LYLAS! Via NASA Videographer @ Flickr.This post on how Facebook can work as a kind of trippy time machine by putting you back in touch (of a sort) with people from your formative years is the inspiration for today's FFT.
I’ve certainly had the “whoa, weirdness” feeling when catching up (even by lurking) with the people who knew you when, but Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s flashbacks have apparently been rather traumatizing. I can’t say the junior high (or middle school, or however you identify that epoch from 12 to 14) was the highlight of my life, but I never had anyone dump yogurt on my head or spread vicious rumors about me.
That said, we all know that young people can be cruel, nasty little pieces of work to each other. In today’s thread, I’d love to see either a vivid portrait of your junior high self (and how you have or haven’t changed, other than the obvious stuff), a tale of adolescent horror, or your experiences dealing with friends and/or “friends” that you lost track of and only reconnected with due to social media. Have you used FB (or school reunions or whathaveyou) to borrow Brodesser-Akner’s phrase: ” put [your] life’s ugliest social chapter to rest”?
I wish I had a good story for this one, but I was a “gifted” but not heinously self-conscious spelling-bee nerd. I had big bangs, but no Guess? jeans. I lived in an OK neighborhood, but I wasn’t super-pretty. I passed notes, but I never got those “secret admirer” candy canes at Christmas. I didn’t qualify for the “popular group” (really, that’s what we called them), but I had plenty of friends and typically awkward interactions with boys I was sweet on. For me, junior high was one part “normal” life, one part benign neglect.
This is late getting up today, so I’ll chime in regarding The Facebook Effect in comments.
Were you Queen of the Cafeteria? A neo-maxi-zoom-dweebie? Could John Hughes have filmed your life? Bring it! Or I will SO sleep over at Lisa’s on Friday.
Junior high was about the worst two years of my life. I was only 11 in 7th grade, so I was behind the curve socially (and pubertally), but a total robo-geek, so I was in all the G&T classes. I hated every fucking moment of it. I was definitely picked on a lot, but I’m scrappy, so I was able to give as good as I got, and after a while the school bullies gave up and left me alone.
Facebook put me in touch with some of those people again–not the bullies, but friends and acquaintances from those years–and that’s has really helped me process the experience and look at it in a less negative light. Since we’ve been back in touch we’ve all admitted to feeling the same sense of embattled isolation, even the “popular” kids. And many people have told me that they liked me and had a lot of respect for how I was not afraid to be a nerd and stand up to bullies. Now, granted, they certainly never said anything like that at the time or helped me out with the bullies, which would have been MUCH appreciated at the time. Still, it makes me feel better knowing that we were essentially going through the same crap together, and that I wasn’t as alone–or as disdained–as I thought.
Also, I had a closet full of stirrup pants and Bennetton sweaters, and wore powder-blue eyeshadow.
Oh man, middle school/junior high was so traumatizing. 1990-1993 I think. I remember in math class that a friend of mine said something about a popular girl, but the popular girl’s friend thought that I had said it. She asked me, and I quote “Do you have a death wish?”. And sure enough, come lunch time, the girl and all her friends gathered outside on the blacktop with the intent to kick the crap out of me. I think the principal intervened and I had to sit in the cafeteria with the popular girl to “talk it out” or whatever.
I had awful hair, dorky friends, a giant frankel mouthpiece. I was a hot mess. Found a few pictures from back in the day while I was at my parents house for Thanksgiving. YIKES! Including the boy I “dated” in sixth grade who was shorter and skinnier and losery-er than me, rat-tail hair included.
I’m not sure what constitutes as Junior high (the American school system confuses me). But I remember my second year of Dutch secondary school, I’d just transferred from one academic level to the other, for which I had to work my ass off.
Then, during PE one day, I was joking around and said something sarcastic about ‘totally needing to work out more to work on my figure’ in responce to the crazy jazzercise video some girls were doing. This one girl turned to me with a glint of glee and the creepiest predatory look and went: ‘Really?’ while looking me up and down.
I blinked at her and told her: “Erm, no, I was being sarcastic.”
Then she asked me what ‘sarcastic’ was.
I was stunned that someone who I thought to be smarter than me- after all, she had been at this level since the start of secondary school- would not know that. I never felt bad when she tried to pick on me or act superior to me in any way after that.
Junior high was hell for me. I developed more noticeable breasts when I was twelve, and wanted to be a skinny kid again instead of growing with a curvy figure. I was awkward, nerdy, constantly picked on for numerous things (people thought I was a lesbian for about six months). Sometimes I got into fights, like smacking a girl who called me ugly or stupid. I had been diagnosed with a learning disability, so I got placed in remedial D-level classes with kids who were thought of as the rejects. I felt like I was dumb and weird, and would find salvation in books by Francesca Lia Block, punk rock music, Edith Piaf, artsy movies, and writing a zine.
The only nice things that I can think about it was that my isolation sent me into being interested in the arts, and kids who picked on me then were nice to me in senior year of high school, and I could be nice to them without any grudges, since I had already moved on.
I didn’t have any deeply traumatic events either. I think my problems with authority really kicked into gear around that time (lasting throughout high school) though and I remember getting in a lot of trouble with teachers for talking back and what-not(being a little asshole I’m sure). This was also when my love of the traditional “bad boy” got going as well. My 6th grade “boyfriend” got kicked out of class a lot too for being “disruptive” and I nursed a long unrequited love for a boy who smoked and ditched class (I think he later got expelled from the public high school in our area). At the same time I was in accelerated classes and felt like an uber-dork and I’m sure some of my smart ass behavior was trying to counteract that. Also not helping was the fact that I was totally undeveloped and flat chested the whole 3 years, totally skinny and self conscious about it. PLUS, I wasn’t allowed to wear makeup or shave my legs until 8th grade.
As to FB I have purposely not friended people I went to junior high with. I don’t care really and I went to a different high school then most of them anyway so my memories are so foggy.
I also had more than one pair of flowered leggings. yikes.
I was in class and activities all day with one person who got almost all of my fury (in my head) because I was her target. After years I dealt with her again through business, so I couldn’t tell her what an ass she had been.
By then it was clear some of her life choices weren’t that great, and she had various problems. So all that fury turned to pity. I think that kind of thing happens a lot.
Tricked by the cool girls into dressing up like a giant vegetable for Halloween! You may draw your own conclusions from this.
Middle school (6-8th grade) was awful for me too. I was depressed for most of it.
There were the usual asshole bullies, mostly male. One time some girl tried the cowardly “my friends will threaten you for some small slight” trick over, I believe, a torn New Kids on the Block picture in our shared locker (they had fallen out of fashion for the most part by then if I recall correctly). It backfired because the guy at the locker next to mine said he’d done it, which was true. They sat there gaping for a bit then slinked off. Apparently they didn’t know what to do when their target changed from female to male. I only remember this particular incident because we had a good laugh at their reaction.
Let’s also just say that puberty, which started for me in 4th grade, was not very kind to me either.
Gym was awful in part because I wasn’t very athletic and in part because we were required to shower at the end of every class and had to line up naked afterwards to get checked off. You were only allowed to skip showers 2-3 times per month for periods which didn’t work for me at all (see puberty being unkind).
For some reason it seemed that all of the teachers took it upon themselves to assign 2 hours of homework each night so I’d get home, eat dinner, and do homework until I had to go to bed. A lot of it was bullshit busy work like word searches. Thankfully, my mom would help me out with it by doing the stuff that wouldn’t really help me on tests i.e. the word searches or stupidly artsy science projects.
That said I would credit some of my middle school teachers for my later academic success. My 6th grade math teacher, for instance, was the first to explain fractions in a way that actually made them fun to do.
Oh, my. Perhaps this isn’t as much Friday fun as could be hoped for. ;P High school was much better.
Oh, school, you were terrible for me, let me count the ways:
- 12 years of relentless mocking for a speech impediment I couldn’t do anything about
- 12 years of relentless mocking for not being a “local” (We moved there when I was six)
- Teachers and administration who sucked up to the “influential” families/chief mockers.
I was (obviously, apparently) an easy target with my perpetually low self-esteem, epic shyness, truly horrible hair, extreme athletic awkwardness and complete lack of anything resembling rhythm. Like vultures, the bullies honed in on me and kept on it until after my sophomore year. Not sure what changed, exactly, except that at that point I finally decided that they could all fuck themselves and told myself I was leaving in two years.
That attitude probably came through loud and clear.
Jr. High was hell. I developed early (4th grade) so I had big boobs, and hips. I had bad skin. I was the school slut, in spite of still being a virgin.
I once spent an hour hiding in a badger hole out in the desert because I was less afraid of the badgers than the football players who’d chased me out there.
There is not enough money on the planet to make me relive that experience.
On the other hand, I have reconnected with a few of my friends from that era on FB and apart from idly checking each other’s status and the initial “OMG! I can’t believe it!” we really don’t interact much. We just don’t have anything in common. I moved all over the US and went to grad school, they had kids and stayed in Boise, ID.
I went to a magnet school, I don’t know if they have those in other places they don’t have them here anymore, essentially, the concept was to ship gifted suburban kids into the inner city schools in order to raise the standardized test scores. To sell these schools there were special program focuses and trips and other cool stuff that the magnet school children could participate in, but the kids who just lived in the neighborhood could not. This, of course, made for glorious racial relations and conflicts most of us were unprepared to handle.
My first day of school in the sixth grade a teacher was shot by a student; a couple of months later, I was at my locker and a student walking by shoulder checked me, threw me about ten feet down the hallway, and stole my backpack.
So, gifted and talented program which gave us like five hours of homework every night, normal middle school puberty-induced angst, plus trying to stay alive in a barely controlled war zone. Middle school was not a joy.
Reconnection story. I am now dating a gentleman who dated my best friend in high school. I thought he was dreamy then, but completely off-limits 4 EVA because of BFF ethics. We are from the same neighborhood and would run into each other every couple of years, but last year he found me on the fb. I’m very glad because he is a lot of fun to have around. In further small worldiness, next semester he is taking an art appreciation class taught by my high school best friend.
I think this epitomizes my middle school experience:
We sometimes had school dances that were held in the auditorium during the last two periods of the school day (yes, our dances were at 2 p.m. after we got out of Algebra I). During middle school bubblegum pop was supreme as well as pop hip hop artists like Nelly, none of which were exactly my cup of tea. They brought in a DJ who played exclusively that and his tiny little light set up and that was the extent of the decorations.
Until I was 18, I had really long hair (like, down to my butt, ~3 ft. long) and I didn’t do much with it so it was pretty frizzy. To amuse my friends during these dances, I’d stand in front of the lights, frizz up my hair to the max and let them watch as the different colors were caught in my haze of hair. Everyone else thought I was a super-weirdo, but my friends and I were having fun. That it what I like to remember of middle school, which was otherwise fairly sucky.
I was a jock. Now, a girl jock is different than a boy jock, but that’s what I was. No one ever gave me any trouble, I had do-gooder/popular friends but got along with everyone and was pretty unaffected. Yet, I am “off the radar” on FB, just don’t want to go there!
Style-wise: Dickies, Painter Pants, Button down shirts, Levis, braces, chlorine-soaked slimy hair. Think “The Official Preppy Handbook” but Midwestern style.
I actually liked junior high. I wasn’t popular, but I got along with all different sorts of personalities. I was one of the “geeky” gifted kids, but never got teased, picked on, or bullied. I had a small, but close-knit group of friends, and my home life was still just hovering in purgatory.
It was high school that really sucked for me. My home life descended into hell, my then-best friend moved three hours away, and all of my other friends lived across town so they were assigned to the other high school. I had to start over again as far as at-school friends go. I was lucky in the sense that I still was never picked on, or bullied. I was just sort of invisible, and it didn’t help that things at home were so bad. That was one of my greatest social inhibitors: when you feel like you an never invite anyone over, or can’t explain why you’re upset or worried, it’s just easier to keep people at arm’s length. Graduation was the happiest day of my high school life because I knew I’d be leaving for college soon. To this day, I get the heebie-jeebies in suburbs because they evoke in me some emotional connection to those years.
I still have one really good friend from my high school days. She’s in contact with other people from that time, but I have no real desire to be.
Shitty. The first two years, I didn’t fit in anywhere. I tried to be ‘popular’ because my childhood friends were a part of that group but I just didn’t belong. I hated the cattiness and the bullshit and being made fun of or snubbed for doing things I enjoyed (I was also a ‘gifted’ kid, and pretty nerdy).
I finally made my really good friends in grade 10, after I came back from private school. By that time I was starting to get really depressed, too, so…
Yeah. Junior high and high school were horrible for me. Early on I was awkward and lonely. Later there were hospitalizations, constant crippling depression, and the angst that comes with teenagers being teenagers, backstabbing, stealing boyfriends… all that.
People talk about missing high school… I do not miss it for a second.
Most of my problems in junior high were caused by my weird repressed Catholic upbringing. I am pretty sure I could have been considered relatively pretty and “acceptable” socially but I totally undermined it with neuroses and shame and ended up nerding myself out anyway. Briefly I teetered on the edge of popularity (it was called the popular crowd in my school too), even being OFFICALLY INVITED by the queen of the popular crowd to “join their group” but I was so shocked that that was the way one actually entered the popular group and scared that it would mean sex or other things I couldn’t handle that I said NO and returned to my neighborhood friends from elementary school. I turned down multiple popular boys who asked me out too out of inexplicable panic. At the same time I got harassed, as I believe I have recounted here before, for not shaving my legs or wearing a bra when I was “supposed to”, for being bad at sports (the only 8th grader on the 7th grade field hockey team, they had to RENAME the team from 7th grade to “developmental” just for me), for being smart and feminist, etc. I was a good girl, going to dance class 5 times a week, writing overwrought poetry, and having innocent kissing sleep overs with my girl friends. I never had a boyfriend or anything until junior year of high school and that protected me to a certain extent. Things started getting better for me in the summer before 9th grade, with the advent of social places I fit in better — mainly drama club and pot smoking with older high school hippies.
Speaking of facebook, two of the popular boys who liked me in junior high but I inexplicably ran from, some of the nicer ones who I actually have always regretted being too prude to “date” in 6th grade (one was a transfer from SPAIN and called soccer football, be still my beating heart) JUST facebooked me a couple weeks ago to tell me they got together and were TALKING ABOUT ME and MISSED ME and THOUGHT I WAS AWESOME and literally invited me to a popular kids party in my old town, THEY STILL ARE ALL FRIENDS AND HAVE POPULAR KID PARTIES, WTF, and I seriously freaked out and called my old best friend and had to obsess about it for way, way too long. It satisfied some deep, sick, pathetic insecurity in me. But I still didn’t go to the party, inexplicably! Some things never change. And some people are just not emotionally equipped to be popular.
Middle school was pretty easy for me. I developed big boobs early, but massive bulky sweaters were in, so they didn’t get noticed too much. The fact that I was still wearing massive bulky sweaters a decade later was more of a problem, and was caused by some middle school taunting I no longer remember, but it doesn’t seem like major trauma.
I was a total geek, but cute enough that the popular kids were nice to me. I never went to their parties, but we could gossip in class.
My biggest middle school problem was that my then-best friend’s mom constantly asked her why she couldn’t be more like me. It pretty much doomed us.
My biggest shame is that my socks, shirt, and scrunci (it was the early 90s!) were always the same color. I matched perfectly every single day. I would only confess that anonymously.
In 5th, and especially 6th grades I was the whipping girl. 6th grade was the worst. There were only 12 girls in my class, and they had to hire a counselor just to talk to us every friday afternoon because we were all so mean to each other. By which I mean 4-5 of them were really mean to everyone else, especially me and my one friend. My friend was dorky but would have flown under the radar if she weren’t my friend–I was always as loud and argumentative as I am today, and always had an unhealthily large belief that social justice is IMPORTANT and it is MY DUTY to protect the WEAKER AMONG US. And so whenever someone got picked on I’d use all my big words and step in and then end up getting emotionally wrecked.
But then in 7th grade, all those girls decided my belief that “popularity” is ridiculous and that the “popular” kids were only popular because everybody thought they were popular (clearly I was into the social construction of identity at a young age) was a good thing, and literally invited me into their group. Then for some reason only 4 people were allowed to be part of this group, and the group was defined by buying matching necklace charms at claire’s at the mall on the weekends. So one day I came in wearing a smiley face or a flower or something, as did 3 other girls, and the girl who I had replaced realized she had been replaced. She had been the leader of the picking-on-me for the previous two years, and I hated her, so I relished in her newfound outsider status. I distinctly remember dancing in a circle at a dance, and stepping in front of her to cut her out of our little group of dancing friends, and she just stopped dancing and walked away, clearly crushed. I still feel guilty, even though she taught me what it meant to be a meangirl by being cruel to me for two years. I spent most of my senior year of high school apologizing for that act of meangirlness, and I think at our reunion when I got drunk kept apologizing again. It’s horrible to think about mean, cruel things that you’ve done and accept that you’ve been a real bastard.
Of course, by 8th grade, boys had become important. I was not interested in boys. I thought they were boring, at first, and wasn’t interested in kissing them. Then one boy came to our small class from another school and introduced sexual harassment to the rest of the boys. He was very popular, and therefore it was expected that he and I would be friends, inasmuch as 8th graders can be friends with members of the opposite sex when sex becomes an issue. I did not take well to his harassment and dumb jokes and constantly talking about masturbation, which made all the girls uncomfortable. I fucking hate that kid still. Anyway, over the second half of 8th and then 9th grade I was phased out, or phased myself out. Not sure. At any rate, that kid became my enemy in high school and used to call me a dyke and an ice queen and get me in trouble by quietly and constantly harassing me in class until I flipped out. Then his girlfriend told me that he had a crush on me, or thought I was hot or sexy or something, and I realized that he is a loathsome creature who hates himself. And was either interested in fucking me because he hates me and wanted to hate-fuck me because he thinks sex is a weapon and wanted to put me in my place, or he hated himself so much that he was attracted to someone who hated him and was the only person in the grade who consistently stood up to him and attempted to crush his soul.
oh I forgot to mention that I still wear like half my clothes from junior high, including my flowered leggings bluebears, don’t front like you can’t rock them still. my crowning moment was a purple tutu and doc martens in 8th grade. and i believe i’ve mentioned my blossom-inspired tie skirt. however i do recall wearing on the very first day of 7th grade before i worked out my style, a poet shirt, long denim walking shorts, voluminous white pushdown socks, and fucking brown oxfords. i quickly realized it was a mistake and all but burned the outfit when i got home.
cimorene, it is so funny to me that you too were formally invited into popularity. who ARE these people???
6th grade and the first half of 7th were great for me. I had really good friends – people I still get along with when we see each other – and, after a shy and awkward childhood, was starting to come into my own.
Then we moved. Right before Christmas. To a very upper-middle-class (even predominantly rich) suburb thousands of miles away where I had a huge case of class anxiety, because although we were not poor, and were probably even slightly upper-middle, we were nowhere near most of these people money-wise. During the first week there, a girl actually told me that “everyone here buys their jeans at X store” – a place where the cheapest jeans started at 150 dollars – with an undertone of “and I’d advise you start doing the same”. Whereas everyone at my old school had worn Old Navy, in New School I didn’t have a prayer of keeping up.
I was the only new kid (it being winter and all) and had a horrible case of homesickness – I distinctly remember turning down an invitation to go over to someone’s house with the thought that I didn’t want new friends, I wanted my old friends back. Needless to say, that didn’t work out too well. In retrospect, I think I was probably depressed.
Things got a better in high school, where things were more mixed (a few different suburbs fed into it, so there was more diversity, at least wealth-wise) and I found friends, but I hated that suburb and was incredibly glad to leave it for university.
My experiences of secondary school (I’m English, thats what its called here) haunt me still in a weird way. On the one hand I suppose I was picked on a bit, I was a goth and so attracted a fair bit of commentary from others. It wasn’t too bad because I had my little posse of other goths and we kind of relished in being oddballs, especially after The Craft came out and a few of the girls were worried we could make their hair fall out (true story! so funny!). I was going through some nasty stuff due to having an absentee parent and not knowing how to deal with that, so I was fairly risky in my behaviour and pretty promiscuous. That isn’t the problem however. What bothers me is that in recent years I have come to realsie that I was a bully. It is a really horrible realisation, but looking back there is no doubt that I was intentionally horrible to certain people, and I was horrible because I percieved them as weaker than me and so not able to get me back.
At the time I could justify my behaviour due to some serious immaturity, and I really and truly did not consider myself to be a bully. In fact, I actively hated bullies, and remember once striding in and getting in a fight in defence of someone I felt was being bullied. Yet I had no insight into my own behaviour, and could not really see what I was doing and how horrible it was.
I feel so guilty about it all the time. I really wish that the people I was mean to knew how bad I felt, but then I always believe that if you behave shittily then you don’t go looking for absolution from the people you are shitty to because you deserve to feel bad for it and that is your own cross to bear. I am now very aware of that side of myself, and I recognise it for what it is on the odd occasion that it rears its ugly head. I just think that perhaps, for some of you who had a bad time, maybe the people who were awful to you do genuinly regret it wholeheartedly. I am not excusing their behaviour, and no doubt some of them knew exactly what they were doing. But there is a chance that some of them were just incredibly sad people who lacked any idea of the nature and quality of their actions. It does not make it better or right, but might be something to chew on.
I was extremely shy and awkward, and completely paranoid that everyone was talking about me, all the time. So naturally I was a target. I had things stolen, intimations about my sexual orientation spread widely after I decided to cut my hair short, and was consistently mocked after my “best friend” gave all our private correspondence to the popular girls in order to get an ‘in’ with them. I would wake up each morning with dread. Gym class was terrible – I developed late, and didn’t start wearing a bra until the end of grade 8.
Finally, in about grade 10, I realized the power of sarcasm, and started giving back as good as I got. The bullies, surprised, started leaving me alone and treating me with respect. Being smart and reading a lot suddenly became an asset.
Since I was so wrapped up in myself, being painful and neurotic, I completely missed any signals from interested boys. I didn’t date until I was 19, and that’s probably a good thing. Of course, this only added fuel to the ‘lesbian’ speculation (Rural Prairie school, so nobody in the town or surrounding area had come out, and being gay was a Very Bad Thing, somewhat akin to being a child molester. I’m not kidding.)
Style? Oh god. I had two tie-dyed shirts that I loved (uh, this was 1997-2002), I wore a lot of track pants (tearaways, anyone?) and Nike shirts. I was not a jock at all (I was too self-conscious to be any good at sports) but dressed like one, oddly enough. I still love my red Nike sneakers that I got in grade 8.