The Ruthless Roughshod of Middle School

I was four years old when I recognized that I was gifted. I was five years old when I recognized that I was, perhaps, unusual. I was six years old when I realized I was different than other kids. I was also six when it dawned on me that ‘different’ may not be a good thing. Needless to say, going from feeling gifted and special at age four, to feeling strange and ostracized by age six is quite the brutality in realization.

From the time I was very little, I struggled to make friends. Not that I was overly motivated; as a young girl, I was pretty and appropriate with little else to offer. Conditioning played a role in who I portrayed myself to be since I was raised in a family where appearance was placed above most else on the priority list. However, every once in a while, I was allowed to shine as my true self.

The real child underneath all of the good-girl training was nothing short of a tom-boy. Digging in mud, playing with caterpillars, and collecting pinecones and pine needles to build primitive structures consumed much of my free time. By the time I was three, I’d entered my pre-k’s big wheel tricycle race - and won. Not only did I win, I won first overall, and first in my age bracket. Being in the newspaper was not important to me at all, and neither, really, was winning. The wind in my hair and the rush from the race is what I’d loved. Doing what the boys did, and doing it better was where I truly shined.

I digress, let’s fast forward. Aside from being a tom-boy and a deep lover of nature, I maintained a sort of conservative, quiet observing aura. Let’s think Disney for a moment. The world never made sense to me as a young one; not since the day Scar pushed Mufasa off of that cliff. My little brain could not handle the gross injustice, and honestly, I’ve never taken injustice well since. Acclimating to a world where deceit was not only accepted, but encouraged, left me absolutely enraged, and thrust me into a lifetime of inner discord.

Conversely, I’ve always felt deeply toward the concept of love. On the other end of the extreme, I adored the idea of enduring love and faithfulness. Un-ending friendship appealed to me greatly. I always thought that if Simba had to endure the unjust death of his father, it was only fair that he was blessed with the enduring friendships of Timone and Pumba. Similarly, I thought the same about Aladdin, Abu, and the Genie. Fantasizing about one day having friends such as these presented me with great delight.

Feelings always felt seemingly so much stronger to me, I noticed, than those around me. From the time I was young I had strong feelings and opinions about the world, but mostly held onto them as silent observations. Luckily, I understood from birth that my greatest relationship would be the one I’d cultivate with Mother Nature.

In Kindergarten, I made one friend named Daniel. Daniel, for lack of a better term, was obsessed with me; and I also really liked Daniel. Daniel and I met in pre-school and became good pals. Sheepishly, I kissed Daniel under a table in Kindergarten. Unfortunately, I don’t remember this, but the story has been told to me many times. However, after Kindergarten, Daniel and I were in different classes for a while and drifted apart. The only friend I had was gone.

First grade was tough. I tried to make friends as well as I knew how. I had a new crush on a boy, Derek, which would endure through sixth grade. Once I heard him singing, “Tinkle tinkle little star,” as he relieved himself in our classroom bathroom, I was hooked. Derek didn’t even know I was alive for most of that time. First grade became lonely, and the only saving grace in my life was recess.

While most kids played on the playground equipment or played kickball, I played in the valley of trees. There was a dense row of evergreen trees on the fringes of the property where I spent all of my time. A dusty path lined the way between the trees and I loved to kick up dust or write my name in the dirt with a fallen stick. On really lucky days, there were woolly worms to play with and pet. In my isolation, Mother Nature wrapped me in her loving, dirty arms.

Second grade was the first grade in which I made a true friend; Ricky. Ricky was one of the only minority students in the school. In the backwoods school that I attended in small town Indiana, there were a total of two mixed race students. Of 300 some odd kids, less than five were non-white.

Ricky was everything I’d hoped for in a friend. At recess, he would occasionally come find me and encourage me to play kickball. I rarely obliged him, mainly because I didn’t know how to tell him that I was terrible at sports. Ricky made kickball seem so effortless, so easy, and I could hardly even make contact with the ball. Ricky likely knew I was no good, but encouraged me to play anyway because I was his friend. Inclusivity was always a quality I admired in Ricky.

Ricky often drew me pictures of Snoopy, the dog from the Peanuts comics (for anyone living under a rock for 60 years) . Snoopy was the one cartoon character he could draw really well, and I loved the drawings. Every few weeks I’d get a new Snoopy artwork. I always thanked him for his art and told him how unbelievably good he was at drawing. Ricky also liked martial arts at that time and could do the splits all the way down both ways, better than any female gymnast in our school. I always admired his strength and agility. More so, I realized, I admired his ability to be so passionately himself. Kind, athletic, artistic, courteous, and a one of a kind friend.

In third grade, I finally met a girl that I really hit it off with named Jennifer. Jennifer and I were uncannily alike in personality and temperament. Though we rarely had the same interests, we were so closely aligned in personality and values that it wasn’t ever difficult to hang out with her or have a conversation. Our friendship was effortless from the start. Of all my friends, I feel the most like Jennifer to this day, and of all my friends, I feel most comfortable with Jennifer. Only one other friend I currently have makes me feel this way.

Shortly after meeting Jennifer, I met Christine and Amy, both new to our school. The four of us just clicked right away. For the first time in my life, I belonged to a group of girls. Girls who always lifted me up, encouraged me, and told me other girls were just being snooty when they said disparaging remarks about my oddities. In this group, I was accepted for who I truly was and I never again had to hide or conform, or so I thought.

Things went well through fifth grade, despite my weight creeping up since the end of fourth grade. For some unknown reason, as I started to get breasts and hit the beginning of puberty, I also started gaining what everyone kept referring to as ‘baby fat.’

Before fifth grade, I’d never been heavy. My mother joked that spending a week with my grandparents ‘fattened me up’ due to their southern homestyle cooking. Fifth grade was a touch harder with the weight gain as all of us girls became more aware of our bodies, but sixth grade was brutal.

Sixth grade is when everything changed: middle school. Everyone had been preparing us for the difficult work and busy schedule of sixth grade, but no one had prepared any of us for the social fallouts we would encounter. Really, it seems almost cruel to indoctrinate children in whitewashed academia without giving them a hint of direction in peer socialization. Who cares if you know about the ancient Mesopotamians if you can’t find a place to sit at lunch because no one wants you at their table?

Sixth grade pummeled me. At the end of fifth grade, my parents separated. By the time sixth grade started, they were divorced, and the childhood home I’d lived in since I was three was emptied and sold. I went from living in a nice, large 3 bedroom 2 bathroom home with a two car garage and over an acre of land on a lake to a small two bedroom, one and a half bath apartment in the middle of town. Don’t get me wrong; it was the nicest apartment in town, but all of my friends lived in homes. Two parent homes. I was the only kid in our social group with divorced parents. Not to mention, my best pal in the whole world, Buddy, our golden retriever, died the same year from cancer.

The divorce and move and death of my beloved dog affected me enough, but to be in a body unlike all of the girls around me brought even more difficulty to my life. Boys began to chastise me and call me fat. Girls shunned me because I was a bit overweight. Isolated and lonely, I really only had Jennifer, Christine, and Amy. But, by year’s end, those relationships were strained, too. Everyone was just trying to survive.

Seventh grade, despite sixth being so tough, was rock bottom. Jennifer, Amy, and Christine had made some new friends that joined our peer group. One or two of them had been on the fringes of the group in sixth grade as well, but now they were all fully ‘in’. Taking a while to catch up, I didn’t realize I was on the fringes until I was already pretty well ‘out’. One of the new girls in particular hated me, so she took every opportunity to sabotage my relationships. Eventually, my friends realized that this girl maybe wasn’t the nicest person, and slowly ditched her - but by then, I’d already changed schools.

Aside from having few friends in seventh grade, I remember the boys relentlessly taunting me for having ‘fat’ thighs and an ‘enormous’ rear. By eighth grade, boys started to become attracted to this body. Either way, both made me feel incredibly uncomfortable and violated. I turned all of their opinions on my body inward, internalizing that misogyny. I hated myself, and I’d hated them for making me hate myself.

The fact of the matter is, whether they were ridiculing me or lusting after me, I was a human being and not some objectified scenario made for the purpose of pleasing men. This, too, is something I wish I’d been taught instead of the periodic table. I spent so many years trying to fit into the male gaze that I lost myself as a human. Belonging is so important to our species that we are willing to give up even ourselves in order to obtain it. My surrendering of soul began at age eleven. First for my girlfriends, and then for the boys, and finally for society. It wasn’t until I was in my thirties that I reclaimed it.

Having only one real friend, a girl named Kristin, in seventh grade was difficult. I rarely saw her at school since we didn’t have the same schedule. I knew her from hanging around my cousin’s neighborhood when we would visit on holidays and in the summer. Kristin was strange and unusual in every single wonderful way. She had ferrets. She loved animals, and her mom also loved animals. She introduced me to Mario Kart for the first time. She also was not very well accepted at school, and had a thyroid condition that would make her gravely ill if she didn’t take her medication. I thought Kristin was just about the coolest person I’d ever met. Without Kristin, I never would have made it through the torment.

One additional thing that happened during my tenure in seventh grade that changed my life profoundly was that the girl whose locker was next to mine became pregnant. She was thirteen at the time. By the time she delivered, she was fourteen. I remembered seeing her everyday, and every day her stomach got a little bit bigger. It was an unusual situation because this girl went from being a quintessential mean girl bully to being bullied by other mean girls. When once I’d disliked her for her cruelty, over the months I softened to her through compassion. Some days she was so angry, so bitter. She’d slam the locker door. Some days she was teary, and once even cried as tears splashed onto her taught, round stomach. As the months went by, I felt more and more pity toward her - and more compassion than I’d ever felt for someone I’d once so thoroughly disliked. After delivering her baby, I never saw her again - because once again, things would be changing for me without me even being aware.

Eighth grade was finally better, but not by a huge margin. By eighth grade, my mother had decided to remarry a man she’d dated for four months. Before they’d even been together six months, they wed and she moved me to the ‘big city’ outside of my small town. To be fair, Evansville is not a big city at a population of 130,000, but my hometown had a population of 6,500, so it seemed quite large in comparison.

Despite the fact that I begged to stay at my current middle school since I had my one loyal friend and I’d recently reconnected with my original bestie, Jennifer, my mother moved me to the district in Evansville. This is when I decided to change my name from Sunny to my given name, Hannah. The sole reason for the change was because I assumed it would be easier to make friends with a more normal name like Hannah, and I was less likely to be made fun of having a more traditional name.

Eighth grade in a bigger city was actually better. The bigger city meant bigger schools and more kids. There were more kids like me in the city. More outcasts. More misfits. More kids who had really seen some shit, and weren’t insulated by the monotony of idyllic small-town life. I met my first goth in eighth grade. She exuded angst and most definitely would shank you with whatever sharp item might make its way across her path. I also met my first drug addicted friend, Angel. Angel was wild and sweet and also completely unhinged. While both of these girls scared me, I found them not only fascinating but inspiring. I found myself wanting to have the kind of gumption that they had, admiring their unapologetic authenticity. Neither of them gave two fucks, and both were constantly in the principals office. Still, I kept my head down and my mouth quiet.

Thankfully, I met a group of friends that endured through high school beginning in eighth grade, and these people could relate to my being different. Many of them were queer. Many of them also came from broken or traumatic homes, understanding the things I was going through at the time. Despite some of them turning to drugs, sex, and alcohol to cope, I was able to maintain my desire to be free from all of that. Just being a part of a group of people who understood me and who stood by me was enough for me to have the confidence to stay true to myself.

However, the sheer cruelty I had to endure in middle school to achieve these close relationships in high school is something that I would never wish on anyone. Why do we chalk all of this lack of parental and societal accountability in social relations up to ‘just being a part of life’ as a young person? It’s clear to me that if we as parents, as a society, were to intervene to help teach kids appropriate social skills during this time, we could change the experience of middle school. Instead of surrendering to the notion of ‘it is what it is’, why don’t we model appropriate behavior to our children? Is it because we still don’t know how to properly socialize and treat one another as adults? Part of me believes this is precisely the reason. We were not taught, so many of us still do not know. Those of us who do know are resigned to the notion that this is just the way it is because it is drilled into our heads at every turn. Every story you hear, every movie you watch, and every experience ever told depicts middle school as this war zone, this hell-scape to be conquered or endured in order to level up into adulthood. No one ever questions if it should be this way; they only acquiesce.

People of the world, I implore you, teach your children about the nuances of communication, compassion, and the foundation of being a human being. Middle School does not need to continue to be like this, nor should it persist in this manner. We as parents and educators hold the power to change, morph, and mold the landscape in which our children grow. Empower yourself and your child in learning proper communication skills. Practice compassion wherever you go. I promise, your children will emulate and absorb those teachings in the end. Let’s transform middle school into a time of learning to love instead of learning to hate or repress. We can do hard things, and middle school is among the hardest. We got this.