When I was in my thirties and I still played soccer — which, as a statement unto itself, feels about as conclusive a piece of evidence that we all live many lives, sometimes very far removed from one another, as you’re ever going to find — my team tried playing indoor soccer for a season, either because of the weather or because all the outdoor slots were full. I can’t remember.
And I can’t remember the exact geography of what happened next, except that to say that indoor (with walls as deflective surfaces) felt a lot more intense than outdoor (where a ball that went out of bounds was just… out) and the play, consequently, felt faster and scarier. Our goalie — a heroic chap whose years of street and ice hockey goaltending served him well in the transition to keeping for our team — was taking a lot of shots, a lot faster and more frequently than any of us were used to, and at some point, something went wrong.
I don’t remember if he got hurt or just got freaked out or what; I do remember that I freaked out, at a member of the opposing team’s offence. I went at him for playing roughly, all big and mean and protective, and we were both pretty ugly with one another. At some point at the end of the fracas, that player wanted to apologize to me and I didn’t want to hear it from him; but he grabbed my wrist to have his say, and wouldn’t let it go.
Now — particularly when I was a young man — my rage ran pretty hot. Also — then as now — I’m a five-pound weakling in a hulking monster body, and so I could not, despite extensive efforts to do so, break his grapple. Those fingers hung on to me tight.
So here I was, caught in a simultaneous moment of my anger revving into overdrive and, as I would understand it later, my fight or flight (set firmly on “flight”) instinct being pushed to its absolute limit, and being denied.
He eventually let me go and I eventually got outside and cooled off and had a panic attack, no big deal. I didn’t know it was a panic attack at the time, of course; I couldn’t describe to my girlfriend later why I’d been so upset, other than repeating “why wouldn’t he just let go of me?” over and over again in a whimpering voice.
I was bullied pretty badly when I was a child, both for being a weakling and for being a girl, and moreover (I think) for being that unlucky “something” that just marks a kid out as being the “hey, pick on that one!” selection for the muscular and deranged on any given schoolyard. It continued well into high school, well into my hulking monster body era, although admittedly, once that meat sack was fully formed, the efforts to stuff me into lockers did precipitously decrease.
I don’t raise all this to position myself as an innocent victim, by the bye; I did plenty of awful shit at that age (and since), and certainly bullied others whenever I was, improbably, higher on the evolutionary totem pole than they were, and never even thought about it, but that’s a story for another time. Suffice to say: children are fucked up. People are fucked up. I was caught in a cycle of violence that stretches all the way back to the beginning of time, because we’re all just animals developing from our lizard brains outward, smearing everything that happens with a premise of higher intellect that only sometimes applies. Fine.
It would be years before I connected the soccer story to the bullying, before I realized that the trigger was simply that feeling: fingers on me that were stronger than I could ever hope to break, holding my wrist or forearm, denying my fight or flight instinct (set, as always, on “flight”). I felt that feeling a lot; I can feel it right now, typing this. The utter helplessness of being the weaker.
When I left grade school — where 60% of the bullying happened — and moved on to middle school, where an additional 35% of the bullying happened — there was a hazing vogue among the grade 8s, wherein they took the incoming grade 7s and dragged them down the side of the gargantuan valley inside which our school sat; dragged them by the ankles from the top to the bottom so that the butts of their pants would be stained bright green and ripped all to shit, and lol, hilarious. I don’t recall how I even knew this hazing was coming before I got to the school on my first day, besides the weird whisper-mill that grows instantly among the prey; I just knew that I didn’t want it to happen to me.
Unrelatedly, there was also a kid, or a pack of kids, who were grade 8s and who really liked to throw apples at the heads of the grade 7s. And I mean: this guy could have been a professional pitcher, for how powerful and accurate his fastball (with an apple) was. Those apples exploded on contact with skull, a Zapruder film before I knew what the Zapruder film was; and, like the green-bumming, I definitely didn’t want that to happen to me, either — an instinct that was validated on my first day, when I (miraculously) ducked such an incoming projectile, felt its air as it passed, and ran my skinny ass off to get away.
And I don’t particularly recall how I put the pieces together on this, but, I did get an apple every day in my lunch. And on the second day of school, I did barter my way out of some bullying or other by promising to give that kid my apple every morning so that he could fire it at other grade 7s. And in return, he promised that no grade 8s would “fuck with me.”
And it literally happened: after a week or so of this arrangement, some random gang of grade 8s did grab me, and wrangle me to the top of the hill, and had me by the arms and the ankles and were preparing to drag me down the hill, and — as ever — I could do nothing to break the grapple, vice-like on my extremities… and that kid, the apple kid, appeared out of fucking nowhere like Batman and told the other grade 8s that I was “his friend” and that I wasn’t to be touched.
He wasn’t my friend. I don’t even know what his fucking name was, if I ever did. I felt clever and ashamed in equal measure for sitting out the hazing war, choosing to be a weapons supplier instead of an active combatant. I got the free pass I paid for, which didn’t apply later that year or at any point in the year following, when a guy in my class took the inevitable dislike to me and started beating the shit out of me on the regular. 7-on-7 violence wasn’t Batman’s beat.
You might have started reading this with a vague structural sense that I was building to some kind of a point, but I’m afraid not. I might have already made it: the thing about the lizard brain. But I will say, I’ve been returning to my experiences of violence a lot since my coming out, not because I think the two are directly connected (although there is a connection), but more because I’ve become aware, recently, that for all the work I’ve ever done on myself — dozens of years of it — I have also done a startlingly effective job at not seeing some of the key traumatic tentpoles that turned me into the person that I am. I’m sure my old shrink, recently retired, would have something to say about what I deem worthy of my own narrative and not: a self-image thing, a narcissism thing, and at the bottom of it all, a need to continuously, reflexively protect something that got punched into the wet cement of my emotional development and yet is still, somehow, kind of wet all these years later. Raw and unhealed. There was a cut on my knee when I was twelve — not bullying-related — that was so wide and so deep it wouldn’t close. I wrote about that wound a bit last year, in my book, that gash on my body that just sort of stayed a gash. I wrote about this bullying stuff too, opening all this up again. These cuts where the inside is still exposed, no matter how many layers I wrap them in, and are still moving my lizard brain, even today.
This week’s links, none of which are bullying-related, thank goodness
- Did you know you can make a pumpkin spice whose recipe dates to the 14th century? And here I thought Steve Jobs invented that shit, like, a year ago (James Prescott)
- Listen to Dan Rather and stay away from social media for the next little while ok? Apologies in advance for the El*n/Tr*mp jump scare above the fold, but it does produce a visceral interest in following Dan’s advice. (Steady)
- Kieran Culkin still rules (Vulture)
- I suspect my YouTube channel is ~2 weeks away from no longer being a weekly thing. That said, I like this week’s video quite a bit. (Giant Green Space Hand)