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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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