Day 4,252—Church Camp—

 

       The meanest kids I interacted with growing up all went to church. I was so prepared for kids to be mean to me when I went to public school starting in 8th grade, but my experience was so vastly different that it was a cultural shock. I hadn’t thought about this for a long time, but because I am working with 11-year-olds who are dealing with kids being mean to me, I reflected on my experiences.

        The memories that stick out the most are the following. The first day, when I told some of the kids that I like doing Judo, which I just started, and was so proud of. The kids started calling me “Judo Boy,” which in retrospect doesn’t seem that mean, but it was the way they said it, laughing at me. When I thought about it yesterday, I realized it was also because they had taken something about me that I was proud of, which I thought was cool, and they openly mocked it. I learned my lesson. Never tell anybody anything about you that you care about. You’re only asking for trouble.

        The second memory was of a teacher losing control and yelling at all the kids when she was trying to teach a lesson. We were supposed to fill out a worksheet that had a lot of sentences with one word removed. The other kids added words to make the biblical story include references to sex acts. It wasn’t the other kids laughing that scared me, but the teacher yelling and threatening to call all our parents.

        The last memory was on the last day during a service. One of the other kids tapped me on the shoulder and asked me who at the camp I hate the most. I don’t remember what I said, except probably that I didn’t hate anybody. I remember he took this to mean that no one there mattered enough for me to have strong feelings about. I let him think this so he would leave me alone, and I could go back to counting the boards in the church ceiling.

        The kids at this camp were worse than the kids I grew up with, but when I reflect on those kids, I think about how mean they were to me, too. Always go out of their way to exclude me and make me feel different. It was terrifying to go to public school because everyone told me public school kids were so much worse. And my mind raced with all the possibilities of what that meant, but they weren’t. It’s not like everyone was nice to me all the time, but when I started school, the cool kids wouldn’t even let me sit in the lunchroom alone. They came up to me to invite me to eat with them.