High School

High school sucks, and don't let anybody tell you different. Teenagers are complete social degenerates. They lack social graces. They're mean, insensitive, arrogant, sneaky, argumentative, a-holes with too much energy.

Maybe I'm generalizing, but you get the point. I can look back on my life and see that those years were definitely not my best. Personally and socially, they were tough. I felt awkward and insecure. I didn't have a great sense of style and I talked a lot. Still do. I was smart but couldn't concentrate on homework. I had great friends, amazing people, but never really felt terribly close to any of them. My family didn't have a lot of money. The perpetual reassortment of the social heierarchy drove me mad. I liked everybody but felt close to nobody. Where was I?

Add to that, a bully.

In my freshman year, the popular boys decided that I'd done them wrong (it's a long story...) and one day at break, the gang of them approached me and threatened to "kick my ass out to the field." So high school, right? Well, it didn't end there. I endured taunts and insults all four years each time I passed one of them in the halls or (God-forbid) shared a class. The two names I remember best and least-fondly are "bitch" and "feminazi". The "feminazi" started when I took a stand against rising for and saying the Pledge of Allegiance in Civics with Mr. Poston. I've always been political. Mr. Poston supported my stance!  Leave me alone!!!
Moving on.

Yesterday, one of the Mean Boys sent me a Friend Request on the Facebook. Twenty year old insults and pain and fear and intimidation rose from the ashes and attacked. I panicked. I accepted? I immediately imagined the whole group of them sitting at a big, rich-guy executive desk rifling through the online photos of my life, laughing at what I am or what I am not. I hated myself a little for feeling obliged to please. God forbid I insult him, right?

I rifled through all of his photos. He had a huge wedding at his parent's estate, I think. He's been to basketball finals and the Super Bowl and his wife is a trophy and he's got two kids and an infinity pool on the beach. Then I defriended him. I couldn't handle it.

I decided to write a note. I told him that he'd hurt me. He'd bullied me. He and his friends were mean and caused me trauma and I wished him a nice life, and it was the truth.

The most beautiful thing happened 24 hours later. He apologized. He said he was sorry for hurting me, that it was a long time ago, and he didn't remember much. But he was sorry and wished my family and me well.

High school can be pretty dehumanizing. It's easy to dismiss your peers for academic, socioeconomic, aesthetic, or other completely arbitrary, ridiculous reasons when you've been together every day for seven years (as much as I try, I can't forget junior high) and you're perpetually rearranging the pecking order.

I sent the note, and he responded, and I think we both became humans again. He's got a family, kids, a spouse. So do I. We were forced to face each other's humanity. I don't see him as a mean, spoiled, jerky kid anymore. He's got more in his life. I liked the photo of him holding his new baby. He had that dopey, proud father grin. My note forced him to see me as more than a name from the past. If only for the moments it took for him to bravely write, "I'm sorry", he had to recognize me as a real human being. He didn't have to. He could have dismissed me and the note as the ramblings of a crazy woman stuck in the past. But he didn't. That simple acknowledgement fills the tiny hole he and his friends carved out of me, the piece of my happiness, my experience, my joy, they robbed me of. But that painful experience is over. Finally. Somehow, after reading a note 20 years in the making, that part of high school really doesn't matter anymore.