Tough Acting Animals

First grade was tough; I’d gone to a different school for kindergarten, so I didn’t know any of the students and the school was bigger. Or maybe it just seemed that way to a tow-headed six-year-old.

My teacher Mrs. Harris wore floral dresses and comfortable shoes and had tightly permed white hair. She was kind and never made me feel unwelcome. I cannot say the same for my classmates. I get it, of course; I was a new kid, they didn’t know me, and I could do something really well that many of them could not yet do at all: I could read.

We had separate reading groups–low, middle, and high–and we would sit our little six-year-old selves at a low table reading together while the rest of the class worked on something else. Mrs. Harris towered over us in our hard plastic chairs, dark blue, so uncomfortable we were never in any danger of falling asleep.

On one of those first reading days, I sat alone as the other students crowded near each other, leaving space on either side of me. When the teacher asked what was going on, I said “They won’t sit by me because they think I have a disease.” Someone had said as much to me minutes before Mrs. Harris’s question.

What followed was a study in separation. Mrs. Harris proceeded to lecture the class on their lack of kindness and told them they wouldn’t get recess that day. They had to stay in the classroom and make me apology cards while I got recess alone in the cafeteria where I ate an ice cream sandwich with lunch ladies who acted like I was the brightest spot in their day. I still have those apology cards in a scrapbook and an affinity for ice cream as a reward. The use of food to soothe is a post for another day.

My reading wasn’t something I bragged about or used to make myself seem superior. At six, how could I have known that was an option? But intelligence, curiosity, and a dogged interest in the truth aren’t necessarily the prime traits elementary kids look for in new friends.

I wasn’t lonely; I did make friends eventually. My mom always reminds me of this when I speak about the horrors of childhood bullying and general meanness directed my way. It wasn’t that I was a target all the time, but I felt it deeply when I was, and the seeds of who I am as a writer were already planted, so I remember everything.

The boy who called me Ugnaught–a pig-nosed character from Star Wars–or the older girls who peered at me over the stall partition in the skating rink bathroom and ridiculed me for needing to go. The middle school boys who acted like I’d made the earth move after doing a jump in a cheerleading routine during my three ill-fated weeks on the squad. The entire seventh grade booing after I was introduced to give my speech for student council. I remember it all, down to the weather and what I was wearing.

But the funny thing is, I don’t feel traumatized by these moments. More than anything I am saddened by the cruelty these kids felt they had to perform in order to feel better about themselves. When they were hurt or cornered or felt small, they came out swinging at someone, and often I was a soft target in close range, easy to hit, and wildly reactive to their barbs.

In the nearly twenty years I’ve taught, I’ve rarely dealt with a student acting out who was actually upset with me. They are often afraid of being seen as stupid or incapable, afraid of being singled out, afraid of something at home that I don’t even know exists. Fear pushes us in ugly directions. As my friend Jordan says we are, after all, just tough acting animals.

We’re currently watching some of this reactive misery play out around the world. From the horrific Russian invasion of Ukraine–an exercise in one man’s fear his life means nothing so he exerts his awful power to ensure a legacy, however heinous–to the terrifying trend of book banning that illustrates the deep fear of an aging population that other beliefs may be more valuable than their own. It is all about control, and it is so wildly and unnecessarily sad.

I told my parents once the bullying I experienced had mystified me as a kid because I knew how smart and nice and funny I was. When I read Zora Neale Hurston later, she gave language to how I’d felt: “How can any deny themselves the pleasure of my company? It’s beyond me.”

I don’t know what gave me this irrational confidence or radical sense of self-acceptance at such a young age, but I suspect reading has a great deal to do with it. The more we read, the more empathetic we become; the more we know the world and ourselves. Anne of Green Gables, Anastasia Krupnik, Elizabeth and Jessica Wakefield, Margaret Simon–and later protagonists like Janie in Their Eyes Were Watching God–taught me there was no reason for cruelty when kindness was within reach, even for myself.

When I see the tough acting animal appear, I try to breathe. To remind myself that the fire of fear is strongest when it burns without the relief of love. As Colum McCann writes in Let the Great World Spin, “The thing about love is that we come alive in bodies not our own.”

We may all be tough acting animals, but we don’t have to hurt each other to save ourselves. There are so many better ways to be.