The Words We Wear
Call Me “Flunkee”
When I was in first grade, I loved school and daydreaming. Not the best combo for a cantankerous 65-year-old teacher on her final year before retirement. Ms. Fory was counting down the days like a kid waiting for Christmas. Her one remaining pleasure was something called “desk checks.” Think mini version prison cell checks with candy as contraband. If your desk was messy, then in a fit of rage, she’d flip it over in front of the horrified class, and you had to clean it up with a trash bag.
On my report card, she repeatedly wrote “Below Average”, “Distracted”, “Talks Too Much About Barbie.” I’m particularly proud of that last observation. I don’t know if it was a secret stash of old Halloween candy that sent her and my desk flying over the edge, but she had it in for little Julie.
It only took one meeting, and she convinced my parents that another year would, “Do me good, help me to focus.” So they held me back. I was totally mortified and too ashamed to tell my friends. The next fall I returned to school. I tried to lay low, even lie, but a brief encounter with a bully named Joey Pallerino exposed the truth. As soon as the revelation dawned on his melon shaped head he hollered, to the whole lunchroom, “A flunkee. Julie’s a flunkee.” Flunkee, was the pejorative term for a kid who didn’t pass last year.
Thankfully we ended up moving to another school, and I did alright. I’d like to say Joey was forgotten, but that word, “flunkee” sunk its teeth in my little 8-year-old heart. I carried on, but with each award, each win, each rung in climbing higher, I could still hear a muffled Joey bellowing from below. To him, we’re still at Ebeling Elementary. I’ve shackled him to the past, but he clamors, shaking his chains and clinking his cup against his cell. It’s his way of reminding me that I failed, I’m dumb, and just pretending.
I know my public school embarrassment was not agony, and the villain, was a snaggletoothed eight-year-old who wore the same dingy Teenage Ninja Mutant Turtles shirt everyday. But, I wore names he and Ms. Fory gave me. I know, I’m not alone. Scores of us have “Ugly” “Fat” “Stupid” “Freak” scrawled across our hearts. And even now, despite success within a great career or beautiful family, names are worn while hearing the faint rhythmic taunting from some condemned place.
What names have been placed on you?
Meet Olivia
Photography: Rosaria Giambanco
Olivia is very pretty. That’s not flattery, it's a fact. Like many in the Detroit area, she’s of Italian descent. Tall, thin, olive skinned and sporting long wavy hair the color of tobacco, she presents a striking image. If you saw her on the street you’d notice. And fair or not, it wouldn’t be strange to expect her to act arrogant, standoffish, or a host of other unpleasant but common attitudes that come with being such a beautiful person. But she’s none of those things, quite the opposite in fact. Olivia is probably one of the top ten nicest and kindest people I’ve ever known. So when she opened up during what I thought would be a light hearted conversation about college I was surprised. Frankly, I was shocked.
“I was bullied bad in elementary school,” she started to say.
“Morgan?” I asked, surprised.
Morgan Elementary was my school. In fact, Olivia and I lived parallel lives, same neighborhood, elementary, high school, church, and now sister colleges. We probably swung on the same recess swings just in different decades.
Sticks And Stones
Olivia: “Yeah, I don’t know why. It was sixth grade, and there were three of us childhood friends, who lived next door, and for some reason the main girl became mean, and spread pretty vicious names about me. To other girls, she would say that I’m fat, ugly with acne, and when I’m sixteen, I’ll be pregnant..”
Julie: “How old was she?”
Olivia: “Eleven.”
What a weird coincidence. The same elementary school that saved me from my “flunkee” doom turned out to be the hell for Olivia. The more she told me what happened the more it freaked me out.
She said, “I finally went to my mom, she presented the principal with printed pages of evidence. And the principal had us both meet. A sort of remediation thing, but I didn’t do anything to her. I was just an easy target, because I never stuck up for myself.”
What a difference a generation makes. When I was eleven we played with toys called Polly Pockets, they also doubled as choking hazards. We performed cartwheel contests and hoarded Lip Smackers in Caboodles, do you remember those?
Being eleven is different now. Olivia’s friends had access to technology that was only in its infancy when I was her age, social media. It’s hard to grasp just how different being a pre-teen is now. And what happens when you give eleven year old girls access to that kind of power? .
Julie: “So now she’s even madder at you?”
Olivia: “Yeah, everyone knew, and it got so bad, the school held a special school assembly about cyberbullying.”
I just got this vision of a wide-eyed, expressive man with a soft voice slowly, haphazardly explaining angry feelings to 300 children. It’s these kind of scenarios that make me smile.
The drama seemed to fizzle out with entering junior high she had a chance to move on, make new friends, leave Morgan in the past.
Words As Weapons
Photography: Rosaria Giambanco
Olivia: “I remember loving all the new students. Totally felt like a fresh start. As a seventh grader, I was a little boy crazy, and this cool eighth grader took interest in me, and we started talking. It was just really nice that someone thought I was pretty, and I felt popular and wanted.”
Julie: Yeah, at middle school you get instant cool status for having a boyfriend in a grade above, but those dances are painfully awkward.
Olivia: Yeah, all the boys were so short.
Being the rare mix of pretty, slender and tall, Olivia easily stood out in the hormonal sea of pox-marked, squeaky voiced and sweaty Old Spice boys. Unfortunately, the boy she caught the attention of, was a liar, and a cruel one at that.
Olivia; “To make himself look cool, he spread rumors about him and I. That were totally untrue”.
She didn’t have to elaborate. Being a high school teacher, I saw the traps students laid to get ahead. Girls, forming packs, wounding another over a boy. Boys becoming beasts to shame and prowl for that hallway nod. “Whore” carved on cars, “Loser” plaster on lockers, and much worse scribbled on passed notes. I’ve opened emails of, “Mrs. Hakes could you please move my child’s desk away from…” They wreak havoc on someone’s life in exchange for four fleeting years of popularity.
For Olivia, whatever she thought she escaped, it came back hard, and every junior higher knew. She was trapped. Girls in the halls would whisper, “Well did you?” Olivia was a great friend, but nobody wanted to be friends in public. And that’s the worst part of slander, beyond the sticks and stones, it’s the loneliness it creates.
Olivia: “His words changed me. The way people treated me changed me, and it changed how I saw myself. In a sense, I started to believe the lie, that I was dumb. Dumb for trusting someone so young. Like the whole thing was kind of my fault. Pretty stupid, huh?”
Julie: “No, not stupid at all. How did you survive?”
Olivia: “Honestly, church was everything. There I was Olivia, not another name. I could worship God and feel peace, and I had real friends.
Running to Sanctuary
In church, Olivia experienced the same thing many outcasts had, refuge. There’s a reason we call the big part of the church where everyone sits a sanctuary. Sanctuary is a Latin word meaning holy. During the Middle Ages a fugitive could run there and be immune from arrest by the law of the Medieval Church. Olivia ran to sanctuary.
In the Bible there’s a blind man named Bartimaeus (Mark 10) . His name literally means “son of unclean.” It was probably a taunt given to him by the local children: “Here comes the ‘son of filth’! Here comes smelly!” Back before social services the only hope of a person who had a disability like blindness was to become a beggar. Bartimaeus needed to find sanctuary, and he found it. Not in a place, but in a person.
Bartimaeus cries out, “Son of David, have mercy on me!” to this local celebrity named Jesus. And, amazingly, Jesus does have mercy on him. He heals him. This compassionate act not only restores his sight, but also brings an end to the emotional torture. He can see, but now he sees himself clearer. Once casted on the fringe of society. Left on the outskirts like garbage. Treated only with pity or jeers. Barnabaus was called a nobody, but Jesus saw a somebody. Jesus, in a single gesture of mercy and love, restored the blind man’s sight and his human dignity.
Olivia chose--at great cost by the way--to unshackle herself from the names that bound her at such a tender age and time of life by committing herself to her faith. She ran to sanctuary. And in her church, she had a new name. Just like all Christians, she was able to choose this name for herself. If she wanted to, she could call herself a follower of Christ. And if she chose this label, by biblical decree, no one--not even prepubescent girls or lying guys could steal it away from her. Only she could choose.
All too often I hear young women repeatedly self-applying their past names and then justifying neurotic behavior, destructive habits, and numbing addictions. And you know what? They have every right to do so. Who we are is formed by what we’ve experienced. And if you’ve never experienced sanctuary you’ll never understand the freedom and security it offers. Just like in the Middle Ages, sanctuary doesn’t play by the same rules as the rest of the broken society.
As we talked long into the night Olivia said something that changed how I now think about growing up in the age of digital bullying. She said that she had, “discovered there’s more to me than even how I view myself. I needed that space so I could have strength.” Space, that’s what sanctuary offers. Space is what teenagers need as they grow into young women. Space to choose a name. Space to make mistakes and not have it sent to everyone’s phones. Space to remove “Flunkee”. Space to create a name for themselves.