 7th grade with a group of friends, and by 9th grade (middle school in my district) these kids had turned on me. But this time, looking at the yearbook and writing my most recent blog posts about middle school made me think about it more deeply. For the first time, I asked myself, "How the hell could this have happened?" While early on I realized that the ensuing bullying was not my fault, for years I internalized the fallout itself as something that I had caused with my sense of humor, jokes landing the wrong way, and just in general being "annoying," "inappropriate," "immature," and "WRONG." I didn't question the idea that it was normal and expected for friendships to end over things like this. It was just the way things were, and I didn't appreciate how utterly absurd and shallow it was. 

My friends began to slip away from me in 8th grade, and then in the beginning of 9th grade, I was kicked out of the lunch table and, by extension, the group. Torey orchestrated the entire thing, backed up by Kat-- who was still angry at me from our fallout the previous year-- and not challenged by anybody else, including Ivy. Torey's explanation? "You're the most annoying person I've ever met, and nobody wants you here." One by one, my remaining friends distanced themselves further, and by the end of 9th grade, even Ivy had completely abandoned our friendship.

As I looked at my yearbook this spring, I truly began to see what a pile of nonsense the whole situation had been. People don't start out liking you enough to invite you to double sleepovers and then two years later decide to abandon you because they're tired of your sense of humor. People don't confide in you about painful experiences with mean girls and then decide to become one just because they find you annoying. I had always thought "Either all of these kids changed and became mean, or they had all become tired of me when they saw how insufferable I was. The latter seems more likely."

Only a couple years ago did it dawn on me that neither of these explanations was accurate, and that something else would better explain the actions of my former friends. The bullying had gotten worse each year in middle school, and eventually got so bad that the kids in my friend group had to have known that if they didn't want to be subjected to the same hourly abuse as me, they would not only have to distance themselves, they would have to actively demonstrate that they weren't anything like me by joining in on the bullying. I honestly don't think it was even a completely conscious decision but the result of instinct shaped by eons of evolution: eat or be eaten. And this spring, as I looked at my yearbook with that in mind, I began to think about that explanation more deeply. And the idea of contacting Ivy and Torey began to stir in my head.

Many times over the years, I considered contacting Ivy and Torey to find out how they remembered the events. But I also felt that I should wait for them to make the first move-- they were the ones who had shunned me, not vice-versa. However, something else happened that made me reconsider: For the first time since its 2003 release, I read Please Stop Laughing at Me, a memoir by anti-bullying activist Jodee Blanco about her own chronic and incessant bullying that was eerily similar to mine. The book ended with her attending her high school reunion to confront her past-- and to be greeted by her former bullies and friends-turned-bullies with profuse apologies. She is now friends with many of these people, and they have supported her in her anti-bullying activism. Would there be a way to encounter Ivy and Torey again in a similar way Jodee Blanco did with her old classmates?

Unfortunately, a high school reunion was out of the question. My school district had two high schools, and Ivy and Torey had been zoned for a different high school than me. And who's even heard of a middle school reunion? The only option, then, was to look them up on social media. But then what? I wanted closure, but I couldn't just ask for an apology or just start talking about everything as if twenty-nine years hadn't passed since I last saw them. For all I knew, they didn't even remember our fallout-- or even me. As unlikely as I thought either scenario was, people continue to surprise me with the kinds of things they let slip down the memory hole. In another scenario that I thought unlikely, but still possible, perhaps these girls still blamed me for everything that happened. Maybe they would see my friend request, send me a nasty message, and block me. I didn't know. I was flying blind. Once again, I concluded that I should just wait for them to contact me.

However, I finally said to myself, "What am I doing? It's been almost thirty years since all this happened. We were middle school kids in a broken system in the ignorant '90s. If I really want closure, why don't I just contact them?"

In mid-June, I friend requested Ivy on Facebook, and Torey a few days later. To my surprise, both Ivy and Torey accepted my friend requests. I had successfully conveyed the message that my door was open, but now what? I decided to wait. Hopefully they would message me, and I would also leave breadcrumbs that I hoped they would examine. I posted several autism memes and a number of links to autism articles-- something I normally do anyway. Perhaps they would see these and realize that I was autistic and start to rethink certain things about the past. Additionally, I posted a link to my then-latest post about the fallout in 9th grade, Sober Reflection About Sober Reflection. However, if a certain amount of time passed-- I was thinking about two months-- and neither of them commented or contacted me, I would contact them. But I would have to sit on it for a while and think of the right way to approach this. 

If I ended up having to message them, then what? Did they even owe me an apology? I wasn't sure. We were kids when all of this happened, and I have long held the philosophy that you cannot hold adults accountable for bad things they did as kids, unless it is something as extreme as rape or murder. And since I was reaching out and not vice-versa, it didn't make sense for me to expect an apology.

Fortunately, Ivy ended up reading my blog post and leaving the following comment, answering the post's question as to whether neurotypical people engage in sober reflection to the same extent as autistic people are forced to:

The answer to your question is yes, we do, and probably just as much or more. I'm guessing I'm Ivy in this story, and that's fair. I didn't stick up for you [that day at the lunch table], and I wish I had. We were friends, and when it all went to hell I chose wrong. I wish I had been brave enough to stick up for you, but I wasn't... Instead of choosing my friend, I chose what I thought was self-preservation, and it was an asshole thing to do. I know 30 years is probably too late for an apology, but I am sorry, and I wish I had been a better person and a better friend to you.

Ivy's comment confirmed what I had already suspected: she knew that she would endure the kind of chronic, incessant, minute-by-minute bullying that I did if she continued to associate with me, including at the lunch table. I messaged her to thank her for her comment. We spent the next few days talking about what had happened in middle school. It turns out that Ivy remembers a lot of some of the same things that I do, such as our constant bickering during a 9th-grade class project that we both thought of as the final nail in the coffin of our friendship, and the ways my former friend group started to gang up on me. However, she also didn't remember some of the nasty things that she had said to me, such as that everybody wanted to beat me up. Ivy said that when she read about this in the blog post, she was horrified and ashamed.

As for Torey, I messaged her about a week after Ivy and I began talking. We engaged in small talk for a few minutes, asking one another how she had been all these years. I brought up a couple funny memories from when we were friends, such as when her friend from church gave her a mouse for her thirteenth birthday. After about five minutes of this, I finally asked, "For my peace of mind, I need to know: do you remember what went down in 9th grade?" Just as I hit "send," I got the following message from Torey:

Julie - not to change the subject exactly - but you’ve been on my mind many times over the years. I was too cowardly to reach out and say this, but I need to.

Then, she saw my message and wrote this: 

I’m so sorry for that. I really am. What I did to you back then is the one thing I look back on and regret often. You were my friend. I didn’t mean to hurt you and I have no explanation for why I did. I’m truly sorry.

Torey and I ended up continuing the conversation on Zoom the next day. She told me that whenever there's an icebreaker activity in which participants have to talk about their biggest regret, Torey talks about the way she treated me in 9th grade. I find it puzzling, however, that she does not remember why she turned on me, let alone so viciously. Or maybe she never even knew why. That would offer credence to the idea that she, Ivy, and the others were acting on unconscious instinct in a hostile environment, shaped by millions of years of evolution.

However, there is one thing that became abundantly clear from talking to both Torey and Ivy. To back up a bit, in responding to Ivy's comment on my post, I told her that I wasn't angry-- at least not at her. Rather, I was angry at the teachers, principal, and administrators who made it safe for this type of hostile environment to form. But after talking to both of them, I realized I wasn't the only one whom the system had failed. It failed all of us. It failed me the most, of course, because I was the undiagnosed autistic kid. But it absolutely failed them too. In addition, I am certain that our 9th grade history teacher, Mr. Frank, played a role in ending my friendship with Ivy. But I'm getting ahead of myself. 

Stay tuned.