How It Began & Junior High School

 

It all began the year I was turning nine years old, or in grade four. My parents had decided to move to a small rural town outside Calgary, Alberta, called Strathmore. They felt that it would be much safer and quieter to live in a small town instead of a big city.

 

At first, I was teased a bit by some boys. It wasn't anything I never had happen to me before, so I just took it with a grain of salt. I was told by the powers that be to "ignore it and they will stop", because apparently they are all just looking for a rise out of me. If I showed that it didn't affect me, then they would stop. I wasn't all that worried about it at the time because I had made some friends, or so I had thought.

 

During this year, I had moved through three different schools all within a couple of months of each other. As a result of this, I found I was very much behind in my school learning, and struggled to keep up with everyone. I had noticed Strathmore's curriculum was somewhat different from Calgary's. Towards the end of the school year, I wound up repeating the fourth grade.

 

That's when it all started for me. The people I used to be in class with made fun of me for failing. I also found myself in a grade with a lot of horribly rude people, who all seemed to think it was funny or cool to make fun of me. I was somewhat different than normal people. I was a tomboy, and very much into playing with the guy toys instead of the girls toys, with a few exceptions of course. I also exhibited quite a lot of geeky tendencies even back then. Once again, I tried the "ignore it" tactic. This went on for a number of years.

 

After awhile, people I thought were good friends started to turn against me. They would stop hanging out with me, or avoided me if I came up to them. Some would even pretend to be my friend only to find out my secrets and spread it around the class, so everyone could have a good laugh at my expense. These things hurt me quite a lot. I found myself closing off from people, and as a result, I still to this day find it difficult to let my guard down and trust people. But again, the only advice I was given was to ignore it, so I kept doing that.

 

Then the Hell that was called Junior High School happened. Our small community had two elementary schools in town from grade one to six at that time. The powers that be thought it would be a good idea to combine those schools, plus two or three of the surrounding towns, into one giant hodge-podge of a junior high school. This is when all Hell broke out.

 

The people in my elementary school who were making fun of me somehow passed on to their new friends to make fun of me and insult me. The insults were quite hurtful and quite personal. I found quite a lot of complete strangers who I didn't even know on a first-name basis were walking up to me in the hallway, saying, "Mellissa, you're ugly!", then a large group of surrounding kids would laugh. This happened at least twenty times a day, five days a week. This was really starting to affect me.

 

Imagine, if you will, being a girl who was entering her dreaded teenage years, with all the pressures to look a certain way, be a certain type of person, and all the fun that is normally experienced in Junior High and puberty. Now imagine an entire grade level (if not the entire student body of three years) insulting you and calling you "ugly". It hurt quite a lot.

 

My grade seven class in particular was the roughest year of my life. I started to notice a weird thing about the teachers, though, which I want to address here, because I want this behaviour to stop as well. Whenever there was a bad kid in the class (you know, the type that fools around, doesn't pay attention, and disrupts all the people around him), nine times out of ten he was moved right by me or I was moved by him, almost like I was a form of punishment for bad behaviour or something. The kid would then focus his attention on insulting me instead of disrupting the entire class, which made the teacher happier, but resulted in reducing my grades — and subsequently my self-esteem.

 

When I remember grade seven, I remember one boy in particular. He was one of those aformentioned "bad kids". A loud-mouthed, overweight kid, who had terrible grades, but his parents were wealthy, so he was never really punished. He was in my life since I moved to that town, insulting me all the way up to this point, and a royal pain in my ass. The teacher had decided to shake the room up a bit in home room and Social Studies, and I got moved near him, which made me cringe.

 

Every day it was ruthless. He would insult me and his stupid friends who were also in close proximity would laugh and laugh. Again, I tried the "ignore it" method, as I had been instructed to do. However, no matter how hard I tried to ignore it, I could not shut off my hearing. Everything that was said, was registering in my brain, and recorded for much later reference.

 

One day, he was being his normally stupid self. We were having our home room time, and as per usual the class was being extremely out of control. Even with a class full of loud and obnoxious teenagers, the bad kid was louder than all of them combined. Indeed, whenever he was on a roll, you could hear him half-way down the hallway. He felt like he had something really funny to share with the idiots around us. He started, "Hey, Mellissa? Hey, Mellissa?"

 

"What?" I replied with strong disinterest.

 

"You're ugly!" He snorted. The rest of the idiots laughed hysterically.

 

I sighed heavily and turned myself away from him, attempting to ignore him. I had learned an almost meditative technique, where I would just focus on the black board and just try to tune him out. After laughing a minute or so, he turned to the gang and said, "Oh, I've got another one. Hey, Mellissa?"

 

Like I was stupid enough to do that a second time! Again, I was pretending like he didn't exist, while on the inside I wished I could just grab him by his fat little neck and strangle out every ounce of air he had in his body. Yes, he really knew how to push this pacifist's buttons!

 

After another few minutes of my black board trance, he realized he was not getting his satisfaction, so he stood up beside me and yanked my math book off the desk. As I turned around to grab it back from him, he bopped me over the head with it, stating, "What are you, stupid or something?"

 

This unleashed the beast within me. I stood up (and was much taller than him I must point out). I was so angry I seriously felt like killing him in that moment. I was panting and growling, and just when I started to feel the white knuckles on my fist clenching and my teeth grinding away, the teacher finally told the class to settle down because we were ready to start Social Studies now.

 

Sometimes I wish I had punched his lights out. I would have at least felt better about myself. Instead I was just taking it. I never fought the insults. I just took it, silently. One of my biggest regrets in life is that I didn't stick up for myself when all of this bullshit was going on. I was just doing what I was told to do: Ignore it, as they are just looking to get a reaction out of you.

 

Many years later I can tell you that I have learned that that theory is, in fact, wrong. The truth of the matter is, they are not looking for a reaction out of you to give them that higher power. They don't really care if it hurts you, if you cry or what not (although tears would earn you the nickname "flash-flood"). They are, in fact, seeking the laughter from the surrounding kids or crowd, so they can feel validation.

 

As long as there are silent participants, who laugh at these sort of events, these bad kids will continue to do what they are doing. In the mean time, it was completely disrupting my life. Even to this day, I find it very difficult to trust people. I also find it difficult to be in a large group of people, worrying that people will laugh at me, or worse, will all think I'm ugly. It's a painful Hell that I would not wish upon my worst enemy. Well, okay, I probably would wish it upon that one boy.

 

Another problem that occurred in Junior High was what was known as "social dance". During the entire month of December, instead of doing sports in Gym class we would dance, by learning ballroom dancing, line dancing, the lindy and so on. Every single boy (with a couple of exceptions) refused to dance with me, all acting like I was diseased and if they touched me they would turn into stone.

 

That reminds me of my nickname when I was in Junior High School. I had two of them actually. One was Medusa, the Greek mythological woman who had snakes for hair and turned men into stone at the very gaze upon her. The other was "Slash", the guitarist from Guns and Roses. When puberty hit me, my hair went wild and curly. I had straight hair as a kid, but once I hit puberty my hair thickened and curled and was completely unmanageable. That's why I had that nickname, not because I was cool but because I had crappy hair.

 

I always dreaded social dance in Junior High, which is sad as I really wish I could have really learned how to dance. What can you do when you are stuck with a bunch of stupid, immature boys who refused to even touch your hand because they thought of you as being diseased, or probably thought they would be laughed at and teased if they didn't respond that way. It was hard to dread December much, as my birthday is in that month and also had a week and a half if not two weeks off at Christmas, which was always awesome for me as I didn't have to go to school anymore. But social dance ruined that month for me.

 

My grade seven class is notorious for being one of the worst (if not THE worst) grades at that school. In fact, there was one time I remember that the principal came to the class. I was sent out of the class for some unapparent reason at the time and told to wait in the hallway. I stood outside the door, and heard the principal just yelling at them all, giving them all Hell for being the brats that they were. I had heard that that happened in a couple of other classes of grade seven (I think there were five or six classes of grades 7, 8 and 9, all labeled with an alphabet number at the end, like "7e"). While I did sort of enjoy that I was spared from this punishment from the principal, it also served to once again single me out and made me even more so like an outsider.

 

After grade seven I made the decision to join the band class. I was in a class that was a little more tolerable, as I wasn't really made fun of as much as I was in that Hell of a grade seven class. I think at this point, though, the damage that hurt me so much in grade seven had affected my self-esteem and made it difficult for me to speak above a whisper. Even to this day, I get asked to repeat myself a lot as I have become a bit of a "low-talker" as a result of all of this abuse.

 

During these junior high years I found myself getting swayed by obsessions. There were two pretty prominent things I became obsessed with in Junior High. One was The New Kids on the Block. Most of the "cool kids" disliked them, so I found myself drawn to the boy band. The other obsession was comic books.

 

As you may have read in my Mell's Spell section, I have always had a love of superheroes, and likely always will. When I was told to stop playing with toys, which coincidentally was about the same time I entered Junior High school, I found myself still fantasizing about them and how I would play with them. When I started collecting comic books in Junior High this became quite the obsession for me.

 

Another painful bullying event occurred in grade nine. This was the year where it was planned to do an Eastern Canada trip to Ottawa, Toronto, Niagara Falls, and Montreal. I was one of the unfortunate people who couldn't go on this trip, as either my parents didn't have the money or (more likely) they were too protective of me to let me go on a trip with boys to busy scary cities "full of gang members" like Toronto and Montreal were to my father's eyes. As a result of this, I was stuck in a class with a lot of the same assholes I was with in grade seven, and some others that I only knew from hallway experiences where they would insult me and I wouldn't even know their names.

 

It was brutal. All the good teachers went on the trip, so we were stuck with a lot of substitute teachers who had absolutely no control over these kids, and the kids treated the whole week or two like it was a vacation. One kid called me a bitch because I sat down in the desk in front of him as there was no where else to sit, because someone had stolen my previously selected seat. I wound up staying home the next day as I couldn't bring myself to go to this torturous Hell of an experience anymore as it was just relentless with the personal attacks on me.

 

My mother made me go to school again the following day. Not even ten minutes into English class and the other painful thing happened. The boy sitting behind me actually picked up his desk and emptied all the garbage in it, like wrappings from candy bars, chips, and empty Spitz seeds (so gross!), on my head. I walked out of the room and went straight for the office and launched a complaint against that boy and the one who called me a bitch the time before, saying that I just can't continue to go to school with these jerks if the teachers (who was in the room at the time this happened, but was one of those aforementioned substititutes) had absolutely no control over them.

 

The damage that happened to me during these three years of Hell hurt me on a very personal level. It affected my self-esteem, my self-worth, my self-image, my self-respect, Hell every "self" you can think of. By the time high school started, the damage was deep and I found myself withdrawing to my room, which became known as my Fortress of Solitude.