Self-Inflicted Wounds: Heartwarming Tales of Epic Humiliation (5 page)

When I say they were dancing in a circle around me, I am being altogether literal.
They joined hands, formed a circle, and skipped around me clockwise in a circle while
chanting my name. Not my family-given name, but my
meditation
name. When my parents got into meditation, we all got spiritual names. The one I
received was
Sujata,
which in Sanskrit means “from a good family origin.”
⁶
I have a feeling none of this irony was lost on my parents. They are nothing if not
funny.

Anyway, somehow, in a moment of severe weakness about which I will always feel a deep
regret, I told one of my classmates about my meditation name. This was like placing
an unpinned grenade in the hands of a poo-flinging monkey, one incapable of sympathy
or mercy, but very good at dancing clockwise in a circle while singing.

So there was me, the wretched human maypole, and them, the remorseless children blind
with glee, and the singing of my meditation name, and the dancing. This went on far
longer than any amount of taunting should without devolving into violence and tears;
me observing dispassionately, them doing their best to mimic the Von Trapp kids, only
without all that wholesome earnestness. I would not show weakness, and they had rotational
inertia on their side, so this thing went on for what seemed like an eternity.

In retrospect, I have to give it up to these kids. They were organized, they were
all moving in the same direction, their chant was both haunting and melancholy with
a slight mordant twinge,
⁷
and it was well concepted and perfectly executed across the board. And it sure did
make me feel like crap. Which I’m sure was their intended result.
⁸

Now, you may be asking, “How exactly is this wound self-inflicted? Seems to me like
these kids were the crass bullies and you the dainty innocent.” But you see, my friend,
you have missed a crucial element to the story: I
gave
them the ammunition with which to bombard me. I couldn’t control the fact that I
was tall, or odd, or a nerd, or a creepy loner, but I could control the level to which
I allowed my tall, odd, nerdy aloneness to be weaponized.

I pretty much just handed over the detonator on that one.

The fact is that there will always be predators in the world, heartless dead-eyed
thugs just waiting to exploit even the slightest show of weakness on your part. And
you may not always be able to avoid predation. Some of these assholes are
good
. But what you can do is avoid feeding their fire. They will dig for days or weeks
to find the chink in your armor; don’t lift up your chain mail the first day and show
them where your soft parts are. If they’re going to drive a blade through your delicate
heart, for god’s sake, make them
work
for it.

Don’t get me wrong: hold fast to who you are without apology or compromise, because
the things that make you odd as a kid make you
unique
as an adult. Don’t ever let anyone make you feel ashamed of who you are, no matter
how outside the main. But if you can, try to avoid throwing metaphorical gas onto
their flame of incomprehension. In my case, I was already a tall, bespectacled, vegetarian
girl who was the only person of my ethnicity in the student body, didn’t have a television,
and was obsessed with reading. I didn’t need to throw one more straw of oddity onto
my camel’s already strained back. People have a hard enough time understanding each
other as it is. The last thing you should do is actively make yourself seem stranger
than you already are.

Because there is another axiom that holds true for human beings, and it is simple
and universal. Much like the Incredible Hulk, what we don’t understand, we don’t like.

And what we don’t like, we smash.

( 4 )

The Time I Got Boobs Way Before Everyone Else

“An insincere and evil friend is more to be feared than a wild beast; a wild beast
may wound your body, but an evil friend will wound your mind.”
—
B
UDDHA

“Mean girls suck.”
—
A
ISHA
T
YLER

If
you were tuned into popular culture at all in the year 2010, you may remember the
“It Gets Better Project,” a campaign launched to help young people gripped in the
throes of bullying. Adults who had been bullied as children, many of them gay, spoke
to a generation of young people, telling them that no matter how desperate, how isolated
or ostracized they felt now, things would get better. That they would grow up, find
themselves and like-minded people who would love them for who they were, develop confidence
and a sense of self, and the taunts and jeers of youth would fade into the background
like so many vuvuzelas at the World Cup. That campaign was awesome.

This chapter is not like that.

I do wish, however, that the adult me could talk to the third grade me, and use those
three words (without infuriating people for whom the phrase “it gets better” has real
meaning and substance). Because the fact is, it
did
get better, but at the time, when I was
eight years old
, and getting boobs, I thought the world was coming to an end.
¹

This seems counter-intuitive, I know. Girls are meant to get boobs. Hell, they are
dying
to get boobs. An entire literary career has been built upon the concept of preteen
girls praying to some busty unseen deity for cleavage.
²
Middle-schoolers get training bras far before they need them, when the only things
filling out the cups are house keys on one side and a very sweaty Android phone on
the other. Adult women purchase more boobs than they can ever hope to carry or their
husbands hope to handle, and then assault the rest of us daily with the human equivalent
of a steel plow soldered to a Smart Car. Boobs are all we ever think about. Honestly,
if we as a culture put a quarter of the mental effort into world peace and sustainable
energy that we put into thinking about, talking about, touching, fantasizing about,
visualizing, augmenting, and trying not to stare at boobs, we’d be Klingon—a planet
with no hunger, no violence, and no war.
³

So it seems silly that I would be sad about getting boobs. Much like Lorraine Baines
to Marty McFly, boobs were my destiny. But when you are already a giantess, have cornrows
and glasses and wear clothes from the free box at the Goodwill while everyone else
is rocking inky Jordache
^®
jeans with the contrast trim, one more thing that makes you stand out is not what
you pray for under the covers while feverishly trying to finish
The Silmarillion
by flashlight. No, you are praying for a cloak of invisibility, even though the
Harry Potter
series hasn’t been written yet. And breasts on a third grader are like a cloak of
“Hey everyone, check out the mad rack on that gigantic eight-year-old!”

When my boobs came in, they came in fast and furious. There was no budding growth,
no hint of décolleté. One day I was a slightly masculine preteen, and the next I was
a slightly masculine preteen with huge boobs.
⁴
This was alarming, as I
felt
no different. I was still obsessed with the Scholastic newsletter. I still liked
to feed mud to my Baby Alive doll. I still hid in the cubby room so I could eat my
lunch uninterrupted while poring over Martian fiction, and possibly eat portions of
others’ lunches as well (more on that later). I was still very much a kid but, suddenly,
I had the body of a teenager. This is like waking up one day and finding out that
your golden retriever puppy shoots lasers from its adorable puppy eyes. Someone is
bound to get hurt.

Most likely, it will be you.

I did not know what to do with my newfound anatomy. They were unexpected and unwieldy
and wholly unmanageable, and they made all my favorite tee shirts too tight. Despite
all my best efforts to control them, which included crossing my arms supportively
and wearing multiple shirts at once, they wiggled and waggled and were entirely disobedient.
I was at a total loss as to what to do.
⁵

I
definitely
did not want to close the door on my rapidly receding childhood by purchasing a bra.
A
bra
was for old people and white ladies like Jayne Mansfield and strangely white black
ladies like Grace Jones. A bra was not for little kids who dreamed of being astronauts.
What are you gonna do with boobs in space? Unless they are currency for some far-flung
civilization, all they’re going to do is interfere with proper oxygen flow inside
your space suit. I was not interested in having boobs, and I was
definitely
not interested in giving them support, moral or otherwise.

The awesome thing about getting boobs when you are a little kid is that people tend
to ignore them. There is something weird about a little kid with breasts, the way
there is something weird about a little kid in a suit and top hat, or a little kid
who is too precocious and articulate. You can’t help but feel that the time-space
continuum has been gruesomely ruptured in order to make this little human strangely
adult, and it is better not to look directly into his eyes for fear of being mesmerized
and sent stumbling into a cornfield to your death. Preternaturally mature kids are
either instruments of the devil or speeding toward a ripping drug habit. They are
best avoided.

So thankfully, no one really noticed the boobs, or if they did, they didn’t say anything.
My parents, angels that they are, kept telling me, as they always had, that I was
perfect in every way.
⁶
And as I became more comfortable with these new members of my inner circle, I decided
that I did not have boobs at all, but rather interstellar communication devices that
would, at any moment, turn on and connect me directly with an alien race in a neighboring
galaxy.

I was
very
into Ray Bradbury novels at the time.

So there I was, clinging as desperately to my childhood as my ever-tightening clothing
clung to me. I staunchly refused to accept what was happening. I was cultivating the
kind of denial construct normally reserved for alcoholics and politicians’ wives.

Until one day I was slapped, painfully and directly, back to reality.

When someone wants to humiliate you, they will say something cruel. When they want
to decimate you and throw you into a psychological tailspin, they will say that cruel
thing loud enough for everyone in the vicinity to hear it, and with such dismissive
derision that you have no choice but to curl up into a tiny ball and blow away.

And so it was that a little girl in my third grade class, whom I’ll call Ashley,
⁷
walked up to me, and with a tone better reserved for speaking over a pile of steaming
shit or freshly puked vomit, said, “Ew! You’re getting
boobs
! They’re huge! Yuck!” And then she walked away, giggling in the way that only third
grade girls can, emitting a sound that is at once delightful and depressing, a combination
of soap bubbles popping, flower petals opening, bells tinkling, and golden retriever
puppies plopping tiny plops of ploppy puppy poop.

That sound was the soundtrack to the end of my innocence. It was time to face the
facts. I had boobs. I was not a woman, but I was certainly not an ordinary third grader
anymore. And it was highly unlikely I was ever going to get to travel into space.
Not with
those
bazongas in the way. I was who I was, and who I was was an insanely stacked third
grader who wore tight tee shirts and loved science fiction.

I can’t say that my boobs were self-inflicted, at least not in the
active
sense. I mean, I did actually grow them myself, but that would have happened with
or without my consent. The body does what the body does unbidden, growing wide hips
or stork legs or ears that could double as badminton rackets while you howl in protest,
dismayed and powerless. You have nothing to do with it, and you can do nothing about
it. But my frantic discomfort with my changing body, and my refusal to accept what
was happening, empowered others—namely a super-mean third grade harpie with a tinkly
laugh and a heart made of carbon—to turn what was a natural human development into
a prickly psychological weapon. That, and I needed to suck it up and get a training
bra.

What is the moral of this story? Nature will deal you a mixed hand, and in all likelihood,
you’ll get something you didn’t ask for—large boobs or small ones, big feet or freakishly
long fingers, buckteeth, a giant head, a laugh that can strip paint. Be proud. No
one in the world can open a jar, use their giant shoe to drive home a nail, shade
others from the sun with their cranium, or laugh wildly at a joke quite like you.
These may not end up being your favorite traits, but they are yours and yours alone.
So don’t be ashamed. Rock what you got.

And know that—with the boobs, as with everything else—it will definitely get a whole
hell of a lot better.

( 5 )

The Time I Foolishly Tried to Trade Vegetables for Meat

“How poor are they that have not patience! What wound did ever heal but by degrees?”
—
W
ILLIAM
S
HAKESPEARE

“I would literally do anything for a slice of bologna.”
—
A
ISHA
T
YLER

Throughout
one’s life, one often attempts a feat that one knows, in advance, will be an exercise
in futility. Tying a sheet around one’s neck as a cape and leaping from the garage
roof. Asking the hottest girl in school to the prom when the sum of your previous
contact was bumping into her in the line for pierogies on Ethnic Food Day. Exposing
one’s breast on national television in the hopes of kick-starting one’s career. It
is a critical and fundamental component of the human psyche that we believe unwaveringly
in the fantastic, the mysterious, the transcendent—and the wildly improbable.