Everyone at school took Joe Cornell dance lessons during the fall of seventh grade. No matter how much I begged my parents to sign me up, the answer was always no. The class was too expensive.
The lessons were designed to teach kids how to dance and be successful in the seventh-grade social scene (the what?), and in the winter of 1980, when bar/bat mitzvah season hit like a Category 5 hurricane, I was not prepared.
Still, when I received an invitation to David Cohen’s bar mitzvah, I was excited. I expected an evening of fun, like I had at my cousin Eric’s bar mitzvah.
I wore green velvet Gloria Vanderbilt pants with an off-white wool sweater jacket that had real rabbit fur on the front. When I came downstairs, my dad said proudly, “My big girl — all grown up, all oiskapitz,” which means “very fancy” in Yiddish.
When Mom dropped me off at the temple, I was suddenly embarrassed to be walking in by myself. The other kids had come in groups with their friends. I followed them inside, picked up my place card, and eventually found my table.
I was seated with some popular kids, but I did not belong to that group. I began to realize the night would be nothing like my cousin’s party, where I had been surrounded by family who loved and cared about me. These guests were David’s family and the popular kids from school.
I didn’t talk to anyone during dinner. This wasn’t unusual for me. I was used to flying under the radar.
When the dancing started, everyone at my table ran out to the dance floor. What was I supposed to do? Should I dance? Should I stay seated — alone?
I decided to brave it on the dance floor.
I tried to copy the dance moves the other kids were doing. The DJ played the popular song “Lonesome Loser,” by the Little River Band. The music blasted. “Have you heard about the lonesome loser? He is a loser but he still keeps on trying…”
Suddenly the popular kids pointed at me and sang, “She’s a loser and she still keeps on trying.”
I was humiliated, and, unfortunately, it was only the beginning of the agony I faced.
What started at David Cohen’s bar mitzvah continued at school for the rest of the year. Sometimes a popular boy would walk by and screech, “Titty twister!” before grabbing my breast and twisting it until it burned and my eyes filled with tears. Almost every day in my seventh-grade lab science class, as we were forced to congregate in small groups around the Bunsen burners, another one of the popular boys would tell me, “You’re an ugly loser. You’re nobody. You shouldn’t even exist.” He led the teasing and my other classmates joined him.
I felt the heat of embarrassment take over my face and neck, but I said nothing. Nothing to them. Nothing to anyone.
Instead, I constructed a suit of armor. I walled myself off from the world. It was lonely, but it felt necessary. I didn’t know what else I could do.
As I continued to grow, my appearance changed and became a marker of my worth and value. I got pretty enough that boys noticed me for reasons that didn’t involve bullying.
I was a sophomore when I met Chris, a senior at my school. I felt awkward and way out of my league when I went to watch his varsity basketball games, attended prom with him and any time we interacted with his friends. It was a great relief that much of our time together involved drinking or getting high, so I could escape into the intoxication.
I loved how attracted Chris was to my body — how much he wanted me. Other boys wanted me too. I finally wasn’t invisible. I wasn’t the prettiest girl and my stomach never felt flat enough, but there was finally something about me that others valued and admired — something that felt worthy, that I could act on, and, to some level, control.
I began to obsess about my weight and how I could make my body look even more attractive. Sometimes I didn’t eat all day and only allowed myself one can of Campbell’s clam chowder soup for dinner — just 290 calories.
Everything in my world told me looks do matter. Everything sent a message that beauty is necessary for survival.
In my 20s and early 30s, work became another part of my armor. I dreamed of building safe and supportive communities and schools for kids, so I pursued getting my Ph.D. in sociology so I could attain the knowledge and skills necessary to improve these systems.
I pushed myself hardto grow and take risks to follow my dream of creating nurturing social environments, but my emotional self couldn’t keep up. At that point, I couldn’t see how my personal struggles with trying to find a sense of value and belonging mirrored what I was trying to learn about and make better in society. I didn’t realize then that I was attempting to understand and fix what had broken me.
I was desperate to prove to the world that I was OK and that I did matter. I frequently felt isolated and not good enough, and when I didn’t get the validation and approval I was seeking, I sank into a well of shame.
Alcohol became my solution. My reliable companion. I used it to silence my hurt, confusion, anxiety and depression. By my late 30s, I was drinking every night and putting a lot of effort into hiding it. I drank before and after meeting friends for dinner. I hid bottles of vodka in my home office, and I started throwing out my bottles in public trash cans instead of recycling them at home.
I never got caught, but drinking had become a prison. When I was drinking, I felt the freest I thought I could ever be. But my world grew smaller and smaller as I expended more and more effort to make sure I didn’t end up trapped in a situation without alcohol.
I was living a double life. I realized this split between who I was and what I showed the world began in my adolescence, when I learned to show only the bright and shiny sides of myself and disconnected from the painful emotions of not feeling safe or good enough. Alcohol helped me live in this way until it suddenly stopped working. It no longer numbed the pain, and, instead, it created more chaos, misery and remorse in my life. I could no longer hide from myself.
When I finally began to honestly admit that I had a problem with alcohol, help came. A friend took me to my first 12-step meeting. I followed their recommendations and got a sponsor, Lisa, whom I met when I was two weeks sober.
“When we feel that uncomfortable and inadequate, alcoholism tries to trick us into thinking that it’s the only solution for our problems,” Lisa told me. I learned the healthier way to deal with those feelings was through creating a new set of strategies and tools for living.
I finally had the instruction manual I had been searching for since middle school. Recovery wasn’t only about how to stop drinking. I received a guide for living. I learned to write a daily gratitude list, to be of service and help other alcoholics, and to stay in the moment and do the next right thing.
Occasionally, there were nights when I felt the urge to eat everything in my cupboard or to drink a glass of wine. I knew that meant I was hungry or thirsty for something else. Often, I took a bath, watched a TV show and got a good night’s sleep. The next day, when my mind was clear, I could begin to figure out what I truly hungered for. Sometimes I was starving for authentic connection, other times I needed comfort. When I worked too much, I was missing fun and pleasure. As these patterns became visible to me, I addressed their root causes. I learned to make better choices, so I didn’t want or need to do things that harmed me.
When I did struggle, I used the tools I learned from recovery. I called someone to talk through my problems. I tended to relationships every day, so they didn’t get unwieldy. I sensed and followed the guidance of my intuition. I grew my capacity to handle my difficult feelings.
In middle school, I received a message about my place in the world and my internal worth as a person. I can look back now and see that what happened to me wasn’t my fault. It wasn’t because there was something terribly wrong with me — I wasn’t really a lonesome loser — but something inside my body, mind and spirit got crushed and silenced.
I felt completely alone as I was being tortured at school, but I wasn’t. Millions of young people are bullied every day. Research shows experiencing mistreatment by other children erodes our sense of safety, well-being, potential and achievement. It also limits the development of supportive, trusting relationships during adolescence and later in life. Kids who are bullied are more likely to be anxious and depressed, abuse substances and have poor physical health. They are likely to struggle more than other kids in both adolescence and adulthood.
Too many people shut down the most sacred and precious parts of themselves to survive abuse. When that happens, we suffer tremendously — both individually and as a society — from the squandered human potential caused by our silence. I often wonder if there could have been another way to learn these lessons earlier, and if my addiction to alcohol could have been prevented.
“What if there were adults who could have helped address what we were experiencing?” a woman at a recovery meeting I recently attended asked. “What if we had learned in adolescence how to handle ourselves in healthy ways when life got hard and scary?”
As the director of the University of Colorado Boulder’s Center for the Study and Prevention of Violence, I endeavor to provide that guidance. I have learned that it is possible to create safe school and community cultures and climates that don’t tolerate bullying and cruelty. That is the work we, and many others, are doing every day in schools across the nation.
Safe schools intentionally build cultures of belonging by providing healthy tools for living, celebrating and honoring differences, and encouraging young people to share their unique gifts. These schools center opportunities to develop strong prosocial bonds. They also teach youth how to recognize the signs of bullying and what to do in response, including standing up for peers who are being bullied, telling a trusted adult or making an anonymous report. Physical and emotional safety is everyone’s responsibility and small actions can truly make a difference and pave the way for widespread change.
I can’t change what happened to me all of those years ago, but I’m working to make a difference now. I hope you’ll join me and do whatever you can to protect and uplift the kids in your life.
Beverly Kingston, Ph.D., is the director of the Center for the Study and Prevention of Violence at the University of Colorado Boulder. Her research focuses on addressing the root causes of violence by creating the conditions that support healthy youth development. Her work has been featured on Katie Couric Media, Rocky Mountain PBS, and in The Conversation, The Washington Post, and The Denver Post. She has recently completed a memoir, “Soulshine: A Memoir of Courage, Healing, and Hope,” which calls for society to invest in creating a culture of care, healing and belonging.
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