More on Reunions – The Other Side of the Coin

Last week, I talked a bit about memories and how time changes people. Reunion time always brings back memories of childhood and the days where everything is potential and nothing is yet fulfilled. Memories of the good times and the people you enjoyed spending time with.

There is also a much darker side to revisiting the past, especially for somebody who didn’t always fit in. Conformity seems to be the rule of law during the teenage years, and the non-conformist generally isn’t treated very well. If that non-conformist also happens to be physically small or sickly or overweight, that stuff is just more ammunition.

I guess they call verbal abuse bullying these days. We didn’t back then. Bullies were physical. They beat you up. They took your lunch money. They locked you inside lockers. But the real sad part is once that ball gets rolling, it’s very hard to stop it. It snowballs, picking up those who don’t stop to think for themselves, but instead go along with the unwritten rules of who is to be cast out and who is not.

I had two classmates who were sickly and small–one male and one female. Neither ended up being all that healthy. The female passed away not too deep into her twenties. The male made it a bit farther, but was on disability for many years because he was too ill to work. He finally passed away far too young. Too many of my classmates either committed suicide, or made the attempt. In fact, one is too many, but there was more than one.

For me looking back, I have no idea why I was singled out. I was small, sure, but I wasn’t particularly clumsy. I was the opposite of fat. I was average in how I did on school work. I honestly don’t know why.

I stayed to myself a lot, not wanting to be at school. I immersed myself in fictional worlds like Star Trek as a way to escape. It was a corny show, but everybody was treated as an equal.

It’s no wonder I wanted to escape:

I was pushed into a locker by a group of five or six guys and had to be let out by the man the football stadium is now named after.

While participating in what was supposed to be a fun event, a classmate flat out told me to leave because I wasn’t welcome. Nobody wanted me there.

A guy I didn’t even know saw my doodles of the band Boston on my folder and told me that if the band knew I liked them, they would all quit.

I had a bruised shoulder for weeks because one classmate continuously punched me when the teacher wasn’t looking.

I was the top scorer on my gymnastics team as a senior. Only I made it to state, yet the lone picture of me in the yearbook is in the team photo. The student photographers intentionally avoided taking pictures of me.

I took the blame and was punished for things other people did because in a room of 30 students, not one had guts enough to say I was innocent. Instead, they preferred to watch me be humiliated when I was forced to apologize to all the students in the library, which I refused to do.

I was athletic, and actually a pretty decent athlete, but I’d still get picked last for teams in gym class.

On their own,these incidents might be funny, but it’s a cumulative effect. it builds and builds over the course of 12 years in school. Some of my classmates who were treated in a similar way tried to kill themselves. I never did. I grew a thick skin by high school, and I realized the things that were said to me and done to me spoke a lot more about the person doing it than about me. Also, I started throwing it back at them, and I stopped caring what other people thought. (Actually, I never really cared all that much what other people thought.)

It made me stronger. It made me independent. But, there’s a reason I avoided reunions for two decades and nearly didn’t go this time. While the atmosphere was a lot more welcoming, a lot of the people I didn’t want to see simply weren’t there. If they had come, would I have enjoyed the event, or would I have left early? I don’t know.

Time heals wounds, they say. I have forgiven all that has happened, but it’s very difficult and unrealistic to forget.