Forty years ago

I haven’t been writing much lately.  The best way I can explain this is by saying that when I write I try to strike a particular tone.  It’s hard to describe this tone but it’s warm, humane and has a level of moral clarity.  Reflecting on this, I realised that this ‘tone’ also describes my better self.  In the last few years I have been preoccupied with grief and anger and that better self has been hard to access.  I figure that if I can’t write as my better self than I shouldn’t write at all.

And while I’ve been preoccupied with my own shit, I’m not big on solipsism – at least when it comes to this blog.  The GLBTIQQARXYZ community is full of people who feel compelled to tell us about themselves at length.  They seem to think that doing so is a political act and frankly, it shits me to tears.  If you can’t connect your own experience to bigger world, then don’t bother. 

Now I am self-indulgent, because of this photo that popped up on my Facebook feed yesterday. 

It was taken forty years ago, on a bright February morning at a state high school in regional Victoria.  It was my first year of high school and I would have been 11 years old.  I had had my first period just a couple of months before.  For someone who didn’t want to be a girl this was a trauma.  Not to mention bloody inconvenient.  In the school toilets there was an incinerator in one cubicle, where afflicted girls could dispose of their used sanitary pads while other girls stood outside and taunted them.  I quickly learned to avoid using the toilets at recess, and run out during class instead. 

But I am wandering down memory lane.  Back to the story.  Looking at this photo yesterday I thought, ‘but I don’t look any different to any of the others!’

What a ridiculous thought, I thought.  Why would I look different??

Because I felt different.  My brothers had convinced me that I was as fat as a house, for a start.  It was not, as you might guess, a supportive family.  Every day was a struggle to survive and each person fought their own corner with the viciousness they had learned to expect from others.  My mother, struggling to raise three children on a single parent’s pension, had an active mental illness which found its expression in marathon rages directed at the cause of her troubles: her children.  My father – medically retired from his job - was in hospital for months at a time.  We didn’t see him the Christmas before this photo was taken, though we were assured he would be home by new year.  When we went to see him he was gone.

‘Gone?’ my mother asked, ‘What do you mean, the bastard’s gone??’  

‘Gone,’ we shrugged.  ‘Like, not there.’ 

He did reappear, a few months later.  Brain-damaged and child-like.  Crazy.  Visits resumed, but there were no explanations, no questions, no guidance, no help.  Work it out for yourself.

I was 11. 

I was 11 when we were herded out of class for ‘school photos’ on that sunny summer morning.  It was in the rear quadrangle.  The ground was pebblecrete (lawn being reserved for the front quadrangle).  There were wood benches painted a khaki grey-green for kids to sit on, though for the photos plastic chairs were brought outside.  Girls in the front.  Boys standing on the wooden bench at the back.   

The school itself was quite new.  It had been open only a few years when I started – my older brother was one of the first male students.  The local girls’ high school was rebuilt with a brand new building on the edge of town, and in its new incarnation went co-ed.  The new building was all brown brick and orange plastic.  Its design was based on Bentham’s panopticon principle: impossible to see out, with an interior designed for maximum visibility.  There was nowhere to hide.

Not long after this photo was taken, my two best friends decided that they didn’t like me anymore.  I don’t recall the reason for this.  Years later I realised that it was probably about gender and sexuality, in as much as anything is about gender and sexuality when you are 11 years old. But the reason they didn’t like me was less important than the way they decided to express their dislike, which was through bullying. 

As opportunities to bully me in class were limited, they focused their efforts out of class. They taunted me mercilessly.  They followed me wherever I went: between classes, at recess, at lunchtime, and after school.  They liked to deliberately step on my heels as I walked.  They followed me to the locker bays which resembled a scene from Lord of the Flies, a documentary that we studied in Year 8.  They followed me into the toilets.  They followed me outside the building.  Once they sabotaged my bicycle.  Once they pretended to make up with me, and took me outside where they unceremoniously threw me into the rose garden in front of the school. 

Now, I had learned - from living with a parent with mental illness - that resistance just makes the abuse worse, so I didn’t react.  This was precisely the wrong way to respond to bullying (where the best response is to resist as loudly, publicly and aggressively as possible) but it was the way that I had learned.  And so it went on.  Not just for a few days, or a few weeks.  It went on for years. 

It went on in full view of my classmates.  It went on in full view of the scumfucks who enjoyed long careers as teachers at that school.  None of them said or did anything.  We turn away. 

I said nothing; it was no use.  I ran away.  I tried to be invisible.  I hid wherever I could.  The library was a good place – they rarely found me in there.  I read the encyclopedias.  I wagged school.  I pretended to be sick.  I couldn’t face it.  I couldn’t cope. It broke me, twisted up the leftover pieces, snapped each one in half again and trampled on the remains.

In the last years of high school, when these girls had found some real outlet for their adolescent libido and lost interest in me, I was castigated for my reluctance to “make up”.  I couldn’t explain my refusal.  It was confusing, but I didn’t want to.   

It’s not confusing anymore and I still don’t want to be friends on Facebook.  I am not close to the people I went to school with, but I have been in touch with a few over the years.  None has ever acknowledged what they saw, much less said anything.  We pretend not to notice.  Noticing makes us complicit. 

That school and its bright blue sky haunts me. I still live with the damage they did, even now.  I’m 51 and I wonder if anyone ever ‘gets over’ anything.  We don’t heal.   We just go on, wounded and bleeding, into the future.

That building has appeared in my dreams, so many times that it is tiresome.  Once, I dreamed that I was outside the toilet block and saw a tiny kitten, lost and alone.  Little and fragile.  And as I approached the kitten morphed into a much younger version of my self.  She was wearing that same bottle-green school uniform that you see in the photo.  Across the years, I reach out to her now.  I will protect you. 

https://bullyzero.org.au/