O IS FOR OUTSIDERS

I did see the movie, but I am actually referring to the book by S.E. Hinton.  My theme is Passions, Phases, and/or Life Lessons.  As I begin with The Outsiders, I am not precisely certain where this book falls.  This book was MONUMENTAL in my life.  I read it for the first time when I was in junior high school.  It stands out for me because, even though I was an avid reader at the time, it was the first book that hit me right where I lived.

Many of the themes of that book were being played out in my own school, minus the knives and rumbles.  There was a huge socioeconomic disparity among the kids that went to my junior high school.  So, while I wasn't engaging in actual war, it sure felt like it every day for three years.

The characters of Ponyboy, Johnny, Sodapop, Dallas, and even Darry were all people that I could relate to very well.  In fact, I understood them better than most of the crazy people at my school.  Ponyboy didn't have a very good grasp of anything going on until after the event had passed (most of the time).  That was a feeling with which I was very familiar.  Johnny understood things all too well, and it was heartbreaking.  Dallas was the first antihero I ever fell in love with on the written page.  He loved so much that he pushed people away.  Soda was that funny guy who I wished I could be at school.  That person often is able to avoid bullies and other uncomfortable people simply by being so darn happy all of the time.  And Darry, by this time, was a person weighted down by responsibility and burden.  He felt heavy all of the time.  I was well acquainted with the feeling.  Life was very hard.  Even I knew that it shouldn't be this hard at twelve and thirteen.  A person shouldn't feel like they are walking into the Gates of Hell every morning.

The Outsiders was like a message in a bottle sent through time and space saying, "You are not the only one."  I read that and realized that other people have felt this horrible feeling.  Other people go through this insanity.  This emotional brutality hasn't been visited on me and me alone.  Some people get what I'm getting and MORE.  This book is loosely based on a True Story.  This might be the worst time of my life, but S.E. Hinton threw me a lifeline.  How did she know I was sending out an S.O.S.?

 

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Rating: I was Passionate about this book when I read it.  However, I learned Life Lessons from it, too.  You don't have to accept any brand that people want to put on you.  You only become hard if you allow yourself to become hard.  Not letting people in is a choice.  It's a lot easier to go through life with a smile than a frown.  Life doesn't have to be this burden unless you choose to take that on.  I am sure that I learned even more than that, but that is what comes to mind right now...

Did you read THE OUTSIDERS or another book in your youth that hit you where you lived?   Did you feel that you were the only one until someone reached threw time and space and threw you that lifeline letting you know that you weren't alone?  Did that knowledge make your experience more bearable?

I CAN'T TELL YOU WHAT IT REALLY IS...

I can only tell you what it feels like, and right now there's a steel knife in my windpipe. I can't breathe.

If those words sound familiar it is because I borrowed them. Or stole them. Or copied them. Maybe I plagiarized them. I don't know. Ask Purple Cow. She wrote a blog all about this and seems to have a handle on it. I want to get back to the topic at hand. Oh yeah, I borrowed them from Marshall Mathers. It is the opener from his song I LOVE THE WAY YOU LIE. Which is about abuse. Well that is appropriate for this blog. Moving on...

I wrote this blog on Wednesday. It was about my first day of school at Wilson Junior High School. I also wrote this blog a while back to help you gain some understanding, if you want further understanding, of all the things spiralling out in my life and making me feel like crap back then.


I have spent two days trying to get a handle on why my junior high school experience was worse than other people's experience. I have decided that it was not worse than everyone's experience, obviously. Wilson was just the worst junior high school in my town. There were two other junior high schools that didn't spit out kids who felt like they walked through a war zone. Why? All of those kids were, more or less, living at the same socio-economic level. In other words, they were more the same than they were different. It was only at Wilson that they took kids from the bottom of the food chain and kids from the top and threw them together. It was like expecting community fish and piranhas to live in harmony. Ha.

I think I mentioned that I wrote several blogs about junior high on facebook and got this unexpected backlash of comments and emails. It turns out that it was torturous for everyone that went to Wilson. The kids from Lincoln and Roosevelt were like, "Whatever. It kinda sucked." The Wilson kids aka adults read that, got drunk, and sent me crying emails. So, no, this horrible, miserable, three years were not just mine. The pain was spread around. However, I can't own other people's pain, and I don't know how it affected their futures. I can only speak for me.

So, Robin, what did Wilson do to you?


1) It gave me a certainty that I would never be enough. I would never have enough. I would never be able to keep up. Even if I saved and saved for the right brand of jeans to fit in, as soon as I bought them, they would go out, and I would be wrong again. Or they wouldn't matter because my shirt would be all wrong. Or my shoes. Or my coat. Or my hairstyle. It didn't really matter, because there was nothing I could do to ever be enough. I was all wrong and I couldn't change it, fix it, or accept it.

2) As a non-person at Wilson, that also makes you unpretty. Your wrong clothes with your wrong haircut combined with the glasses you have to wear... that all adds up to unpretty. Even when you get contacts, the unpretty feeling remains. Once unpretty, always unpretty.


3) You are not good at anything athletic. This is because you are small and unpopular. You are unpopular because of #1 and #2. You are small because you are small boned and naturally a small person. The super athletes at this school are not going to give you a chance to see if you can play any actual sports. Instead, they will knock you down to get to the ball. You get knocked down enough times, you are smart enough to step aside and let them play your position and theirs. The gym teacher never once calls them out for this behavior, because he thinks that you can't play sports either. This is confirmed by being picked at the end or near the end for teams. In the beginning, there was this thought that ran in my head, "If they only knew I am a gymnast and I can out play their ass if they would let me." That thought lasted until I picked myself up off the ground the fourth or fifth time. Then it became, "I suck at sports." Don't ask me to play sports, because I really do suck at sports now. I hate effin sports.

4) Fear. I learned all about fear at Wilson. Unfortunately, I didn't learn what to do with it. I worked on my invisibility skills without a lot of success. There was this one girl who I thought was just bullying me. Turns out it was her mission to terrorize as many people as possible. (That was one of the things I found out on facebook.) It was daily. Pokes and jabs. Small things. The irony is that I never saw them coming until they hit their mark. How do some people do that? Her best ones were always when I thought she would overlook me that day. Or when I thought I was in a safe zone like class.



We were in Home Ec. In hindsight, I should have taken Shop. Careerwise, it would have served me better. It was the cooking day. We had made our Whatever. It was all up at the front and there was a line. I already had mine and was sitting at my table. Kellie (yeah that's her real name), my tormentor, was walking back to her table with food and drink and decided to stop right behind me. Not good news. I only knew she was there because she started talking to me. She was holding her cup of red juice over my head. She says, "I could pour this whole cup of juice over your head and nobody would care." She gives that a long pause to let it sink in. The nobody would care part and the fact that she's contemplating such an act. The cup is still dangling over my head. "You're no one in this school." She let that sink in. Cup still dangling. "I could say I slipped. No one would question me." Finally someone came back to my table and she moved on. She and her cup of red juice. And I said nothing. Not to her. Not to anyone at my table. Maybe not to anyone. Well, probably to my neighbor, Robin, who got to hear about each and every horror that I lived through at Wilson. Not sure anyone else. Well, all of you who are reading this.

It probably wasn't long after that I read THE OUTSIDERS and it changed everything for me. And I wrote about that in this blog. Matter of fact, on my trip to the library today I checked out that book again. I haven't read it since I was a teenager and I wanted to see if it would read the same now. Probably not quite.


Wilson. The place I lost my voice. The place that a whole lot of people needed to be told to fuck off (pardon my language, but there really is no nice way to say it). I wish that I had seen PRETTY IN PINK sooner. Of course, that was impossible, because it hadn't been made yet. However, there was my answer to problem #1. If you can't keep with The Jones's you don't try. You think about this problem and decide on YOUR STYLE and then you create it. It might mean you spend some time in Goodwill and places like that, but you get creative.

My point is this: I thought I kicked that negative tape loop when I went to high school, because I loved high school, and I have an awesome Kellie story (later gators). BUT... somewhere in my head that tape loop is still running. Or it was. Or it can. When I feel under pressure or something makes me feel like I am back at Wilson for some reason, that switch gets flipped. I need to burn that tape once and for all.


and before I make any more copyright infringment mistakes....
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