VICTIMS NEED VILLAINS

 BOOK ONE CHAPTER 2—BULLY FOR ME Part 1 VICTIMS NEED VILLAINS

Hi.  Glad to meet you.  My name is Annie.  I’m ten years old.  And I’ve leaped off the historical time line to tell you my story.  However, before we get started, there’s one thing in need of clarifying:  You may think me older than my years, because I’ll be talking through the adult I’ve become, whose voice has a tendency to override mine, from time to time.

For example, a kid would not say:  Don’t ya just hate it when you meet someone, and the first thing you hear is that person’s story of woe?  I mean if misery likes company then why do people go on and on about themselves instead of letting you top their sad tales with a whale of a tale of your own?  In truth, misery just wants listeners to agree that life should not be so unfair for someone as intelligent, caring, personable, hard working, and fun as—you.

Perhaps misery needs listeners to agree with 'woe is me' for this reason:  We know that life can be a slippery slope.  But when the person sliding downhill is oneself, we tend to believe that the reason for our slide is someone else's fault, because—Every victim needs a villain to blame when misery just won’t quit.  At least that’s what we tend to believe is true until a growth spurt toward emotional maturity shines the spotlight of insight upon the necessity of holding oneself accountable for one’s own words, actions and deeds once we’re adults.  The primary issue being that too many adults remain blind to those times when they ‘act out’ like undisciplined children rather than acting like self disciplined grown ups.

On the other hand, each time an unexpected situation arises, twisting a child's self-confident voice into tongue-tied knots, that child—Whoops—I forgot that this particular child wants to speak for herself.  So begging your pardon for my interruption, let's welcome young Annie back and listen intently to that which she feels need to say, today ...

At five, I'd patted crying classmates on the back, reassuring them that our moms would pick us up at the end of our first day in kindergarten.  You see, during the 1940’s most of us had not been enrolled in preschool, and daycare was a word not yet coined.  In fact, if Rosie The Riveter had children, they were most likely cared for by grandparents, who’d lived with our families after emigrating from ‘the old country’.

At ten, I'd stamped my foot on the playground at recess and refused to play until my friends stopped bullying the new kid at school.  Though I’d been unaware of my budding leadership skills, Mother Nature had empowered MY VOICE to ring out ‘loud and clear’ with my peers concerning whatever I’d intuitively felt at my core.  And clarity concerning my socially secure status in school remained mine until we moved to the suburbs where an emotional storm cloud darkened my pre-teen years in such a terrifying way that the confounding nature of my new reality felt too unbelievable for my sense of clarity to bear.  (In case you’re thinking:  Here starts the misery—I mean mystery—concerning the dizzying aspects of Annie’s deeply conflicted relationship with—herself, please stop your mind from jumping to conclusions, because the mysterious nature of my conflicted relationship between self-confidence and insecurity had actually experienced sound reason to develop during the fall of 1946 when I was not quite three at which time the fickle finger of fate had unleashed tragedy to trample all over my family’s sense of safety, not once but twice within less than two months time … and now, having clarified the fact that I was just a tot when a double dose of tragedy ran interference with my personal sense of safety at home—we’ll leave 1946 in the past so that when next we meet, eleven year old Annie can continue to tell you what happened to her in 1955 when her family moved to the suburbs, where she and her six year old sister, Lauren, began to go to a new school  at which time our protagonist faced experiences that proved so confounding as to have silenced the voice of her budding leadership skills, which, over time, felt so bewildered and parched as to dry up and wilt …