Of maybe 25 girls making up the total membership of freshmen who had been accepted into our club, seven of us became best buds, suggesting that, every semester, the majority of our membership outnumbered our small group, when electing new leadership rolled around. As high school years passed, club meetings proved so argumentative that eventually, only two benefits came with having been chosen to belong to our club: our social evenings with boys’ clubs from schools on the north side of the city continued to flourish, meaning that meeting new guys was a given. And the second perk of ‘belonging’ offered pj parties, which proved lots of fun most of the time.
Why only most of the time? Well, no one knew when, spontaneously, one of the girls would be singled out for scrutinizing by some of the sisterhood (offering one reason why my besties had begun to feel apart from the membership as a whole.)
One evening ( unbeknownst to my besties) a very pretty, shapely, blond girl, named Sue, who’d never been seen without layers of makeup, had secretly been singled out. So, during that slumber party, as soon as she’d fallen asleep, a pack of ‘mean girls’, armed with soapy wash cloths, attacked their sleeping ‘friend’, and while some held Sue down, others scrubbed her face clean ignoring her startled, thrashing screams to STOP IT! Needless to say, by the time ‘the mean girls’ were done, Sue’s face, at sweet sixteen, looked every bit as pretty, scrubbed clean, as she had with her skin covered with powder and blush—in fact, her ivory complexion may have been even lovelier sans makeup than before her ‘friends’ had bullied her highly vulnerable, sleeping form. (Many years later, during a small club reunion) Sue confided to a few of my besties, inclusive of me, that she’d been physically abused as a child, and today, that leads me to wonder if she’d felt need to cover up much more than her delicate skin during our tempestuous years of high school.
The night that proved my turn to be targeted by mean-minded scrutiny came completely by surprise, because, each time we’d come together as a group, I’d sought a quiet corner in which to ‘disappear’ within the safe haven of my besties until this particular Pj party when one of the club members, who was very pretty but not very nice, hunted me down and having cornered me, this club ‘sister’ stripped my vulnerability bare with a tongue lashing that torched my repressed fear of seeing myself abandoned and uninvited to any social gathering throughout the rest of high school—and without further ado, here comes the verbal abuse, which had seared deeply into my long term memory when I, like Sue, was sweet sixteen: Annie! Ever since you’ve lost weight, I’ve grown sick and tired of watching how many boys ask you to dance at our socials and then write down your phone number at the end of the evening. It makes me so mad that I wish you’d get fat and ugly, again! (Is it any wonder that, during our teens, the nice girls amongst the mean girls slid into the woodwork, suggesting that none of us had developed the courage to insist that the bullies amongst us zip their loose cannon lips?)
Having felt such a scathing perception burst out of ‘my frenemy’s’ mouth, my sense of personal safety, feeling burned to a crisp, broke through the solid wall of girls who, having circled round, had stood stock still while taking in every word (each of which had felt as sharply painful as a stone slung straight at my heart) as if the lot of them had been transfixed into statues, and once I’d made a dash for the nearest bathroom and locked myself inside, my knees gave out, so sinking straight to the floor, I lay in a miserable heap, sobbing in fright of being shown to the front door after hearing that my presence was barred from inclusion within social gatherings, forevermore—thank goodness, my deepest fear did not manifest, being that the fists pounding gently at the locked door belonged to my six besties, all of whom were begging to be let in to comfort me by offering a view that my fear induced, narrow mindset had dismissed as never being a possibility—
Upon unlocking the door, my friends piled in, offering words in hopes of soothing every open wound, which had felt soundly stoned—Annie, first of all, B—— was not insulting you, and secondly, none of the girls is sending you packing. B—- is just one of several girls who envy you so much that, though her outburst had to have hurt your feelings, she was actually complimenting you, because you’ve become so popular with boys that the others are jealous of you!
My friends words fell on deaf ears:
But—I don’t want anyone to be jealous of me! I just want to feel safely accepted by all of the girls in the club.
You are accepted. But you’d best get used to other girls being jealous of you, too!
But why?
Because they think you’ve become—beautiful.
What? No! That can’t be true! It’s impossible!
But it is true!
I don’t believe it! Boys will never find me attractive! That can never be!
Why do you think that?
A whole bus load of boys made sure of that fact at the start of sixth grade. My first kiss was a disaster, and throughout jr high, none of the boys would come to a party if I was invited. I’m not pretty. In fact, I’m ugly!
Annie, would so many boys pay attention to you if you were ugly?
(That’s the confounding thing about the human brain—each time a deeply repressed fear is triggered, the emotional side of our thought processors can twist a simple truth into so many knots that we can’t think straight to save our sense of social insecurity from drowning in darkly cloudy, self conceived misperceptions even if our very lives depended upon mental clarity ‘unfogging’ up…)
Annie, you were chubby. Never ugly! Whoever made you feel that way was just plain mean!
(And now, if you’ll scroll back, quite a bit—actually near to the beginning of my blog, you’ll find that the detailed version of each of these stories (concerning the black and blue birth of my unattractive self-image amidst a boisterous, bullying bus load of body shaming, ‘stone’ slinging boys has already been posted, and though I remember the title—First Kiss—darn it, I can’t remember the title of the emotional thrashing my self esteem had taken on that bus, four times each week—unless … maybe it is something like—BUS RIDE FROM HELL
(In order to scroll back quickly, look at the left hand margin of my blog to see earlier posts listed and dated and just keep clicking downward till stories of my childhood pop out on your screen.)
PS
To this very day, compliments concerning my physicality strike my ears the wrong way. It’s as if I still see myself as did those boys on the bus, who’d poked, pushed and laughed at my body so thoroughly as to make me feel unworthy of any kind words so that a trampoline, installed atop my brain refuses any positive compliment concerning my physicality entry into the inner sanctum of my deeply scarred self image. And resultant of how traumatized I’d been made to feel about myself during those highly vulnerable years of pre-teen development, I’ve had to coach my adult self to reply, thank you while hoping my smiling verbal response is accepted as being sincere rather than— being wooden, based in the anxious arousal of yesteryear’s self protection due to experiential episodes of PTSD. And upon today’s insight-driven reflection, I can clearly see that not one session of EMDR therapy had targeted my life long need to heal deep seated wounds, which, oozing, anew, seemingly make no sense, today, unless you, too, have come to understand the lasting mental effects of childhood’s low self esteem concerning the fact that once yesteryear’s bully takes up residence within your subconscious memory or mine, no one can bully your physicality or mine more painfully than insults we cast at ourselves.
👩🏻Annie
