Said to me by my best middle school friend, who would often sit me down and confront me about all of the things that were wrong with me.
Before I met her, I was a happy-go-lucky kid. If she perceived me as being miserable, it was only because her presence made me miserable.
Of course, at the time, I couldn't recognize this, and I took her comment to heart, thinking that this was just another part of me that was inherently bad or inadequate.
In the 7th grade, I befriended a girl who I became incredibly close with. But before we grew close, she told me that she thought I was really stuck up. I had never heard anyone describe me as "snobby" or "stuck up" before and it hurt my feelings very much because although I'm stubborn, I didn't think of myself in that light. It was a description that I associated with kids who had wealthy parents and spoke over their classmates with arrogance.
It was always in her character to be bluntly honest, so I put my trust in her because I thought she would always tell it to me straight. I started to think that other people may have the same impression of me but never told me.
In the end, we grew apart. I endured an emotionally-abusive friendship because I was a self conscious 13 year old and I wanted to be edgy and "fun." She took advantage of the fact that I was highly impressionable and I trusted her; she was clever, charming, and could argue her way out of any situation. I wanted so badly to be more like her and less of an uptight "snob."
I don't think of myself as stuck up anymore. I am now 24 and much more confident than I used to be, but I haven't forgotten what she said.
"Are you manic?"
A competitive high school acquaintance asked me this very bluntly, and in a very cutting way.
It was one of the first times I realized that my depression was apparent on the outside.
These words still echo in my head any time I hit a really high high, or a really low low.
I don't even think she'd remember asking me that, but it's one of the cruelest things anyone has ever said to me.
One time when I was in high school my mother and I were talking about sex. My boyfriend at the time was an Evangelical Christian and because I loved him I had started to become one too. My mother kept trying to bring up sex and I kept laughing, insisting that we weren’t having sex - we weren’t - and to close the subject for good I told her that I was saving myself for marriage. She was stunned. She said, “But what if you’ve waited all that time and it’s bad?”
Always ready with Evangelical sound bites, I said, “If I have nothing to compare it to, how will I know?” I smiled. My mother looked me in the eyes, her face deadpan.
“You’ll know.”
“You’re really intense.”
It was an interview for a company and position I had dreamed about. I’d be studying for weeks. Met with three people in the office and was feeling awesome.
Then, in walks the VP. He sits down, spreads his legs out, puts his hands behind his head in a cocky manner, and asks me to tell him about my interests. I start talking and he almost immediately interrupts me with this statement.
He asks me to start talking again, then interrupts me again: “Yeah, you’re intense. Has anyone ever told you that? Like, really intense.”
Turns out, he was testing me. But I’ve never left a room feeling so unsure of myself.
“You are a cool breeze on a calm sea.” He wrote that on the last page of a paper I’d written for the class he taught. There was an “A” in red ink, which pleased me not half as much as being compared to a summer’s day. I was fifteen, just coming into focus. I reminded him of himself, he said, and when he asked me to meet him at the football field on a Saturday afternoon I didn’t hesitate. He drove me to his apartment, told me to take my clothes off in a way that made me uncomfortable. But I liked having a secret.
Later, much later, he told me he had a boyfriend, someone he loved. He’d die if anything ever happened to him, if he were to find out what we did on Saturday afternoons. So it stopped as abruptly as a needle being lifted from a record.
What stuck with me wasn’t the rape, as my therapist insisted I call it, it was the power of words to seduce, to shatter.
When I was 13 I went to a summer camp and had to share a shower with other girls.
While I was bathing a girl yelled out, “What’s wrong with your boobs?!” And all the girls stopped and looked. I couldn’t understand what she meant. They were mine they weren’t overly perky but I never thought of them as wrong.
Another girl asks “Did guys ya know, do stuff with them?” And the same girl replied, “Who would want to play with those?” I lowered my head in shame and confusion.
To this day I’m always self conscious the first time I reveal my body to any guy. Will he want to know what’s wrong them as well?
When I was in college, my friend was struggling with coming out as bi. I wasn’t understanding the struggle, nor did I understand the coming out process. Our mutual friend accused me of not being supportive of our friend and told me I was insensitive, and that I’d never understand how difficult it was.
A few months later, I came out as gay, and the mutual friend’s voice played over and over in my head, telling me how difficult it was to come out. It made me feel like the sudden peace and understanding of who I was was somehow wrong. I felt like I was doing something wrong and I should have been struggling so much more. To this day, I still wonder if I should have struggled more.
I moved around a few times growing up. Right before I moved across the country the summer after 9th grade, a close friend filled my yearbook pages with lovely memories but most importantly a note that said, “No matter where our lives take us and even if we drift apart, we’ll always have these memories from this past year.” Her words stuck with me after that and helped me get through the tough times when friendships faded or when I needed a push to see the bright side of things.
This friend and I did drift apart when I moved, but nearly a decade later we found ourselves living in the same city and our friendship picked up right where it left off.
I was in fourth grade, it was the first hot day of the year, and I was so excited to finally be able to wear my new tank top from Gap Kids.
When I got to school, the first person I saw was this girl who I had recently become good friends with. She was standing by the door with a group of people, and she said to me, loudly, “You should NOT be wearing that!” They all laughed.
I was so shocked and caught off guard. I don’t even remember what I said in response. I think I laughed and kept walking.
To this day I’m not sure exactly why she thought I shouldn’t have been wearing that tank top. Maybe it was because I wasn’t wearing a bra, or maybe my arms looked weird or something. But it makes me really sad to think that I’m still trying to figure out what was objectively “wrong” with my nine-year-old body.
Has anyone ever made a fleeting comment about you that immediately became tattooed onto the front of your brain for all of eternity, impacting your self-perception and self-worth? Whether it was an offhand comment made by someone you love and respect or a fleeting declaration by someone you barely know, we share the moments that stick.
