Middle School Was Just Not My Thing
Middle school was just not my thing. I never found my niche, and I never found my tribe either. I was a castaway, and I struggled to keep connections because there were already so many people against me in my neighborhood, and those issues trickled into my school life as well. At one point, my neighborhood’s outrage against me over another issue became worse, but that is a topic for another blog. Needless to say, I struggled during the transitional years of school, and things were only going to progressively become worse.
Little did anyone know that I was a ticking bomb awaiting a timed explosion. If I wanted to plan my freedom from the bondage I was in with a narcissistic family and an onslaught of vicious bullies, I had to think strategically. I did not believe that I had an out, and in a fit of rage when the man I almost married was a young boy I had a crush during middle school called my home, my father yelled the most absurd things about me going down the wrong pathway along with the rest of the girls that became teen mothers, street women, or drug addicted junkies. That was not a life I ever envisioned for myself. In fact, I envisioned getting a great job, becoming a wife, and becoming a mother to several children. [It is interesting how only one of the three ever materialized for me but more on that later.]
By eighth grade, I began to wake up and take stock of my life. I knew that if I really wanted to get away from my narcissistic family, I reasoned that I needed a good education to make an escape. A good education is all my father every talked about. He believed education was the key to success. I somehow took it to mean the key to my freedom. Sadly, however, I had basically dozed my way through school up until that point, and it was not until the end of my eighth grade year that I decided to make things happen for me.
Some teachers believed that I had waited far too late to make changes, but I was never one to listen to what others had to say about my life especially when I did not agree. So, on my high school registration form, I forged my way into every advanced high school class that teachers had vehemently denied me of taking.
I knew that the advanced courses were designed to put me on the fast track to college instead of the “work” track that I had previously been assigned to by all of my teachers. I told no one of my plan and simply turned the registration form into the office under the scrutinizing eyes of the secretary who smirked as she eyed the form but still placed it upon the stack with the other registration forms. All I could do at that point was hope for the best.
Basically, all of my teachers with the exception of one did not believe I had what it took to make it through high school because I had never proven myself as being worthy of middle school. Unfortunately, they mistook my trauma-based coping mechanisms as nothing more than forms of laziness. No one at the school had a clue of the trauma that I had survived and lived [to not be able to tell about].
No one seemingly cared, and if anyone truly did, no one ever expressed this much to me. Even my favorite English teacher had no idea that I was suffering. Perhaps I could have spoken up to someone, but I had already voiced myself a million times over to my parents, to relatives, or to anyone who would listen, but I had been branded a liar, a troublemaker, and at times even worse. My voice was chained. Speaking out was a pointless act. I only seemed to make the right people I needed to hear me angry with me. So I shut down and, instead, I chose to live my life through their view of me.
I did have two teachers – a married couple – who were fresh and new to the school mid-year through my eighth grade year who thought differently about learning. They would become instrumental during my remaining months in middle school, but I had felt their entrance in my life at the time was a little too late. I had no idea how valuable they would become to me when they transferred to work at the high school. I also had no idea that there were more issues to come. In fact, during the latter part of my eighth grade year, I entered into the lair of a predator who was primed to groom me and take me on a path to hell. If I thought my middle school years could get no worse, I had no idea that the devil had an assistant to make sure of it.
Even still, though, middle school was a total dud for me. That would not be a time I would want to repeat if I were given a choice. It was all just one huge trial and tribulation, but I did survive it. I did survive it.
Stay tuned for the next post.
My Voice Unchained 