I promised myself when I started blogging again that I’d be honest and share things the way I would have before I got scared away from blogging, so today’s post is one of those moments.
I’ve told the story before, I think, but today I’m going to talk about five scars I carry with me every day no matter what happens to me. These are personal things I share just because I think that others might feel the same sorts of scars, and maybe knowing others feel the same will help people to contextualize. Sometimes I know it helps me to just talk about it.
The earliest of these incidents almost nearly left a scar. When I as three or four years old, my grandfather (mom’s adoptive father, an alcoholic) smacked me in the face so hard I fell to the ground (and he left a handprint on my face that didn’t fade for weeks). Apparently I’d had the nerve to talk about my black friend in his house. That mixed with my history with my father makes me highly suspect of male role models, even as I always search for the male role model that won’t hurt me.
The next one is also physical, and there IS a tiny scar from it if you look close enough. My freshman year of high school I dated a girl for a bit. I didn’t really care that much for her; we’d been set up by a friend to go to the homecoming dance. I wasn’t against the idea of dating, really, I just didn’t have much in common with her other than that we were both chubby. I couldn’t read her, at all. I thought we were just friends, just hanging out, whatever. One day she got mad that I wasn’t paying enough attention to her and she hit me in the forehead with my class ring (which she’d wrapped in yarn– bolo style). I bled, and that was my first time being dumped. I should have known when she just up and took my class ring something was up, but in high school I loaned lots of fashion accessories to various people. I didn’t think twice.
Still in high school, I was working hard on getting over my social anxiety. I was the editor of the student newspaper. I was pretty good at it, I think. Good enough that I also worked for the local paper. I was trying to create an sense of inclusion for the people who weren’t a part of my friends circle, to make the staff of the paper feel like a unit. My best friend and I had a joke about “having the GWAM to hang with us.” It was something we came up with in typing class, which as insanely boring. Gross Words a Minute. We both managed to type very fast. So one day, one of the newcomers to the staff was working on something, and she did pretty well. Not perfect, but pretty well. I said “you might just have the GWAM to hang with us.” I got a call from her mother that night that she was in tears over that comment. Since then, I’ve been careful not to share inside jokes with others, keeping the circle small.
Once on the bus to a basketball game I was listening to LL Cool J. I was bobbing my head along to the beat. I turned around at one point to find that four of the other players were pointing at me, mocking my head movements, and laughing. Ever since that day I’ve been overly conscious of how I move when I’m around other people. Even though I don’t care what people think anymore, I still remember that feeling any time someone looks at me funny.
The last memory here is the reason why I stopped blogging for so long. And again, I’ve mentioned this before. I had some difficult times while I was working on my PhD. I had a moment of crisis, where I was basically told it was wrong to maintain my own beliefs as I went through the program. I was told by one of my mentors that “we aren’t sure you’re going to make it.” This was in spite of the fact that my masters thesis was as long or longer than the dissertations my peers were writing and that I was ahead of my 5-year-plan the entire time. I got a little neurotic about it, and I asked for people to explain to me what it was that I seemed to be doing so wrong. I wanted to fix it.
It just got worse for me, and when no one would listen, I posted to my blog about it. And some people from outside of the program saw the post. And they asked questions. From a rhetorical perspective, it was a good move on my part. I finally got someone to listen to me. But I was browbeaten for talking about it and having the nerve to talk about such things in a public space. I was accused of being unprofessional, along with all the accusations from before the posting. I never got the help I needed, and given that I’m doing just fine as a colleague now, I have to assume it was nothing. But any time I feel weird, or out-of-place, that sense that I was a problem creeps back in.
These things don’t cripple me. I’m a fairly functional person. But even with all the growth I’ve done in my life, each of these things rattles around in my head, all the time. I would say that makes me a stronger person, but I don’t think it actually does. I don’t think there’s any benefit to such things. But bad things happen, and we can’t spend the rest of our lives down in a hole because of them. We have to share them and come to grips with them, because this world is a horrifying place sometimes and, honestly, a lot of the people here are assholes.