Reply #290: Very good point, Will, about girls

[LiberalEsto]

Girls can be savages. In middle school, my older daughter was targeted. They girls were like rabid animals. A couple of them lived down the street, and my daughter was afraid to even go out our front door.

A year or so later, one of them was caught trying to set fire to a school restroom. She was suspended for a while.When I found out she was being allowed to attend the 8th grade dance (a big event) despite the arson, I raised hell with the principal. According to the rules, the girl shouldn't have been allowed to participate in it. I was afraid this kid would torment my daughter at the dance. The principal refused to keep the girl from attending the dance. This is the kind of enabling shit that allows bullies to flourish.

When I was growing up in the 1950s and early 60s, I was bullied relentlessly from second grade on. My parents were Estonian immigrants, and I didn't start learning to speak English until kindergarten. I had no clues about American social behavior, and my parents didn't have a clue either. Then I was found to be highly intelligent, and was skipped a grade.

I ended up being the smallest, youngest kid in class, while still getting high grades. Add a pair of ugly eyeglasses, no money for nice clothes (I wore dowdy outdated hand-me-downs from a distant cousin), and extreme skinniness due to anxiety, and I was the perfect victim. I was very thin because I had a hard time eating, since my parents too frequently yelled, criticized and beat me with a leather belt. So I was a victim at home and at school. And I was too small to fight back. I spent a lot of time playing in the woods, alone. (One good thing came of this: I became fairly expert at identifying wild flowers and other plants).

When I told my mother about the school bullying, she dismissed it, saying the others were just jealous of my good grades. This kind of stuff didn't happen to her in Estonia, so she didn't realize how bad it was. I ended up learning how to fake illness to avoid going to school, and consequently missed months and months of classes, mainly in junior high. I was always "sick" when I had to give an oral report.

To this day I have a lot of internal anger, anxiety and depression.