Survival part one

[mrissa]

So why was I asking about compliments again earlier today?

Well. Someone called Nameseeker was asking, in the comments to my post about Minicon and the "Geek, Be Not Ashamed" panel, what I'd recommend to someone going through a bad high school experience. What would help with that situation? It's a good question. It's one I've been thinking about. And a week from tomorrow I'll be part of Career Day at a local high school, and so while I'm hoping that it's a good one, not the really toxic atmosphere some of them are, it's got me thinking about that. And sure, like the man says, escape is a prisoner's first duty -- but nobody screws up high school so badly that they're still a sophomore at 47. So there's escape, but there's also the consideration of how to do it so that you'll be functional later. How to get free of it without chewing your leg off, so to speak. Not always easy.

Compliments were a major weapon at my high school. The barbed compliment, the sarcastic compliment, the compliment that turns on someone else present, the compliment that's supposed to erase months or years of ill-treatment...and then the complimenter can turn to others and say, "I was just trying to be nice." There was one girl at my high school -- which was, in case you hadn't heard by now, a pretty nasty one, although there were several salvageable experiences from it -- who was clearly trying to be nice by her own standards. She wanted to be known as a nice person. She also wanted to be "popular," in the high school sense of being in an in-crowd. And it did not occur to this kid that people would set the value of her attempted niceness much higher if she didn't spend her time with some of the meanest people in the school. If the sort of people who would kick handicapped kids in their leg braces and make fun of the kids who could barely speak a sentence didn't get a free pass from her on their behavior.

So I guess my first piece of advice for people trying to endure a toxic high school is to recognize that other people are having to live with the toxicity as well, and to be as kind as you can manage. Other people may not notice it. But it'll be something you know about yourself. You don't have to be indefinitely kind to people who are mean to you, but it might be useful to give people more than one chance; if they're used to hearing, "Is that a good book?" with derisive snickers behind it, they may not be prepared to take it as a serious and congenial discussion question the first time around.

(This is not the same thing as being as nice as you can manage. Nice is a club you can give other people to beat you with. Nice conforms to local standards, particularly for girls. "Nice" may prevent you from taking a good swing at the guy who kicked the girl in her leg braces. "Kind," on the other hand, may well tell you to go for it; sticking up for others can be very kind and well-remembered years later.)

This was meant to be a longer post, but with work on fiction and the ever-popular vertigo troubles, it's taken me this long just to get a start on it. So I'll try to do more later on the same theme, because I think it's unfortunately important.

Comments

[ellameena.livejournal.com]

I didn't respond to your poll because all compliments make me squirm. They are not all bad, and sometimes even kind of nice in spite of the squirming. But there's no question that complimenting someone is also an imposition, a social gesture fraught with meaning, laden with obligation, and often an attention-getting tactic on the part of the person giving the compliment. I never had trouble with compliments in high school, but by virtue of having someone in my life who is habitually giving compliments when what she really wants to say is "Love me please, please, please," I'm not crazy about them. A good complimenter uses them sparingly, and they are best used when the recipient is already in a positive mood.

[lollardfish.livejournal.com]

Girls play good hockey.

Are you coming to Applecon?

[callunav.livejournal.com]

God, what an evil set of experiences you describe. (And what a good icon you have for this project.)

I'm going to spend a few minutes today being grateful for my high school. I'm sure there were mean people in it, but by the time I was 16 or 17, none of them were being mean where I had to notice, and it wasn't any kind of topic of conversation - no one sat around whispering, "Did you hear what ... said yesterday, to poor ...?"

It was a geek school. I think that makes all the difference. Once upon a time, it was a lab school*, and then I think it had a brief hope of being a School For The Gifted, but the only "Gifted" who ever came were the geeks, because it became self-perpetuating: the very smart kids who knew how to dress and who to have crushes on and were cut out to do well in high school anyhow could have gone to our school, but they were horrified at the idea. "I don't want to go there. It's full of freaks!"

Admittedly, in first few years, people were pretty mean, but in an unskilled, disorganized kind of way.

I'll tell you one thing that I, personally, helped a lot. It's not something the kids you'll be talking to have any power over, alas. The main thing was that we were 90% geeks. But I happen to believe that there was a lot of side help from the fact that we didn't have a cafeteria. The school didn't serve food, and we ate the food we brought sitting on the floors in the halls or perched in the stairwells, or outside. Every YA novel I have ever read depicting American high schools seems to point to The Cafeteria and Who Sits At Your Table At Lunch as being absolutely key in the unmanageable horror of high school.

Anyhow. We didn't sit around snarking at people, nor did we sit around fearing people. We barely sat around having crushes on peope. Mostly, we were too busy discussing whether to have a student strike because a particular teacher was boring and - we were very incensed about this - too lax in the classroom, or because they took away the ancient wooden desks we could and did write on and replaced them with modern blue things that were sort of plasticy and wouldn't take pencil marks. We were so upset. We were sure our civil rights were being abridged. We knew we weren't allowed to write on the desks, but we all felt that we should have the choice whether or not to obey that rule. And besides, the Paisley Desk had been the work of generations of students.

Geek school, represent. I would *not* have survived the kind of school you're describing.


* As the school's publicity will tell you ad nauseam, it's where New Math was invented and first taught. Now, New Math is now Old enough that most people my generation don't know what it means, so it would be fun if there were a more recent accomplishment, but still.

[netmouse.livejournal.com]

All good stories and points... would you be willing to write this (or let me re-write this) as a post for Talk Hard!?

[zalena.livejournal.com]

I'm reading these in backward order; but I thought I'd mention that one of the best things about attending my high school reunion was the realization that most the people had grown up to be fairly decent human beings... and that a lot of the people I thought were my persecutors had experienced some pretty intense things at that age, too.

This is not particularly helpful advice for someone in the trenches; but it definitely helped with my long term attitude about the experience of high school and the people involved.

(BTW - I was disinclined to go to my reunion; but my best friend since the 2nd grade convinced me to go, and having her there with me definitely put a positive cast on the experience.)