I Understand

This is a long page. I've designed other websites, and I know this isn't formatted correctly, but I don't really care on this page. It has a purpose and the formatting of it really doesn't matter. If you don't feel like being here for awhile, then hit the back button on your browser.

And yes, you read that correctly - I did type "For Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold" above - why? Well, I explain that further on, so read on if you wanna know why. This is My Story. It might get boring at times, but there is a point to this page. Please note as you're reading that I in no way agree with what they did, nor am I seeking to justify their actions, so above all else, please read this with an open mind and try to see where I'm coming from. When you're finished reading, sign my Guestbook and let me know what you think.

I'd also like to note here that I am in no way making excuses for these two boys, nor am I implying that any of the victims "asked for" what was done to them. So please, if you wish to comment on the content of this page, please read the whole thing before passing judgment on me or my words. My only intent with this page is to attempt to shed light on some things that I feel are sorely lacking in today's society - compassion, understanding, respect, and the value of human life - every human life.

My Typical High School Day
circa 1981-84

Alarm goes off and I get ready for school. I don't look in the mirror much - why? Because I have this bad case of acne that nothing seems to work on (my skin has allergic reactions to just about every anti-acne product on the market). Not to mention the shadow of dark hair on my upper lip - instant ostracism for a teenage girl.

When I get to the schoolbus stop, I stand off to the side by myself...why? Because the other kids at the bus stop just hammer me with insults incessantly - PizzaFace, Loser, "It," Ugly, Witch, Satanist...these are my "names."

The bus comes and I get on - that's unless the bus driver laughs, slams the door in my face, and drives off, which happened pretty often. (My mother never believed me until I went home with a bloody nose and the daughter of her friend up the street told her mother I'd had the door literally slammed in my face. The guy was fired.)

Once on the bus, a paper shopping bag is put over my head most days. The bus driver (even after the above jerk was fired) never does anything. I take the bag off, it goes back on. Eventually, after 5 or 6 times, they get sick of putting it back on and just laugh and call me names all the way to school. Do I cry? Nope, I just "take" it.

We get to school and I get to my locker to find a note there - addressed to PizzaFace - asking why I don't use Clearasil or some other insulting comments. (You tell me whether the purpose was to intentionally hurt or whether it was an "innocent" thing? You tell me if the writer knew what his/her words would do?)

As I walk through the school halls, I'm given the sign of the cross, as if I'm a vampire or something. People stand in little groups, pointing and laughing at me. Why? Well, first because of my acne and my "mustache," second because my family's not rich and I don't wear the Sasson jeans or whatever that are popular then, third because I listen to heavy metal music (NOT acceptable back then), and fourth because I guess I'm just a loser. I don't look like a model, and I don't play sports - it's a sports-oriented school and if you're not a cheerleader or a jock (which both make up about 99% of the 200 or so students), you can forget about being accepted.

Do the teachers notice? Bet your ass. Do they do anything? Nope. In fact, a couple of them go right along with it. One even calls me PizzaFace from time-to-time in class. My day goes on. I dread gym class, when everyone groans that I have to be on their team (I'm the only one left when the "picking" is finished). I also dread classes where one has to choose a partner for some project because if there's an odd number of students, I'm left partnerless. When there's an even number, I have an unwilling partner whose friends spend most of the class time pointing and laughing at him/her.

I carry a razorblade in my pocket. The reason? I guess revenge - twisted as that sounds. Somewhere in the back of my head, I think that if I actually had the guts to use it on myself, then maybe the ones picking on me will have to deal with their conscience, maybe they'll think twice before the next person they pick on. But I never have the guts to do it - which makes me feel even more like a loser.

The bus ride home from school is more of the same - the bag on the head, the namecalling, etc. Sometimes, the bus stops at the regular stops and nobody gets off. I know what this means. This means they're all getting off at my stop. They do. And I, sitting near the front, get off and make a break for it, with a group of at least 15 kids chasing me. Usually they catch me and proceed to beat the crap out of me. I don't fight back - I'm not a violent person by nature - I just lay there and take it. One day, I run to a neighbor's house. He drives me home, explains what happened. After he leaves, my mom smacks me, embarrassed for herself that a neighbor drove her kid home.

Typically, after school when I get home, I go straight to my room. My mother, voted Most Popular in high school, doesn't understand why I have no friends. "Well, you must have done *something*" is her only comment. The time not spent alone in my room, losing myself in books and music, is spent alone in the woods, just me and the trees and maybe a good book.

The above is by no means all of what I was subjected to. In my senior year, I was asked to the prom. I thought, naively, 'Wow, maybe it is possible for people to mature.' A week later, I was told by the boy, while he laughed, that he had simply asked me "on a dare" and made 5 bucks just for asking me.

I tried wearing makeup in my junior year. Once. Soon as I got to school, the first comment I heard was "Ha! She thinks she can use makeup to cover up her ugliness!"

I was "unofficially" voted Least Likely to Ever Get Married and Least Likely to Ever Have Someone to Love.

They say that sticks and stones will break your bones, but words/names will never hurt you. That's outright bullshit. Names and words sometimes hurt worse than sticks and stones, and most times they leave scars. Scars that might fade with age but that never, ever go away.

I'm 32 years old now. My views have changed a bit. I no longer have acne, and the hair on my upper lip is something that's easily taken care of - there are things on the market for it. I'm far from ugly now. I still feel self-conscious, especially when meeting new people. My confidence and esteem have grown by leaps and bounds, but there are still times when I look in a mirror and see the "ugly" girl I was.

My mom never fully understood what I went through. She was too wrapped up in her own life back then, too busy to remember what it was like to be a teenager, too confident to comprehend that not everyone can be Miss Popularity, too naive to realize that things have changed a lot since the 50's and 60's when she was in school, that how you dress and how you look plays a major part in how you're treated now. She didn't realize it until my younger brother (younger by 11 years) went to the same high school and received some of the same treatment. The difference with him, though, was that by then there were a group of "losers" that he hung out with...they were all in the same boat. So my mom understands a bit more now.

I'm married now. My husband says I'm the most beautiful woman he's ever known. He accepts me for who I am, not what I look like and not what my past was like. At 32, I don't really look much older than 26 or so. All I can attribute that to is that since I didn't have any friends and, therefore, didn't do all the partying that was going on back then - drugs, booze, etc. - I aged a bit slower? Ya got me. I lived what should have been my teenage years in my 20's.

So why am I posting this page and tying it in with what happened out in Littleton, Colorado? Why does it say "For Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold" at the top? Because the more I read about what happened, the more I read about how those boys were harrassed. I see blame being placed on them first and foremost, where perhaps it should be. But I also see blame being placed on the music they listened to (Marilyn Manson as an example), their parents (for not knowing what they were doing), society, guns, movies, etc. These are all, in my opinion, copouts - scapegoats. Why? Because they remove the blame from where it should be. Yes, maybe the parents should have seen what their kids were up to. But my mom never saw...she didn't know I carried a razorblade in my pocket, never knew I tried several times to hang myself out in my beloved woods, never saw the things I wrote in my journal (which was hidden very well from hers and any other prying eyes that might have found it). Were there warning signs in my case of what I was going through? Well, considering that even the teachers sometimes joined in on the namecalling, yeah...there were. I tried to explain to my mom sometimes, but she never understood - always thought it must have been something I had done to make people treat me that way.

My proposed solution - of killing myself and "making them all feel bad" was perhaps a juvenile one - I view suicide now as a permanent solution to a temporary problem - ha, a line I even used in a report I had once done on the subject in high school; I think I had found it in a book. But just how juvenile was it really? If I had gone through with it, how many people would have felt bad? You think probably not many, but I think maybe a few would have. In the back of their minds, they would have thought "Gee, I never knew just calling her a name could make someone feel that bad about themself that they'd kill themself - did my namecalling have anything to do with it?"

This brings me to the next part of my "story" - what happened after I left high school. In 1989, I received an invitation to my 5th Year Class Reunion. By this time, I'd been out in the "real world" and I had friends. I'd learned that high school and the real world are two totally separate worlds, that it is possible for people to accept you for who you are and not what you look like or how you dress or how much money you make. And I wrote the following letter to the Class Reunion Committee:

I will not be attending the class reunion. They say that one's high school years are supposed to be the most wonderful years of one's life, but for me they were the worst. A typical day for me consisted of being constantly harrassed and called just about every name in the book. I thought many times of "getting out while I was still young," but I never did. And I'm glad that I didn't because I have learned a lot since I graduated from high school. And of all the things I have learned, perhaps the most important is that no matter how beautiful or ugly someone is, no matter how rich or poor, no matter how smart or stupid - nobody is better than anyone else. And if that is the only thing I have learned, then I consider myself to be among the richest people in the world.

It has taken me these last five years to gain self-confidence, self-esteem, and self-respect. To risk losing even one bit of what I have gained to visit the very people who caused me to lose those things in the first place is not a risk I am willing to make, so I will not be attending.

The very act of dropping that letter into the mailbox changed my whole personality from that day forward. Rather than putting it into my home mailbox, I walked up the street and dropped it into one of the big blue post office mailboxes, knowing that once it was in there, there was no way I could change my mind ("chicken out") and take it back. Instantly I felt like a weight had lifted from my shoulders. I thought to myself, 'For once, maybe the weight will be on someone else's shoulders.' I didn't know how right I was.

The next few weeks were strange to say the least. I received a card from one member of the Reunion Committee. In the card, she said that she had recently lost her younger brother in a car accident and that all too often people learn too late that there is never enough time to tell someone how you feel, that there were so many things that had been left unsaid between her and her brother. And she said that she wanted to tell me, before it was too late, how very sorry she was for the pain she and her friends had caused me.

I received a phone call from the Reunion Committee President, former football captain. Through most of the call, we were both very quiet. He kept saying, "I don't know what to say. I don't know how to tell you I'm sorry because I know it's not enough." He eventually said that he knew beyond any doubt that he and his friends caused me a lot of pain, and he wished he could apologize on behalf of the entire class, but that he knew it wouldn't ever change any of what I had suffered.

I received a phone call from another member as well, insisting that while she knew she had "nothing to do with any of it" (in reality, she had), she was sure that since we had all matured, it should be easy to let "bygones be bygones." I agreed we'd all no doubt matured after five years, but I also got her to admit that by high school age, people also know the difference between right and wrong and how to respect others.

I have to admit that other than with the initial card, I sat through the two phone calls with a grin on my face, not a happy grin, but one which seemed to come from my feeling of the weight's being on someone else's shoulders for once, the satisfaction in knowing that at least two people who'd caused me some grief were having a guilty conscience. In the case of the girl with the card, I felt kind of bad in that instance because she never actually joined in the namecalling, just never stopped any of her friends from doing it. She was the one my letter went to because it was her name at the bottom of the invitation. Had I known about her brother, I would have sent it to a different member of the committee.

In the years since, my views on that second phone call have not changed. High school kids do know the difference between right and wrong. And they should know how to respect others and their feelings. My stepson is 10 and lives with my husband and me. We talk to him often about the subject of "respect." We tell him that if anyone ever makes fun of him for any reason, it's simply because they are trying to overlook something about themself that they don't like. We tell him that no matter what someone looks like - ugly, fat, pimply, skinny, black, red, yellow - that we're all the same, we're all equal. We teach him nobody is better than anyone else for any reason, that every person is equally as important as the next, including him.

I can look back on my high school years now and see it for what it was. A learning experience on my part. I never judge a person by how they look or dress, never. In fact, a few years ago, I worked in a factory. There was a guy named Fred there, who was considered a major "geek" by everyone. Not by me. Fred and I became good friends. A woman asked me once, "Why the hell do you talk to HIM?" I asked if she had ever talked to him. "Hell no," was her reply. "Why the fuck would I?? He's a friggin' nerd!" I said, "Well, ya know, if you actually sat down and talked to him, you might realize that he has a lot of very intelligent things to say." I became a "geek" that day. She never talked to me again after that, other than to laugh at me for being friends with Fred. I looked at her once when she did that and said, "Hey, call me a loser. But if you never take the time to talk to someone just because you don't like the way they look, then you're the loser, honey." She just stayed away from me after that, which was fine by me:)

I can almost laugh now, although halfheartedly, at the ridicule I was subjected to in high school. I tell people who know about it that I was a "public service," that by pointing out what was wrong with me, the other students were able to overlook their own insecurities and flaws.

So while I do see what happened in Littleton as a horrible thing and my heart goes out to the families of the victims, my thoughts also go to the two boys at the heart of it all. We can try to blame the music and the gun manufacturers, we can try to blame the way they dressed or the Goth subculture, we can blame the movies and the videogames, we can go on and on about how horrible it all is. But I think we need to look a little further, dig a little deeper.

I have read many articles which say that those boys were picked on incessantly, so it doesn't seem to me that the ridicule was any big secret. Are there people in Littleton whose consciences are bothering them? Probably. How many students are thinking, "I used to make fun of them all the time...how could that lead to this?" My answer is that it can't - it takes more than just one namecaller, it takes many - day in and day out, over and over. How many teachers are thinking, "I saw it happening - why didn't I stop it?" Maybe that's the most important question in all of this. Why didn't someone say, "Hey, he's just as important as you are."

What's the difference between Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold and me? They had each other - and apparently a whole group of kids that were in the same boat as them. In my class of about 200, I didn't. What would have been different if I'd had other "losers" to talk to? If we were constantly belittled and ostracized and harrassed, what would we have done? If I'd had access to firearms instead of a lousy razorblade, what would I have done? I don't know.

What I do know, though, is that my feelings of being "subhuman" or a loser were not the result of the music I listened to or the movies I watched - they were the result of constantly being "reminded" that I was a nobody, that I was a lower member of society, that I didn't deserve to be accepted among my classmates, that I had nothing to offer anyone. What I realize now is that those are all lies - every single one of them.

My husband and I are teaching my stepson that he is just as worthy a human being as anyone else, that he is just as important as the next person, that it doesn't matter how smart you are or what you look like or what color your skin is or how much or little money you have, we are all equally as important as anyone else.

The following are lyrics from what I consider "my" song. The band is Warrior Soul, and this song says a lot for me.

Warrior Soul
THE LOSERS

Have you ever wanted to be someone you´re not
But you look into the world, and you see what you´ve got
There´s nothin´ there but brains and guts
Finally open the door and then it shuts

Look to the center and I think you´ll find
The people that are gettin´ they (there?) are blind
You changed the channel and there´s nothin´ there
You weren´t born pretty and it isn´t fair...

Here´s to the losers
The substance abusers
To the rejects
All the imperfects

´Cause I think we´re beatiful
´Cause I think we´re beautiful
´Cause I think we´re beautiful
No matter what anyone says
I think we´re beautiful
The most beautiful in the world

You try for jobs, but they say you´re strange
You´re sportin´ a style that they call pain
So you get in trouble and your brain is gone
You´re cryin´ out man, but the words are wrong

Here´s to the losers
The substance abusers
To the rejects
All the imperfects

´Cause I think we´re beautiful
´Cause I think we´re beautiful
´Cause I think we´re beautiful
No matter what anyone says
I think we´re beautiful
The most beautiful in the world

I know you´re tired of being put down
And all the crap that´s said in town
But you´re the person that matters most
I raise my glass, and make a toast

Here´s to the losers
Substance abusers
To the rejects
All the imperfects
To the retarded
And the broken-hearted
To the starving masses
And the lower classes

´Cause I think we´re beautiful
´Cause I think we´re beautiful
´Cause I think we´re beautiful
No matter what anyone says
I think we´re beautiful