I had nailed life.
At 12, I was BMOC at Louise Archer Elementary in Vienna, Virginia. Good grades (on the gifted track no less!), all my teachers adored me, most all the kids liked me, including some girls and even some of the kids who beat me up. I was in student government, on the safety patrol sporting the bright orange belt thing and playing crossing guard. I won awards for art, attendance and good citizenship. I was a soccer prodigy.
Coming out of the 6th grade, the sky was the limit.
And then…
Middle school. Henry David Thoreau, to be exact. For two years in the late 70s, my life turned to hell. Everything I thought I knew and loved about the world was stripped away like <poof!> I was starting over, and it didn’t feel good. Still doesn’t. We’ll get to that.
According to A.I.
As I was developing this post, I asked ChatGPT about what actually happens to kids in middle school. I wanted to gauge if my memories are too dramatic or have been warped over time.
The feedback was comforting: my recollections are spot-on. It was also alarming as hell: my recollections are spot on.
At 12, the adolescent brain is busy wiring and rewiring itself, which explains why every minor mishap feels like the end of the world. Puberty riles up the stakes for embarrassment and humiliation, inside and out. Peer approval is like oxygen; identities and styles morph daily in order to survive. And school itself, according to A.I., “emphasizes compliance over curiosity.” Sounds familiar.
So yes, pseudo-science and artificial intelligence confirm my memories and feelings about those days. Middle school sucks.
Picture this.
Doug, circa 1977. Start with all the curses of puberty. Then apply thick, horn-rimmed glasses. Braces. A mop of ill-barbered hair that could not be combed a la mode. Persistent and ripe but natural B.O. A shiny patina of dread. And somehow, I suddenly became shy, uncoordinated and physically awkward. My Mom, bless her heart, once tried to console me by telling me that most boys my age are “unattractive.” She meant well.
That’s the baseline of what we’re working with for this post.
There were other boys who were already tall and buff, with peach fuzz and hair feathered like Andy Gibb. They were confident and popular alphas, and they knew it. Their families went skiing at Christmas and spent the summer “at the beach.”
Between 6th and 7th grades, girls got some weird growth spurt. They were also getting a little fuzzy and filling out. They seemed more mature. Honestly, I’m glad I wasn’t a girl because I know those are some seriously rough years.
A Day-in-the-Life
Every school-day morning started by schlepping to the bus stop, sometimes before dawn, sometimes in the rain and snow. Some days toting a trombone case. The stop was at the intersection where I had been a crossing guard the year before. The salad days. Back then, I was an authority figure, respected by the underlings, with the power literally to stop traffic.
On the bus, I somehow became relegated to sit in the second row on the left side, directly behind the bus bully. So by the time I got to school, I was a traumatized, nervous wreck with disheveled hair.
The gifted/talented thing followed me. That’s not a humble brag. It meant I was shut in with the same 20-25 kids most of the day. The only time we were released into the general population was for lunch and P.E.
Let’s talk P.E. So this kid, me, who’s suddenly lost in the world, yet cloistered and cocooned, is forced to spend 30 minutes every day getting tackled in flag football, outrun on the blacktop, humiliated at the bottom of a chin-up bar and rope climb, pinned on a wrestling mat, striking out, sitting out, losing out.
Plus, there was the everyday, tacit threat of getting wedgied in the locker room; I might have actually witnessed one and since blocked it. And stay alert near the toilets, the menacing air of an imminent swirly was ever-present. Or way worse: a chunky swirly.
If that’s not enough, let’s make all the pubescent boys arbitrarily get naked to take a shower, under the watchful eye of our creepy gym teacher. Not libelous, I assure you.
At lunch on the first day of school, the social order and proximity were established and codified. I and the only kid who was more of a dweeb than me circled with our trays until I spotted an old friend from my soccer days. He looked up, horrified, as I approached. The kid he was sitting with was all, “no, not here, uh uh. No way.” We sat.
Fond memory: within a few months we were shucking and giggling about “Animal House,” the “WKRP” turkey drop and Steve Martin’s “King Tut” on SNL. (“Freaks and Geeks” conjured the SNL event, starring a similar clique of outcasts.)
Then there was band. I had neither the aptitude nor attitude for the trombone. I hated to practice. I found the many scales to be arbitrary and pointless; I still do. Rote learning is not my thing, and pressing the mouthpiece hard against my braces for an hour a day was bloody unpleasant. I quit after 7th grade. I was a quitter now too.
Oh, and Girls
Along with all the other symptoms of puberty comes those funny “feelings.” I’ve related in another 60|60 post my dreadful experiences at school dances. Despite my enthusiasm, I was a trembling wallflower. I simply didn’t have the rap or confidence. But I did have thick glasses and braces and probably hyper-B.O. from the stress, so, “let’s do this, ladies!”
I knew of some classmates who were dating, so why can’t I? It took me weeks to muster up the nerve to ask a girl to the movies. Julie was sweet, smart and pretty. I called her up. I didn’t present well. I panicked. I swerved and crashed. Flames. She rightly shot me down. If you’ve been through that, you know how it stings at that age (or any). Worse yet, she told her network. Long before social media, word-of-mouth shame was just as cruel and bitter.
It wasn’t all bad.
There were a few teachers who made a positive difference for me.
- Mr. Dallas taught social studies and was cool, and he had this killer handwriting on the chalkboard. I adopted it, and it occasionally comes out, to this day.
- Mrs. Williams was my English teacher in 8th grade and encouraged me to push myself and write outside the lines, although she did have to pull me back in on many occasions.
- And Senor Timmons, a small and spritely Spanish teacher was the most positive fella there was. He was my homeroom teacher too. The first day I tried out contact lenses in school, anxiously, he made me feel like a million bucks.
After all these years?
Valid question: why am I still reliving this? If you’ve ever been in therapy, you know that step one is to find a way to blame everything on your parents. But they’d get a lot further, I think, if they started with middle school.
It was a formative and defining chapter of my childhood. It took the wind out of my sails and nearly sent me adrift, at a really important time. It instilled in me a sense of lowliness, of social ineptitude, and the lack of control over any of it.
Yes, yes, I suppose it made me stronger in ways. Blah. I’m still not that confident that the trade-off was worth it. The scars of isolation, anxiety and inferiority still itch.
And then…
The summer before I started high school, I got my braces pulled, my contact lenses became a daily thing, and the latest in deodorant technology worked wonders.
My life was perfect.
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