I arrived in country December 19th, and set off to school - 2nd grade - in January. The standard policy at the time in that district was for newcomer ESL students to be held back a grade, but my dad refused. So 2nd grade it was. In the next couple of months, some math testing took place where the teacher proved to be less qualified than one would hope (that's all I remember about the situation), and next thing you know, I am finishing off the school year having been skipped into the next grade. Come September, I'm starting 4th grade and ESL is basically a technicality for me, as the pull-out class is a bit of a joke, and I had the summer I guess to pick up the language.
Fifth grade in the same school goes without a hitch. Made a few friends in my neighborhood, even ventured to be a substitute bus patrol for a few weeks. Went to my first American birthday party. And then summer between elementary and middle school, we moved out of state.
New school, new town, new experiences, and not good ones. Sixth grade proved to be where I found out I was a nerd and a dork and a geek. I still had my dad pick out my outfits, and I found out - after being asked point-blank how frequently I wash my hair - that weekly hair washing wasn't going to cut it. A boy in my math class referred to me as an It - I was apparently too androgenous in a newly adolescent landscape. Also, apparently, leg shaving was a thing.
On the bus, it was especially clear that I was out of my element. All the cool kids sat in the back. I kept quiet, but I also committed a faux pas unbeknownst to me - I dared to look at the cool kids. I was quickly cut to size when Shawn Gray turned around in his seat and stared me down, making sure the other cool kids saw him trying to intimidate me. I guess they wanted to see what I would do. I averted my eyes. (So is my less-than-stellar eye contact really a sign of autism?)
When they asked me where I was from, they probably just meant to point out that I was the new kid. But I assumed they meant "originally", so I told them I was from Poland. Enter: Polak jokes and being told to go back to where I came from.
One of the coolest girls on the bus had a brother who, for some reason, was one of the geekiest kids. The cool girls thought it would be fun to try to set me up with him - Stephen King (I kid you not. I had not heard of the famous author yet.) I felt bad. It's not that I wanted to make him feel bad, but I just wasn't into him in that way.
Her friend, Richa Giri, was an Indian girl who lived on my street. She once borrowed a quarter from me. I was very particular about money, taught to never be wasteful at home. So when weeks passed and she kept "forgetting" to pay me back, I finally came up with a clever way to make my peace with it. I told myself (and later her) that she was bound to make a charitable donation sometime in the future. When she did, the first quarter of that money would be from me. She never did pay me back.
Sixth grade was brutal. I set off to change things the following year. Seventh grade for Halloween, I dressed up as 80s Madonna. It was so out of my character, but the end result was... I guess a sexy outfit. All of a sudden, I was on the map. Boys took notice. Including boys that my female friends were interested in. I hadn't yet figured out the nuances of navigating who was and wasn't off limits. I enjoyed 7th grade, but I upset friends as well.
For 8th grade, I swung yet again in the direction of dorkville in order to win back my fellow dorky friends. I still managed to have a couple of boyfriends. In fact, all older boys, two grown (18 & 19) guys whom I met at a friend's church. Nothing illicit went down. It was all very innocent, but still inappropriate considering the age difference.
By high school, I had found my groove, I guess, and there was no more bullying. There were other problems, which I'll save for another time. But bullying stopped. In retrospect, however, the damage was done nonetheless. Especially since I never once shared with my parents or teachers that I had been the victim of bullying. I didn't know I shouldn't have had to go through that. There was no zero-policy on bullying at school yet. I didn't know that's what it was called. It was just survival of the fittest, and I was trying to figure out how to assimilate.
But that scared and insecure bullied little girl never healed. Today, she still anticipates mean people making her feel bad. She still naively expects people to be kind nonetheless, but has no skills to protect herself with the occasional adult bullies that still roam the earth, having never received healing on their end, either.
I haven't yet learned that I can show up however I am, and it's good enough. I don't have to perform. I don't have to impress. I don't have to compare myself in any way to others.
But this is a knee-jerk reaction built on top of an earlier legacy of performance-based conditional love and acceptance that first reared its ugly head in my childhood prior to migrating - courtesy my maternal grandmother, the matriarch of our family's enmeshed system, an undifferentiated mass rather than a group of individuals.
She, too, taught me to be keenly aware of how I am perceived by others. It was made known to me early on that people are always watching and judging me. I was to be polite, smart, pretty. The only thing that changed was what qualified as those things in my grandmother's eyes versus my middle school peers' eyes. The commonality was: people judge you all the time, so you must always be hypervigilant. You do not want to be caught not living up to expectations.
In the business of trying desperately to fit in, I didn't have time to explore my likes and dislikes, my strengths and weaknesses, my hobbies and talents. Everything was being filtered through a preconceived lens. Some characteristics were too strong to be held back by my vigilance, but it took years - decades - for me to relax long enough to sit back relaxed, and start thinking about how I want to show up in the world. Who do I want to be?
One final word on bulling. I finally looked up the definition of what it even is. One version I found resonating with me: "unwanted behavior from a person or group that is either: offensive, intimidating, malicious, or insulting; or an abuse or misuse of power that undermines, humiliates, or causes physical or emotional harm to someone." With that definition, I can see that my peers tried (successfully) to intimidate me because it made them feel superior. Therefore, they clearly had their own issues of internalized inferiority that hadn't been dealt with.
As far as my grandmother, since she saw me as an extension of herself, an appendage of the family that oscillated around her, any sign of perceived weakness or even just divergence that wasn't fully within her control made her fearful. She wasn't trying to harm me in any way. She simply was emotionally unavailable and therefore neglectful, and the resulting gaslighting in my formative years led to a starkly delayed ability to individuate and form healthy boundaries, because I didn't have early models to mirror. I had to wait until such models - and the corresponding vocabulary explaining it all - became available to me.
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