On Being, Big and Small

Growing Into Myself After a Traumatic Childhood

Each year, about one in five children experiences bullying. I spent a good part of my childhood in that twenty percent. For decades, I used my history as a bullied kid as fodder for funny stories and self-deprecating jokes, and as a bridge to build empathy with my students and coachees. Even as I write this letter to you, my dear readers, I am tempted to lighten it up, to make my story more entertaining or palatable. But the truth is that my bullying wasn’t funny, and I have only recently begun to understand how deeply traumatized I was as a kid.

My mom told me that when I was two years old, bullies used to steal my toys when we went to the laundromat. My survival strategy was to make a game of giving them away. I stood at the door and handed my toys out as people came in, and my mom would chase around and take them back. I learned early that avoiding confrontation and not getting too attached to things could help me survive.

The first bullying I can remember happened when I was five. I was in my front yard, digging in the dirt, and a bigger boy who was riding his bike down my street stopped and threatened to beat me up. I offered that, if he would leave me alone, I would show him a magic trick: I would write my own name on my skin with nothing but my finger. Intrigued, he scooched down by me and watched as I scratched my name onto my dry, tanned skin with my fingernail. That day, I learned that engaging a bully could sometimes keep me safe.

By grade school, I had enough going against me that the bullying became both more frequent and more painful. My family moved around a lot, often in the middle of school years, so I started to fall behind in subjects that are sequential, like math, and social-emotional skills, like building friendships. I also had undiagnosed ADHD, which left me in a perpetual state of disorganization and confusion. My desk was so messy, and I spent so much time staring into space, that my third grade teacher told my parents I might have an intellectual disability. Kids at school called me “gazer” and, when anxiety caused me to start biting my upper lip so much that it bled, “rabbit.” The further behind I got on work, the more I got teased, the smaller I tried to make myself. But it was hard to be small, because my natural tendency was to be playful, silly, affectionate, exuberant, and alive.

We moved during the summer before my seventh grade year to an affluent suburb of New York City, where kids wore Jordache jeans and Swedish clogs and feathered hair and lip gloss. I was a developmental hodgepodge at that point: my verbal skills were off the charts high, but I wasn’t savvy enough to understand how weird I sounded to other kids. My social skills were weak, and my executive functioning skills were even worse. I had buck teeth and frizzy hair, and I wore the perpetually startled look of someone who isn’t in on the joke but knows she’s probably the punchline.

Within a week of my entering school, a rumor started circulating that I was a witch. Not in a cool way. I was tormented as I walked down the hall between classes, tormented in the locker room, tormented on the playing fields during gym class, tormented on the bus ride home. School became unbearable, and I started feigning illness to avoid going. When I did have to go, I would hide in the bathroom between classes and during lunch, pulling my feet up onto the toilet and locking the stall so the other kids couldn’t find me.

Shortly after I moved to that school, my dad lost his job, so, in addition to being socially awkward and academically out of step, I also became poor. When it was time to get a training bra, my mom was too frazzled to notice. When my pants stopped fitting, there was no money to buy new ones. We often lacked heat and hot water at the house, and my already sketchy beauty routine devolved into neglect. Puberty caused me to look wilder and weirder with every passing day, and there was nobody to help me figure out how to smooth myself down.

The rougher the bullying got, the harder I worked to stay small. I knew I would be tormented in the locker room, so I started to “forget” my gym clothes, and I developed frequent stomach aches that prevented me from participating. I knew I would be ridiculed for using big words, so I stopped talking in class. I was afraid to join any after school activities, or attend school dances, or even go on field trips, because I didn’t want to be hurt.

I coped with my bullying by reading books and writing stories, retreating into a fantasy world. And I stayed in that world through junior high and the first two years of high school, almost none of which I can remember.

I can’t blame all of my childhood trauma on bullying. Moving around, experiencing poverty, living with an alcoholic dad, and coping with untreated ADHD all contributed to my troubles at school. But bullying was the most painful part of my childhood, not just because it hurt to be teased, but also because teasing caused me to abandon parts of myself, to make myself small. I believed my bullies. I believed that I was ugly and unloveable. I believed that I was weird. And I believed, as surely as the stove was hot, that if I took a risk and made myself vulnerable, I would get burned.

Finally, in my junior year of high school, we moved to a small town where I could walk to school, which meant that I could join extracurricular activities. I got a job scooping ice cream, which allowed me to buy some new clothes. A teacher recognized my writing talent and encouraged it. I made a few close friends, whom I still treasure. I joined chorus, and theater, and the school newspaper, and I began to come alive.

Even still, huge parts of me were shut down. I didn’t interact with boys at all because I assumed that I was hideous and unloveable. I didn’t play sports or work out because I was afraid of being ridiculed. Even the things I was good at felt dangerous - when my teacher publicly praised me for a piece of writing, it was both pleasurable and excruciating, because I expected to be ambushed in the hallway after class.

In theater, speech and debate, and chorus, I found other weirdos who appreciated my wacky sense of humor and loquaciousness. But I carefully controlled my voice - I could be funny, but I couldn’t get too real, except with my closest friends, or else I would be found out for the pariah I knew I was.

Over the decades since my traumatic childhood, long-dormant parts of me have continued to come alive, bit by bit. In college, I was able to make some dear friends and also to date. I never took a college math class, but I discovered that “science for poets” classes were both accessible and delightful. In my thirties, I started to run with friends and competed in a few 10Ks. In my forties, I joined my first band and dared to let my inner rock star out. I am proud of all of those accomplishments, not because I excelled at them, but rather because I overcame my fear of failure and ridicule to try them.

My decade-long love affair with tennis is probably what I’m most proud of, not because I have gotten great at it, but because I have dared to take up space on the court, something that has required me to stretch socially, intellectually, emotionally, and physically.

When I first started playing tennis in my mid-forties, every match triggered my fears that I was awkward, ugly, and unloveable. I joked with my new tennis friends that I was a klutz or a space cadet, figuring that, if I called myself those names, they couldn’t hurt me. I feared that being awkward on the courts (which, of course I was, since I had never played any ball sport, let alone tennis) would cause others to laugh at me, avoid me, or, worst of all, pity me. But that’s not what happened. Instead, my friends were patient and kind.

I also discovered that I wasn’t nearly as klutzy as I had always believed myself to be. An even bigger revelation: if I practiced skills I was terrible at, I got incrementally better.

My first few seasons of competitive league tennis were a trial by fire: I was so afraid that I would let my team down that I went into an almost dissociative state during matches. Rather than leaning on my friends to help me conquer my fears, I rationalized that I was “more of a singles player” so that I didn’t have to disappoint a partner. After one particularly horrible match, I was contemplating giving up tennis entirely, and my daughter Skye counseled me, “Mom, nobody cares if a middle-aged lady wins or loses her tennis match. They care that you are a good sport, a good teammate, and a good friend.”

She was right. I have been participating on tennis teams for almost a decade now, and, though many of the friends I started with have moved up several levels, I’m still playing 3.0. But I am fitter, more self-confident, and happier than I would have been without tennis. And I experience camaraderie I would have died for when I was a kid.

This year, I became captain of my 3.0 team, a role that requires both executive functioning and complex social skills. As captain, I schedule practices and matches, keep track of my players’ availability and partner preferences, communicate with the other teams’ captains, remember a plethora of rules and norms, get food and collect money from players to pay for it, and keep track of conversations I had with people while away from my calendar or a pad of paper, because teammates often make requests of me while we’re on the courts. “Captain” is too glamorous a name for the role: it’s more like a hybrid of air traffic controller, travel agent, and flight attendant.

Mostly, I performed well in my first season as captain, and my teammates thanked me for doing a thankless job. But I made plenty of mistakes, especially not delegating often enough. Like my two-year-old self, handing out my toys at the laundromat, I was giving time and energy beyond my capacity and not asking for help. As a result, I got overwhelmed and forgot some of the promises I had made.

Last week, a friend, who was harboring hurt feelings from last season, lashed out at me on the courts. Her words were tailor made to trigger my oldest wounds: “You’re not as good as you think you are. . . You think you’re so great, but you’re really not.” They were designed to make me feel small.

I am happy to say that I didn’t respond to her words as I would have as a child. First, I didn’t believe her - I know exactly how “good” I am, and I know that it doesn’t matter: I deserve to play anyway, because everybody does. Second, I didn’t retreat into my own pain. Instead, I shared my experience with my family and with a dear friend, who helped me to make sense of what had happened and gave me space to heal. After a few days, I was able to reach out to the person who hurt my feelings, and we took steps to resolve our differences. I suspect that we will be a bit tender around each other for a while, but neither one of us got pushed out of the community we love, and that’s a huge victory.

After that painful episode on the courts, I comforted myself that “hurt people hurt people.” That is partly true. But it’s also true that hurt people have a choice. We can grow. We can choose not to bully others. We can take responsibility for our own failings, while also practicing radical self-acceptance and acceptance of others. We can step in when we notice other people being left out, and we can apologize when we make mistakes.

I am still not fantastic at the intersection of executive functions and social skills. I sometimes forget to answer texts, or I accept invitations to parties and then feel too shy to show up. I sometimes miss subtle cues that another person might pick up on, and I am terribly forgetful. My tendency is to mask those vulnerabilities, which is what I was doing during that first season of captaining. Masking is exhausting and often backfires on me, so my new growth edge is to be a good captain while also being true to myself.

For years, I made myself small to protect myself from bullying. Growing into the parts of myself that I suppressed for so many years has come with challenges, ones that I know many of my ADHD coaching clients will recognize from their own lives. I am learning to show up in the world and be open about both my strengths and my vulnerabilities, to understand that my only two choices aren’t to be invisible or perfect. Stepping onto the courts for the first time was brave. But staying there is where the real growth is.