I Believe That People Should Be Nice.

Senior year of high school my lunch consisted of baby carrots and apples eaten in solitude sitting cross-legged in front of my open locker. It was pretty bad not having the same lunch as my two friends, pretty bad being ignored by the boy I had a crush on and had made out with the night before in the park, in the dark. Pretty bad being associated with the most unpopular sport in school.

My only extra-curricular activity was synchronized swimming. It was a rare sport in my rural-suburban town in central Pennsylvania. In fact, not too many people even acknowledged it as a sport. No one really understood it—certainly not the “real” swimmers and water polo players who liked to steal our nose clips and the aquatic center when we were signed up to practice. It was the only sport I ever participated in or excelled at. I even applied to universities that offered collegiate-level synchronized swimming teams, but somebody told me that was a dumb reason to go to a college and that I wasn’t good enough anyway. I forget who that was.

I do remember though the pretty girl with long straight fiery hair named Jen who was on the synchronized swimming team for only a year in middle school before she quit to do something more worthwhile. She called me fat. And maybe I was—morphing from my baby body into whatever I would become, and in the meantime, lost in that in-between stage of awkward adolescence. It wasn’t pretty, I’m sure. But still. How did that one girl who I barely knew and that one comment that I barely heard make such an impact on my memory?

Now that I’m in my thirties and watching the workings of high school dramatics every day, I wish I could tell these girls, my students, the painful truths that I have had to bear—that words really do hurt more than stones sometimes, that the more something hurts the longer it takes to forget, that we should try really, really hard to not let other people’s opinions hurt so much. Which is almost impossible.

Thinking back to my lonely lunches of carrots and apples senior year, I realize how sadly significant negative comments can be. Somehow we barely even hear, barely even believe the good. It’s the bad stuff that sticks. I almost remember my teammates’ compliments about my swimming, almost remember the other girls jealous of my thick wavy hair and long legs, but I remember far too clearly that a Jen thought that I was too fat.