Survival, part two

[mrissa]

(This started last night: I was thinking about what advice we can give kids who are stuck in a bad high school situation. Still am.)

When we as adults give advice to high school kids who are having a bad time at school, I think one of the ways it most easily goes wrong is that we make it sound like they ought to be able to do what we're suggesting, rather than making it clear that it might be useful to them if they could. The phrase I'm thinking of here is, "Don't let them bother you." Also, "Don't let them get to you," or, "What do you care what they think?" Of course it's useful if you can simply not care whether people around you are being hostile and nasty. But really, how many of us as adults can, by sheer force of will, make it totally not matter that we're spending forty hours a week with people who are willing to be as unpleasant as they can get away with? Not many. Not many of us as adults have to put up with that sort of thing. I have a friend who has recently left a bad job, a situation in which people were relentlessly hostile to her and to each other for her entire work day, five days a week. It was extremely hard on her, not because she wanted to be cool or wanted them to be her best friends evAR!!!11!!1!, but because she is a human being, and that kind of toxic environment is hard on anyone.

I think we should be careful to make it clear to teenagers who are having a bad time at school that we're not saying, "You should be able to do this; everyone can do this," but rather, "Look, we're focusing on you because you can't control the other person. We know this is hard for most people, but it's the best we can think of right now."

And you can't control the other people in your class. You really, really can't. And so fixating on "making them see" or "showing them" or "making them feel [whatever]," is not useful. The win condition is not that your high school classmates flock around you telling you how much they respected the theorem you just proved or the book you just wrote or the marketing decision you just made or the way you just handled your kid's tantrum. The win condition is that you can only remember the names of the ones who were kind and/or interesting to you. The win condition is that when you get news of something terrible happening to someone who smeared Ben Gay all over your friend's locker or pushed another friend down the stairs or any of the other lovely things that happened in high school, you are not glad. Because you're not just a bigger and better person than that, you're so much bigger and better and have moved on with your life so far that you had to stop and think why that name sounded familiar. That's what winning looks like.

So how do you move towards that win condition while you're still in high school? I don't know entirely; anyone with suggestions should feel totally welcome in the comments section. But I will note that the people I know who got through high school the happiest, healthiest people -- even if it was a good high school -- were mostly the ones who had other things outside school with which they strongly identified themselves. For a lot of them it was something computer-related, but that's probably a major skew because of the type of people I know. For me there was writing, and there was my piano, and both of those things were ways in which I could challenge myself and do interesting things that had nothing to do with school. I also had a bunch of pen-pals, which would probably translate to something internettish these days, but the point is, there were people who knew me and liked me and didn't care what so-and-so said to me in gym because they would only find out what so-and-so said if I could make it an entertaining story to tell them, or if I needed to vent. We stick kids in this environment and make it their major point of identity, which is disorienting enough at the end if the kids involved are in a good high school. When it's a bad one, we're strongly encouraging them to define themselves through something that makes them miserable. This is not healthy. It's not okay. And even something as simple as, "I'm someone who likes to go fishing with my cousins in the summer," or, "I'm someone who grows cucumbers," is a better way to identify oneself than, "I'm the verbal punching bag for Mrs. X's third period."

By the time you're in high school, having parents "put you in" a karate class or an archery class or a pastry-cookery class is not a good thing; if it's not what you've chosen, it's more of being shuffled around at other people's whim, which is not something you're exactly short on in high school. But sitting down and thinking to yourself, "What would be interesting to me apart from graduation requirements and college applications and dodging the jerks at school? What do I want to be able to do?" might be a good start. Everyone has to build a life that's irrelevant of the structures of high school eventually. Everyone has to find an identity that doesn't involve where your locker is or who you sit with in the cafeteria. No reason not to start as soon as you can.

Comments

[arielstarshadow.livejournal.com]

My advice to those in high school who are having a bad time generally goes something like this:

1. Yes, it is hard, and it sucks
2. There's often very little you can do about it except, and this is important, endure. Endure until it's done, and you can move on to a place where you aren't forced to always be in close proximity with people you don't like, who don't like you.
3. For most people, college is better, because most do tend to find people who are like-minded and from whom you can gain support and intimacy.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I think that, for subpoints to these, I have two:

1. Proximity does not require intimacy. You don't have to be actual friends with any of these people if you don't want to. Even if you find it more pleasant and more convenient to be friendly, that doesn't mean you have to confide in them or etc.

2. Endurance is important, but if you can also manage to endure in a way that won't leave you set up with bad habits later, that's even better. I know too many people whose coping mechanisms for enduring high school caused them real trouble later in life.

[laurel]

2. But you can do things other than endure, like what mrissa said in her post. Engage in outside activities, etc. And try to make the best of a bad situation at the school.

3. For quite a few people college is the same or worse than high school, I think it's incorrect to say "for most people college is better". At least that's not been my experience.

Clearly mileage varies on all this stuff.

[cakmpls.livejournal.com]

And you can't control the other people in your class. You really, really can't.

It seems that one of the hardest lessons for anyone to learn--indeed, many never learn it--is that you cannot control what other people do. You may in certain positions at certain times give yourself the illusion that you can, but in the end, you can't.

[talimena.livejournal.com]

That bit of advice is golden.

This wasn't the hardest lesson for me, but learning it is way more useful than I would have thought.

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

Yes, I think you're spot on, here. It's especially helpful, I think, if the outside things can be social and socially reinforcing activities. In a lot of cases, it might be particularly helpful if the outside things you do include people who older than your high school peers, and don't live that same social pressure-cooker that high school is. Even a year or two of college can have a profound mellowing effect.

It may take some exploring to find the right group. For a while I was attending a class mostly populated by Eagle Scouts, learning PL1 programming. I gave that up after a disastrous date with one of the scouts. I found a D&D club that I went to sometimes, but never fully clicked. I eventually got a summer job that wasn't working for my Dad. If I were doing it again, now, I would probably have looked for an opportunity to volunteer at the SPCA or other animal charity.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Summer or after-school jobs vary so much. I think it ends up "easy" for a lot of kids to get jobs where everyone else in their high school is employed, because there aren't that many grocery stores or telemarketing firms or etc. in a given area. But this doesn't let them break free of the school stuff -- it just extends it to work. On the other hand, I knew kids who were primarily friends with the other barristas at the coffeehouse where they worked (who went to various high schools and colleges), and that worked beautifully for them.

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

One of the ways in which car-commuter suburbs make life extra hellish on teens, I think, is making it that much harder to find jobs, volunteer situations, or social clubs that are outside the catch-basin of their own school without a car to get farther away with. Then being carless among kids who have their own is not just a marker of being an outsider, but also one more way of feeling stuck or trapped.

[profrobert.livejournal.com]

I don't know that this is particularly useful, but my approach was to use humor as a weapon. I figured if people lived in terror of annoying me, no one was going to mess with me. In practice, this worked a little be too well; the editor of the newspaper a year ahead of me (a brilliant, poised, competent and very attractive young woman who was going on to Harvard) wrote in my yearbook when she was graduating, "Thank you for not satirizing me." But it worked. I'm not sure how to convey that to current high schoolers, nor whether one should if one could.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I think it's extremely useful to those for whom it's useful. It's like, "play the locally favored sport well": doesn't work for everyone, works fairly well for those who can do it. A lot of people can't be funny on cue, or -- and this was my problem -- have trouble tailoring their humor to their audience. I had to adjust at college, because I was used to saying things that I thought were funny and having them go completely past people, and suddenly they weren't going past any more.

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

I had a similar experience (my jokes becoming funny) moving from a Business School environment to a Lit Dept. Kate Yule says that this is the problem of the corollary to rule that "the more you know, the more jokes you get." The corollary is, the more you know, the fewer people get your jokes.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

I was lucky enough to be in a good high school where me and my like-minded friends constituted a large enough bloc not to be vulnerable. (The band was fully 10% of the entire population, and generally sat together in three or four large tables during each lunch period.)

But I think it also helped that I was a writer, not in that "I hide in my imagination" way (though that, too, mostly to stave off boredom), but because ultimately, I knew there was a world beyond high school. I could keep things in perspective, and know without needing to remind myself that this was just a couple years of my life, that would seem pretty insignificant once I left them behind.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

We had a group of people. It wasn't large enough not to be vulnerable in some of the relevant settings, but it was large enough that it wasn't just "that one girl and her friend off by themselves." We had our own parties and went out on weekends and stuff, so none of us had to think, oh, wailie woe, nobody loves me. That definitely helps, too, but I think it helps in a different way than having friends outside school. Sometimes more. But different.

[crimini.livejournal.com]

I don't know if this is possible, but for those teens who are seriously miserable at school, why not the option of home schooling? There are lots of internet based programs that offer college-prep courses (for those with an eye towards college) and ways to get the GED equivalent. That might not solve the issues at hand, but the troubled student might, at the very least, be able to concentrate on school work and other things than worrying about peer humiliation.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Sure, depends strongly on the person and on the family situation, but it's definitely not something I would rule out. I wish more people in this country right now were willing to see options as a good thing rather than feeling that they had to defend public, private, or home schooling in all circumstances. This would be much easier if people wouldn't keep attacking each option in all circumstances, of course!

[dichroic.livejournal.com]

Gah. yes. Especially homeschooling, which I think by its nature is likely to vary more than public or private school.

I've seen homeschooling that was so good I wanted to ask the parents to adopt me (I was the age of the parents, not the children) and other homeschooling that was basically a socially acceptable way for the kid to drop out of school

[kijjohnson.livejournal.com]

The most useful thing my mom ever said to me, when I was about 14, was, "You're wasted on high school. People will really appreciate you when you get to college." Having that to look forward to made high school a lot more bearable. And she was right. But mileage varies, of course.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Yes, that's a very easy one to whisper in a kid's ear: "It gets better after this."

[buymeaclue.livejournal.com]

My main trick for getting through high school intact (and I went to a basically low-evil high school) is, unsurprisingly enough, my main trick for getting horse-world drama intact:

Do not engage.

That is, just let the crazy go on around you while you keep doing what you're supposed to do.

There are, of course, downsides to this. I was halfway through college before I started really figuring out how to develop good, healthy, depth-including relationships with people who were there with me (as opposed to online, which isn't to say you can't have good, healthy, depth-including relationships with online folks, but I find the skill sets, though similar, don't overlap perfectly). But it was/is useful to me, and because it's about behavior, it was easier to follow through on than not caring would have been.

[buymeaclue.livejournal.com]

Er. Do not engage with the bad stuff, that is. Absolutely, engage with other things.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Did you ever have people attempt to forcibly engage you in drama either at high school or in the horse world? And do you have tips for that?

[buymeaclue.livejournal.com]

In high school, not so much; I was pretty firmly disengaged in general. But in college and in horses, absolutely. My general response was/is to listen, but refuse to participate. Sometimes, if it seemed like we were repeating ourselves, I'd start asking stubbornly rational questions/give stubbornly rational advice. After a while of that, usually they'd either give up or let me change the subject. Most of the people that I dealt/deal with really just wanted to vent. Letting them do that without fanning the flames usually worked a treat.

I guess I should maybe note that I was reasonably well-liked by these folks. That is, I wasn't _close_ to many of them, but they thought I was okay and basically considered me part of the group. So attempts to forcibly to engage me in drama did look different than attempts to engage someone who was generally seen as the enemy or a punching bag would have.

In instances of the latter, my reaction was usually stunned silence, because I don't think well on my feet. Which had, I guess, the same do-not-engage effect, but wouldn't've been my first choice response.

[carbonel]

At my 30th year high school reunion, two different guys came up to me and apologized for the mean things they'd done to me in high school. I told them both it was okay. What I didn't tell them was that I didn't remember either of them.

I'm not sure being forgotten is an appropriate revenge, but I'm rather glad that the time (much of it pretty awful) has faded into an anonymous blur with a few bright spots.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Well, thanks; I don't feel amazing in that regard. Just ordinary.

[callunav.livejournal.com]

One of the things that delighted me endlessly - one of the things I learned to keep my delight to myself about because no one I was working with could see what I was on about - when I was working with behaviorally disordered kids, especially adolescents, was that ignoring was an important skill which kids seriously discussed with adults about how best to work on.

This was mostly in residential, where kids would be in basically the same social groups for almost everything, morning to evening, for months if not years, so in some ways it was even more of a hothouse than high school usually is. And, of course, they were all there because they for one reason or another couldn't live well with foster parents or their original families, and all their capital-I-Issues definitely upped the temperature.

One of the biggest problem behaviors recognized in that context is instigating or setting ___ up. It's widely and explicitly acknowledged that some kids are likely to spend a lot of their time deliberately trying to provoke other kids. This is partly because they have behavioral disorders, and partly because they are adolescents and partly because they are humans. And generally, the kids I was working with were more thin skinned than average teens, if there are such things, which is to say, very thin skinned indeed.

So one of the goals kids would set for themselves or be encouraged by staff to set for themselves was Work on ignoring.

I loved this. Work on ignoring.

"What are your goals for today, Calluna?" "Not spend more than an hour online, do my job, and work on ignoring."

---

Your comments are making me very thinky, but I will wait until I have a better brain and am not in the office to try and articulate the thinkiness, and probably do it in my own journal. Thank you for making me think, though.

[laurel]

My high school experience varied from year to year. But it was a small Lutheran high school with 65 students in my class so we all pretty much knew each other at least by name.

I had outside stuff going on: I spent a ton of time on computer bulletin boards chatting with people from elsewhere in the Twin Cities and I eventually started going to SF cons, etc. I was into TV, music, movies,b ooks, (watching) sports, all things pop culture. So I always had stuff I could talk about with classmates, but mostly I was quiet and read a lot, but I had a few people I'd joke with during class or sit with during lunch sometimes.

It was funny at my 10 year reunion how I learned from a couple of friends that they just thought "I had other stuff going on" and was somewhat "above high school" or something. I found out in the years after high school that some guys were interested in me, that others thought I was just . . . apart. Not stuck up, but busy with something else. I was perceived as smart and my own person and that's cool, really (though while in school I had the lowest self-esteem imaginable a lot of the time). Being more social might've been nice, but I didn't drive and lived 20 miles from where I went to school. (It was weird, all my BBS friends thought I lived way in the sticks, all my school friends thought I lived in the big city. Actually it was just Mound, but it meant most people weren't willing to pick me up to go places, etc. kalikanzara is one of the few who would pick me up in Mound).

I never noticed the stuff about who was dating whom. Didn't care, didn't pay attention. I didn't notice much in the way of bad stuff either, but that doesn't mean some kids weren't picked on-- I just didn't notice.

Our class was one of overachievers so almost everyone was in AP classes and also involved with sports and/or band and/or choir and/or drama club. It was nutty. I didn't do the extracurricular stuff much (yearbook, school paper when we had one), but was in the AP classes. I learned later that some of the folks in my class who didn't get good grades and didn't go out for sports or other extracurriculars got really really sick of hearing from teachers and other adults how freaking awesome our class was. Wow, I can understand that!

But really. Mild-mannered Lutheran school in a small rural town in Minnesota. Was all pretty tame. A blast for some, okay for others (like me).

[diatryma.livejournal.com]

Oh. Yeah, that. A great portion of the reason high school worked so well for me is that I fell into theatre. I assumed the default was theatre-- everyone important tries out. So I did, and I got into the musical, and then I was on speech team, and then I had... people. I am not certain, now, that we actually ruled as much as we did, but it was enough. There were people who didn't like me or thought less of me, but they weren't... okay, so having found a group, I also found the outgroup. I didn't care about Student Council, the people whose lockers were next to mine (I don't think I ever opened my locker my senior year), sports... and it didn't matter if they cared about me because I didn't see it. I saw my theatre, speech, choir, performing people. I assumed the rest of the high school was just audience.

Doing things outside of that context would have helped for the social issues I still had, though. Definitely would have helped.

[mkille.livejournal.com]

I will note that the people I know who got through high school the happiest, healthiest people -- even if it was a good high school -- were mostly the ones who had other things outside school with which they strongly identified themselves.

Related to that, I think it's helpful when the outside-school things are multi-generational. It's one thing to see that there are better places one can end up, and it's another thing when people already in those better places show that they can like you and value you and include you.

For example, "having a job" may or may not be mitigating, but "really being someone's colleague" very often is. "Being in the church youth group" may or may not be mitigating, but "really being a member of a congregation" very often is. Etc.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Rigid segregation by age is one of the most damaging notions our culture clings to.

[aedifica]

Yeah, that would have been good. I remember telling my mom once that I didn't have any interest in growing up, not because being not-grown-up was all that great, but because I couldn't see anything adults did that was fun. She gave me what was probably the best response she could have given if she had sat down and thought about it for a week: that just as there were things that interested me that I wouldn't have liked or understood when I was five, there would probably be things I liked when I was an adult that wouldn't appeal to me yet now (the "now" that was when the conversation was taking place). And I allowed as how that might be true, and I was willing to give it a chance (wow, I've been reading Suzette Haden Elgin's Ozark trilogy and it's rubbing off on my word choices! which is kind of fun, but that is really not a phrase that's normally in my idiolect--end language digression) and you know what? She was right!

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

My parents have always had friends and a social life. It seems like such a simple thing to say, but there it is: I don't remember a time when Mother and Dad didn't go out with friends or have them in for parties or just to hang out in small groups. And while I couldn't swear that I've always adored all of their friends any more than they've always adored all of mine, for the most part I think my folks' friends are good eggs, and I generally enjoyed being around them. There was none of the excruciating, "And what subject do you like best at schooooool?" interrogation from the people who were actually my folks' friends. So I could see pretty much from the time I was old enough to think of it that adults had fun.

I also could see -- and this was extremely important -- that Mother and Dad were not hanging out with Kathy and Bill or Jody or Vicki and Al or whoever else because they thought that those people were externally known as The Cool Crowd and would enhance their prestige. They were (are!) friends with them because they like them. Because they think they are cool people, rather than The Cool Crowd. I think that was extremely healthy for me to be able to see as a kid.

[zalena.livejournal.com]

Some excellent thoughts. Thank you so much. Clearly you've put a lot of thought into this. You'd be a great guidance counselor.

I think I would add (and this is included implicitly in your suggestion to focus on them rather than changing other people) is that it isn't just enough to say, "Life will get better later," but to give them specific coping strategies to help them through what can be a very difficult day.

I think our culture generally disapproves of bullying; but there is a kind of institutional bullying that goes on all the time. And your acknowledgement that many of these kids are also being bullied by parents is very important.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

My own experience with guidance counselors meant that it took me a minute to recognize that as a compliment! They were at best useless to me.

A friend who doesn't have an lj wrote to me on this topic, and one of the things I'm putting in my e-mail back to her is that I was thinking of her as one of the people who successfully didn't get very personally invested in high school, but that I wasn't sure how to make what worked for her general: she has a very close-knit family with many interests in common, and I've always thought that she identified strongly to primarily with them. Which is great, but it's not something you can make happen if it isn't already happening by that point.

[marydell.livejournal.com]

My advice for anyone who's struggling (kid or adult) is to write a (private) journal. It gives you an outlet for your feelings, and it makes you feel like you have a friend even when you don't. It helped me through a lot of very hard years. So did playing D&D with a group of fellow misfits. So did having mostly boys as friends--boys don't mind a girl being weird; all girls are weird to them. What you say is very true--high schoolers are too old to have their parents choose activities for them, but activities of some sort are vital. High School is a job (sometimes an awful one), and you can't let your job be your whole life.

[ashnistrike.livejournal.com]

This is helpful, thank you. The bit about not being able to change people is something that I and many of the people I know still struggle with in adulthood - I think it's something that our culture does a pretty bad job of conveying and supporting.

-Nameseeker

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

In fact, I think some parts of our culture actively teach the opposite: the idea that your One True Love will Change For You if they Really Truly Love You certainly plays into that.

[ashnistrike.livejournal.com]

Urgh ... you're right, that is part of the same pattern. I'd never connected them in my head before. Thanks!

-Nameseeker