logo credit to Nate Williams
Being Kendra’s “best friend” did not make me feel better about myself, perhaps because it wasn’t really a healthy friendship, even though at the time I thought of it as such. Vaughn et al. (1993) found that having one close friend can make the difference in the life of an unpopular child. Yes, it was a secure feeling to have a friend, but with Kendra, I felt I wasn’t as good as her. It was evident in her actions she didn’t think I was good enough to be included in all activities. It was not an equal friendship. In fact, I realize now that it was a form of bullying. From that first time that she ran over my toes with her tricycle, Kendra exerted power over me and made me feel weak and controlled. Her relationship with me differed, however, from traditional bullying in that we had genuine affection for each other.
School was a place of many terrors, somewhere I dreaded going to each day. But in fourth grade something happened that made school a little bearable. I discovered I was good at it. My grades had been rising steadily. By fourth grade I was one of the top students in the class. This was something that made me feel good about myself. But by fifth grade, it had become another reason for the children to pick on me. I decided it was time to change my identity, so I would be more like the others.
Playing dumb
Before fifth grade, most of my classmates had ignored me or refused to play with me. It was lonely, but not unbearable for me. In grade five I remember the name calling started. This was probably because I started wearing glasses and I got very good grades. I was the perfect portrait of the nerd. I remember getting called the typical names, such as “Four Eyes”. That wasn’t too bad-my Dad had told me what to expect, because he had gotten glasses at a young age too.
I knew that getting good grades in school and being the teachers’ favorite made me much more unpopular with my classmates. I can remember one incident where the class had done rather poorly on a spelling test and I had one hundred percent. The teacher kept the whole class in at recess, except, that is, for me. At lunch the kids blamed me for getting a good mark. This was the first time I realized that doing well in school can make you unpopular with your peers. I was firmly established as the class geek. The kids use to call me geek, goody-goody two shoes, ugly. People would touch me and touch someone else and say, “Ew! You’ve got Cathy germs”, and no one would be my partner in gym class. I knew there was nothing I could do about my glasses, I needed them to see and my mother had told me contacts were out of the question. The only thing I could dowas change my academic status. And so I stopped trying in school, in fact I tried to act like the ditzy girl, a behavior I retained well into senior high. The kids still picked on me, being a ditz had not made me popular, but at least now I had one less bad quality for others to hold against me.
According to
When I started junior high (grades seven to nine) I thought maybe if I changed the way I dressed, if I adopted a more mature fashionable look, I would fit in. I poured over fashion magazines all summer trying to find the right look. I told my mother I would not wear clothes in the children’s section anymore and I wanted my clothes from the trendy stores such as “Smart Set and Suzy Shier”. On the first day of school I decked myself out in what I thought a fashion plate, destined to be popular and admired by all, would wear.
Fashion disaster
I am looking at a picture of myself taken on the first day of junior high. In the picture I am in my living room, standing beside the organ. One hand is resting on the organ and the other is clutching my first purse, which is beige with multi colored zippers. My new Adidas school bag is in the background behind me. I have long blonde hair, with big glasses (that take over most of my face,) under which I am wearing pink eyeshadow (my first time being aloud to wearing make-up). I am wearing a red checked blouse with white frills at the collar, breasts and cuffs. Around the collar of this shirt I have placed a bow tie. I am wearing a long denim skirt with frills on the bottom, white knee socks and black loafers. The western look, the men’s look, and the preppy look were all popular that year. I seemed to have mixed all those looks together.
When I see this photo, I think two things. I remember how excited and grown-up I felt leaving for school that day. But the adult me looks at it and thinks ,‘Oh. My God! That poor child, I was such a geek!’ The adult in me sees the awkward child who, back than, I could not see looking in the mirror. I had high hopes for that year that were not fulfilled. I did not make friends in my class and I was still picked on.. This memory makes me think of a song called “Grade 9’ by the Barenaked Ladies. The lyrics express the awkwardness of not fitting in:
I found my locker and I found my classes.
Lost my lunch and I broke my glasses,
That guy is huge! That girl is wailin!
First day of School and I’m already failing.
Chorus
This is me in grade nine, baby, this is me in grade nine.
This is me in grade nine, baby, this is me in grade nine.
I’ve got a blue-and-red Adidas bag and a humongous binder,
I’m trying my best not to look like a minor niner.
I went out for the football team to prove that I’m a man;
I guess I shouldn’t tell them that I like Duran Duran.
Chorus
Well, half my friends are crazy and the others are depressed
And none of them can help me study for my math test.
I got into the classroom and my knowledge was gone;
I guess I should’ve studied instead of watching Wrath of Khan.
Chorus
They called me chicken legs, they called me four-eyes,
They called me fatso, they called me buckwheat,
They called me Eddie.
Chorus
I’ve got a red leather tie and a pair of rugger pants,
I put them on and I went to the high school dance.
Dad said I have to be home by eleven –
Aw, man, I’m gone miss Stairway to Heaven
(Barnaked Ladies, 1992)
This piece brings to the forefront the hopes of popularity a lot of us have when entering a new school. If we just obtain the right look or join the right groups, we imagine we will achieve the popularity never possible before. But of course this doesn’t always work; in fact, it usually fails. The rejected students stay rejected. This song speaks to the experience of entering junior high, negotiating a place to fit in, and not succeeding.
In shopping for that first day of school outfit, I chose a physical transformation, which is a common strategy for adolescent girls. According to Weber & Mitchell (1995), our identity and ideas about identity are influenced by pop culture images. Further, the clothes we wear play an important part in the social construction of the self (Weber & Mitchell, 1995). Teen-age girls are told by magazines that all it takes is a good makeover and you will be popular and adored by boys. Unfortunately, for most girls, this is false hope.
I think this experience is common for many girls, not just those of us who are peer rejected. What’s the same is that this physical transformation does not make girls popular. What’s different for peer rejected girls is having the added burden of still being peer rejected; in other words, it’s a double disappointment.
After this failure I was depressed but not defeated. I was just becoming a teenager and was determined I would be well-liked. I went back to my teen magazines and novels to look for answers. They all seemed to point in one direction, “get a boyfriend”. According to what I was reading, if you had a boyfriend you would be happy and people would like you. In fact the more popular the boy was, the more popular you would be. So I set my sights on getting myself a boyfriend. I had my first boyfriend the summer I turned thirteen.
And I will continue to thank Catherine for letting me share her papers from school, and her experiences. REMEMBER, if you have something to contribute fb or e-mail me! nancy.wood@mbsradio.com! Happy Freedom Against Bullying Week!
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