The Finger

I guess school wasn't the best experience of my life, but I don't really hold any anger towards the institution for the bullying I received there. It was a different time, when bullying wasn’t really recognised as a thing like it is now and I didn’t really understand what was happening or why. Ironically growing up in the bible belt doesn’t make childhood arseholery less likely, it makes it more insidious and the veneer of Christian values leaves its victims without the skills to deal with it. I was a naïve and sheltered child who truly thought that everyone was meant to be nice to each other, so when people were not, I had no frame of reference to deal with it. I hold no anger for my childhood torment because it made me the fabulous person I am today, but it still makes me sad that you need to be broken before you can be strong. I now wonder if the children who called me Gay Lord even knew what it meant.

Side note if I was a superhero, I would definitely be the Gay Lord, saving the world one fabulous wrist flick and snarky quip at a time. But back then I didn’t know what gay was, all I knew is that it wasn’t a term of admiration or endearment. I was half a step before the internet generation, living in the bible belt, so it’s pretty unlikely that 12-year old’s knew what gay was beyond a slur. Despite the isolation I felt growing up I am eternally grateful that I did most of my growing up before social media took over the world. I’m not sure I could have survived the abuse I copped being inescapable wherever I went. Kids these days have a whole world of information at their fingertips, but they have no way to escape the constant intrusion this creates in their lives. I had my problems, but the fear of going viral for a teenage moment of awkwardness wasn’t always over my head like it is for teenagers these days.

For me, home was a safe place to retreat from the world, while I worried about my parents knowing I was gay, it was still always a safe place to go home to. When you have been bullied relentlessly it all tends to blur into an abstraction and the individual moments no longer stand out. Like a Johnny Cash song, you don’t focus on the single notes, you hear the song as a story more descriptive and emotive in its completeness than a series of individual notes and chords. No one wants to live with their most painful moments constantly coming to the surface, so we do what we have to do to push them back down. Some of us develop healthy coping mechanisms, Me, I drink. To the point of oblivion sometimes, but it works for me. I think I probably had undiagnosed ADHD as a child, a diagnosis that would never be missed in this era of aggressive labelling, but as I have said it was a different time. If I was a teacher, I probably would have sedated the fuck out of a younger me just to make me bearable, so yeah, it’s probably a good thing I never decided to be a teacher. That said I honestly believe that the teachers are often a lot worse than the kids. Kids are arseholes, but they are innocent in their dickishness. Adults know better, except they either don’t or they just don’t care about the damage they do to the kids in their care. I would never be a teacher, God it would be fuck awful spending my days trying to corral other people’s crotch goblins and managing the dysfunctions they bring with them from their messed up, too busy, but still know it all parents. It would grind you down, but that’s the job, remaining aware of the power you have to shape kids’ lives when they are at their most vulnerable and malleable. Every time you let a kid down you shape their future, every time you ignore bullying you teach a child that no-one will be there for them. I know I just said I was a bit of a handful, but I was a pretty well-behaved child. I might not have been the brightest or the prettiest (unlike now when I am definitely the brightest and sparkleiest butterfly in town) but I absorbed those Christian messages of respect for your elders to my core. I did my best to pay attention and was always respectful to my teachers.

In year 2 I had a teacher called Mrs Meddle, a mean spirited meddling old bitch who saw the beginnings of what I would one day become and did her Christian best to break the sinful little fag inside me. I was 8. I do believe I was born gay, but at the same time 8-year old’s are not sexual beings, and this adult tried to break the sexuality out of a child who did not yet have any concept of sexuality. Chalk one up to the Christian values. Mrs Meddle noticed that I only had female friends and decided this was a namby pamby flag of future fagdom and it was her job to save my soul by isolating me from my friends. She justified her phobic behaviour by claiming it was a mental health issue, apparently female friends are a sign of a broken psyche. Mrs Meddle I hope you rot in hell for hiding behind your Christian values to isolate and bully a child for being born the way they were born. I didn’t choose to be gay, I am not gay to upset you, I am not thumbing my nose at your traditional values, I am not unnatural or sinful (Ok occasionally sinful because damn it’s fun). If given the option Mrs Meddle would have trucked me off to a conversion therapy camp to have the gay tortured out of me. Meddling Meddle, the supposedly responsible adult, strategically turned my friends against me and even made false allegations to the headmaster that I was acting inappropriately towards my friends. Somehow in her messed-up mind, isolating a child and making revolting accusations about an 8-year-old was the answer.

My parents eventually got wind of Mrs Meddles meddling, but too late to reverse the damage. I now had no friends either male or female, and became the loner weirdo social outcast. The hurt part of me feels my friends were not real friends if they abandoned me like that, while the adult part of me knows that rejecting adult interference is a big ask for a kid. Still the little boy that’s buried deep inside of me always carries that abandonment with him. We all know that shopping fixes all manner of ills, and to make me feel better my Mum allowed me to save up and buy a barbie doll. I had been begging for months to be allowed to get a barbie doll from Franklins. My Mum didn’t seem to mind my love of all things girly, and was happy for me to wear my sisters’ hand me downs, but she was still always nervous about concealing that side of me from others. I had to hide that barbie from my dad, not because he was a bad person, but because he was not quite ready for a son that didn’t fit the picture in his head of what a son should be.

Like the teen movies promise, I was sure high school would be different. I had some friends by year 6 and I thought high school would be my new start. One friend from my primary school was going to the same school as me, we were not close friends because she was in the popular group, but we were friends. I thought Kendall and I would naturally just hang out because we both knew each other. No such luck, Kendall was immediately accepted into the popular group to be pretty with the other pretty people, and I was ignored and forgotten like the less aesthetically pleasing of us tend to be. I’m not saying I would have done differently if I was her. I still hate the whole entitlement of beautiful people who have never been excluded, but damn it, it would have been nice to have the option of being the beautiful excluder.

Puberty brings many unpleasantries, and for me a newly discovered social anxiety reared its head. Hiding behind a class room on your first day of high school because you are scared to go to the toilet and think you might wet your pants doesn’t really inspire confidence to face the world head on. Hindsight is a smug and judgy bitch. Even now, looking back imaging myself as a glorious green fairy godmother a ’la Kylie Minogue as the absinthe fairy in Moulin Rouge fluttering about whispering in my younger ear ‘Get up! Make friends! Who cares? Say something! do something stupid! better to be the class clown than dreadfully alone!” My inner fairy is obviously more the sassy type than the gentle encouragement type. In hindsight most approaches do lead to friendship, but you need to have the courage to approach people. Unfortunately, when your focus is on not wetting your pants behind the classroom on your first day of school, there’s not a lot of mental energy left to devote to faking confidence and making friends.

For the first seven months I struggled. Eventually a new kid arrived called Ted. Ted was from a broken family and seemed to struggle with learning. Probably another one who would now be diagnosed with a learning disorder, but that’s not how things rolled back then. I had made a friend, and from there things started to improve. We joined a group of misfits. All stories have a beginning a middle and an end. The middle is a bit TLDR but the ending for Ted and I was pretty ugly. As I have said before, I was an annoying, socially awkward kid. I said something that annoyed Ted and he reacted with violence. This completely floored me. I was a closeted gay kid living in the bible belt, going to bed at 7:30 and not allowed to watch Home and Away because of its adult themes.

My picture was in the dictionary under both sheltered and naive. That anyone would ever physically attack me just wasn’t on my radar. Ted broke my finger. It swelled like the elephant man’s hard on. I lied to my parents about how it happened, because I didn’t want my friend getting into trouble. My version of it is I probably deserved it because I was being a dickhead. My editor says that it is creepily close to the narrative of domestic violence. The believing you deserve to be hurt, that you provoked it, that you will be alone if you say ‘I don’t deserve to be treated like this’. This is what teachers like Mrs Meddle do, thank-you you fucking witch for breaking an 8-year-old to the point where they protect the people who hurt them and make excuses for them even 20 years later still believing that it must be their fault when people lash out. I had to have surgery for the fractured finger, how pathetic does that sound? I had to undergo major fucking surgery, wear a finger cast for 8 weeks and do 3 months of physio. People probably thought it was an RSI injury from too much teenage masturbation, and even now it still looks like a messed-up doodle. 15 years after I was a bit of a dickhead, I still have the reminder, an arthritic finger that looks like a manky penis gone wrong. Some childhood scars are internal, some are external, and some look like ugly broken penis fingers.