At the beginning of sixth grade I transferred to a new school. It wasn’t that I needed to transfer. I had started the year at the neighborhood parish school I’d attended since pre-K, but my parents were worried about declining academic standards, so they put me on the train up to a different parish school in Winnetka, a rich northern suburb where they felt confident I would get a better education.
Sacred Heart, my new school, was smaller. The average graduating class only had 20 or so kids in it, and almost everyone lived close by. I was a curiosity. My first day at lunch all the boys gathered round and asked me what position I played in football, what sports I liked, and what sort of video-games I was into. I didn’t know anything about football, didn’t play sports, and was terrified. I mumbled something awkward about liking “violent video games”, which they mistook for a mark of edginess. It was clear I was not the new kid they were hoping for, and the welcome committee dissolved without further ado.
Adjusting to the new school was hard. It felt like everyone had known each other since they were toddlers. They were all neighbors. They hung out together on afternoons and weekends. They lived in an environment where they were safe and afforded freedoms I’d never experienced. I was a conspicuous outsider. I was from “The City”, which in their minds was a dirty, scary place where their landscapers lived. Several kids took to heckling me in the hallway, calling me “Elian” and telling me to “go back to Cuba.” I didn’t fit in.
There were perks, though. I got to wear normal sneakers for the first time in my life. The uniform was more relaxed and the teachers were better. I had my own locker, and was able to secretly read all the Harry Potter books during free periods at school, without worrying about my parents’ disapproval. I’d been a star student at my old school, and I was a star student here as well. I remember my math teacher, Mrs. Witkov, and the thrill I got from her lessons. She was wonderful. Most of my teachers were wonderful, and in that strange way smart young kids often feel, I felt loved and appreciated by them.
My previous school had been run by a group of Franciscan School Sisters who were maniacal disciplinarians. Everyone processed between classes in single-file lines with assigned line-leaders. Behavior was aggressively monitored and corrected. When I was in kindergarten the principal, an evil woman named Sister Marcian Swanson, caught me throwing away my lunch garbage at the wrong time and yelled at me for getting out of my seat. She told me I would have to sit up on the stage alone for the rest of the year and eat my lunch in front of everyone. (An empty threat, but terrifying to a 6 year old who didn’t even know he’d broken a rule.) After that I was so frightened of stepping out of line that I developed a habit of wetting myself every day rather than ask to use the bathroom. This habit continued for about two years without any intervention.
My second grade teacher would throw tantrums at kids whose desks weren’t sufficiently tidy and dump them out onto the floor in the middle of class. In fifth grade I was called aside repeatedly because my math teacher didn’t like the way I wrote the number “9”, and accused me of lying about where I’d learned to write. I don’t want to go through a litany of insane disciplinary behavior, but these anecdotes are indicative. The place had an atmosphere of terror reinforced at every level, presumably because the nuns believed this was the way to instill order.
The atmosphere at school was partially mirrored at home. My father worked two jobs (plus graduate school) to make ends meet and was absent most of the time. My mother was struggling emotionally, and would have frequent violent outbursts, with unpredictable triggers. There were certain closets I got used to burying myself in, and certain nooks where I knew I would be hard to find.
I bring all of this up simply to observe that the relationship with authority at my new school required an adjustment from me. Teachers were kind. My 6th grade english teacher was so nice that she habitually referred to us collectively as “friends”. When she found that I enjoyed reading the Dune series, she brought in her own copies of the sequels, and gave me the fourth volume as a gift. I was amazed by the freedom and supportiveness of the adults there. I’d never been in an environment like that before.
But with my peers it was a different story entirely. At my old school I was a known commodity. I wasn’t into sports like most of the boys, but I wasn’t seen as weird and had my little gaggle of recess playmates. Here there were no other nerdy kids. My Lord of the Rings obsession was unmentionable. My family was not part of the local community. I had no real way to become part of it, and was not wanted.
The summer before 8th grade I decided to try and fit in. I got my mom to buy me some graphic tees like what the other kids wore outside of school. I started lingering outside the other boys’ circles at recess, trying to find an opening, trying to learn to belong. After some months of this, I discovered that I had a nickname, “Frank the Freak,” and found out that I was being mocked behind my back. I gave up on fitting in. I learned that there was nothing I could do to bridge the gap that left me alone.
The few occasions where I was invited to social events outside school went poorly. I remember going to a school dance that year and weeping to my mom on the ride home because I had no friends. She got me a copy of Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People as if this would be helpful. I read Carnegie’s reflections on the Teapot Dome scandal at night in my bedroom and puzzled over how any of it was relevant to my problems.
One way to grasp at the experience I had at Sacred Heart is to say that I felt left behind. My peers had all established familiarity with each other and their whole life-world long before I ever arrived on the scene. By the time I was there it was too late for me to break into their adolescent sense of the good or the familiar. I was new and strange, and 13 year olds are consumed with fitting in, finding role models, consolidating their identities via group membership and exclusion. It’s safe to say that for me, as a kid denied the possibility of belonging, acceptance, or friendship, that period was no less formative than it was for my peers.
That was also the year I first really got serious about Christianity. I was going to a church youth group my older sister was involved in, and one of the leaders recommended I read C.S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity. Perhaps it’s just my cynical hindsight talking, but Lewis’s presentation of Christianity gave me something to cling to that I knew my peers lacked. I was a born again Christian. They were just Catholics (not christians, as I was raised to believe), and not even serious ones. I started fantasizing about evangelizing the boys I had crushes on, and imagined how that would make us become friends. In my journal from that period I have notes about which ones I would give copies to if I could, and how it would all work out. Nietzsche would have had a field day.
Eventually middle school ended and I got another fresh start with a bunch of people who didn’t know me, and didn’t know each other. I did much better for myself in high school. I met people who were like me, and liked me. I met my best friend, Will, at cross-country running camp before freshman year. I still exchange emails with him now and then. He is one of the most delightful people I’ve ever known, one of the strangest and most wonderful. I don’t even know if he knows I feel this way about him, but even when we go without making contact for a while it means a lot to me that he’s still there.
At multiple later stages of my life the experiences I had during middle school have bubbled back up, in subtler and less petty ways, but no less painful for that. As I got older the fact that I was never allowed to have friends over to my house, and was rarely trusted to spend time with peers outside of school, meant that I missed out on a lot of the formative experiences of adolescent independence my friends had. When I arrived to college the culture shock was overwhelming. I didn’t know how to be around drunk people. I didn’t know how to handle all the variety of backgrounds and perspectives I encountered. I found it disturbing, threatening, unpredictable. I felt hobbled by how sheltered I was. Later on when I became Catholic I joined yet another social group that had a tightly-knit history. Whether because of their behavior or because of my own hangups and self-hatred, I always felt excluded, barely welcome, an outsider.
I wrote this post because somehow I still haven’t escaped these feelings. Maybe given the magnitude of the things I’ve described (and left un-described) this is unsurprising. In many ways I grew up believing that things were OK, because it was all I knew. But the pattern of neglect, alienation, and abuse was self-perpetuating. When I was in college I felt like I couldn’t experiment or open up because I was afraid of losing my parents’ approval, or slipping away from my religion. In my 20s I didn’t leave Christianity because I was afraid that God would damn me to hell, or that sin would ruin my life. I developed a pattern of seeking out relationships with toxic, abusive people, because they felt safe to me. Meanness meant I didn’t have to wait to find out if I was despised.
And even now it continues. Lately I’ve made a point of trying to get out of my shell, trying to be social and face getting to know people with some degree of bravery. But when I meet other gay men I am so often plagued by the same sense of being left behind. I came out when I was 30, and my peers, even the late bloomers, mostly did so by the time they were in their early 20s. They settled into careers that mostly didn’t end up being dead-ends. They have a sense of identity and community that’s much more deeply established than anything I have. Sometimes I’ll be listening to someone share a story from the past, and I know that I cannot share anything similar, because the analogues from my past are so heavy-laden with trauma and regret, to bring them up would be entirely inappropriate and somewhat embarrassing.
I’ve done such a good job on this blog of tying my reflections and remembrances up with some kind of pithy bow at the end. I don’t have a punchy conclusion for this one. There is really just a tremendous amount of psychic pain from carrying all this stuff around with me. In the midst of it all I’ve grown and matured, and I’ve learned to be kind to people and expect kindness from others. I try my best to shower the people I meet with affection, because after so many years of fear and scrupulous judgmentalism I want to see what’s beautiful in other people, and cheer them on, and be there for them.
I told a friend recently that I’ve always been an “island of misfit toys” sort of person. It’s hard for me to relate to people without problems, though I admire them. But the people I love the most readily are the ones who don’t quite fit. There are selfish reasons for this—oddballs are presumably less likely to judge me, and are therefore safer. But there are also wholesome and good reasons as well. It’s hard to love someone without needs or faults, because it can be hard to help them, to be there for them, to support them. Those who have been deformed by life, passed over, left behind, seem to have more space in their lives for the affection of someone like them, someone like me.