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

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I think it's extremely important for people not to dismiss the bad high school experiences as, "It's high school; they suck." Because not all high schools have to be really bad, and we are not, as adults, taxpayers, and members of society, off the hook for the ones that are.

I didn't go into the lunchroom much; I ate my lunch in the journalism room because it was the only time I could squeeze work on the newspaper into my schedule. I think that in some ways this was extremely good for my sanity.

[callunav.livejournal.com]

Since I'm back, replying to the question below, I'll add that I think you're quite right. Dismissing atrocities with, "Yeah, that's high school for you, whatchagonnado?" is a complete abdication of a very real responsibility we have to make that not "high schools for you."

The past 5-10 years have seen a small revolution in how a lot of people think and talk about bullying, although that has focussed on grade schools from what I've seen. Still, maybe it's cause for hope.

The thing is - and this is part of what I had hoped to think and write more about in my own journal and may yet manage - there's this weird alchemical reaction that goes on when adults interact with adolescents, in which a large part of the adult becomes again the adolescent they once were, while a small part stands in the middle of the ensuing chaos, yelling, "WE'RE THIRTY-TWO. THAT WAS NEARLY HALF OUR LIFE TIME AGO. WHERE ARE YOU GOING???" and being ignored, of course. Someone told me, the first time I'd had a job dealing with teens, what she had been told the first time she had had such a job, which was that the first thing that happens when you start interacting with a lot of teens is that whatever issues you had when you were their age come flooding back. For her it was constant fear she wasn't "cool" enough, that she would be mocked or rejected by the "cool" kids she was trying to hang around with. For me, it was quite different. But it happened, nonetheless.

So I think that's a piece of what happens when adults try to think about high schools - that they become 90% teens trying to think about high school. And so the "That's the way high school is" line becomes very self-fulfilling - that's how they internalized the idea that they couldn't change their peers, they just had to get through the bad spots as well as possible, and so then, when they're adults, that's what they revert to.

So the difficulty is not in giving teens a new line so that when they're adults they'll revert to it (unless it's, "I'm doing what I can for you about that now, and when you're an adult you'll have a chance to do it yourself,") but in trying to intercept the reversion process. I'm not sure how one does that. Everyone who works with teens much and has any success generally manages it somehow, but the 'how' is very individual, and handled in private.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Hmm, interesting. I wonder if going to college at a younger teen age than many people has given me a different spot to revert to, or whether I'm not doing this, or whether I'm just doing it in ways I haven't spotted yet.

[callunav.livejournal.com]

I was thinking about people who espoused that attitude with a teen in front of them, rather than in theory, but of course, it happens in theory, too. I'm not sure. But if I'm remembering right, you have a pretty awesome mother. Possibly one of the differences is in having had an adult on your side - but that makes a lot of assumptions. I don't know. I think differently about it, too, but I ascribe a lot of the differences first to the fact that I went to an unusual high school and second that I subsequently worked clinically with teens, which gave me a really different attitude to problematic behavior (e.g., "I can't necessarily change what you think and feel, though I may be able to help you change them, but there is something I can do about your behavior, it's my job to do it, I'm going to do it, and it's going to work. If I can get you on board with this so that it's not a fight, all the better.") Most people don't have that.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Actually it was both parents, not just mom.

And actually I meant when I'm dealing with them in person, not when I'm writing this sort of thing.