Everyone places different meanings and emphasis on words, specifically negative words, such that what is hurtful to one person may be of no consequence to another. The good news is that positive words of love, affection, care, affirmation, concern all have the same impact with nearly everyone. This fact suggests that positive words are much better at creating a healthy, unfrozen reality, than negative words. Therefore, we all should purpose to create a positive environment within others. This act is easily done if we determine to be slow to speak and attentive to listening; once again listen first, then think, and speak last.
I am reminded of my youth when I entered 7th grade at Glover Junior High School in Spokane, Washington. It was 1975 and the movie Jaws had been out for a bit over 2 months and I had been given a Jaws movie t-shirt to start my first day at my new school. I was very proud of that t-shirt I thought it was the coolest thing I’d seen in a long time. However, there is something for you to know about those childhood years of mine. It was fraught with a significant amount of verbal criticism by my peers because I was obese, I was the fat kid, or sometimes “fatty fatty 2×4 can’t fit through the bathroom door” or many other classically harmful rhymes and phrases that children back then (and I am sure today) use on one another.
So, I went to Junior high School on the first day of school in September and I was at wearing my shirt, and I was very happy with my shirt. At recess that day I was just doing my thing reconnecting with friends, meeting new kids, and hanging around since, well it was recess. At one point, I came to the attention of two young girls who saw my shirt and started calling me Jaws and chasing me around the recess area yelling epitaphs of what they would do to me with their female parts or what I couldn’t do because I was so obese to their female parts. You see the young girls (yes I still remember their names but for the sake of their anonymity I am not sharing them here) had just begun to blossom into puberty and as a young man I was aware of that I didn’t know what to do with it. I had no concept of sex or what that all meant at that point in the seventh grade so I did the only thing I knew to do which was run away from them.
My running away from them caused all kinds of laughter and other derision from the other students and the newly acquired nickname of Jaws (among others) was labelled on me. I went home that day took the shirt off never wore it to school again. I would wear it at home and at family gatherings where it was safe but never to school. It also became a nightshirt for me until it wore out and I threw it away. Sadly, I was not able to throw away the nickname nor the other names given me by peers in those developmental years. It was that seventh-grade moment that began (or perhaps rekindled) the verbal abuse from peers that lasted for 6 years through Junior high School and High School. Nearly every encounter with those two young girls always resulted in some vile statement that they would make towards me and truth be told to this day I have never understood why they picked me out of all the other kids, other than that I was obese and therefore different. Looking back, I now know that this is how racism and prejudice begin.
During that time, it got to the point where I would never associate with them if they were in the same classroom with me. I would sit as far away from them as I could, often on the opposite wall, and I would get out of the room as fast as I could if we are in class together. The result of this is that it created in me a hatred, and I do not mean a light hatred, I mean a vile, fearful, extreme hatred for all things female. Such that I started to become a misogynist of sorts (as much as a 12-year-old child can be that) and all the feelings that went along with it just grew over time because of what these two young girls, among others, had started. Their pattern of verbal ridicule was picked up and carried by other girls and a few boys at the school also resulting in behaviors against me that encouraged that type of rejection from females in general.
It was not long before I thought that if they were going to treat me like that then all women were going to treat me like that, I might as well live to that standard and become more obese. Now that mistake is my own and wholly on me. Granted it was a mistake of ignorance but still a mistake that culminated in extreme obesity and over the years in a significantly strong hatred for women, all women, to the point where women to me were nothing more than an object for my pleasure and my release, nothing more—nothing less.
Suffice it to say that, that thankfully that was a mindset that did not last. It did take years to get rid of, and I give all credit to God and my evolving relationship with Him, so much so that I am so repentant and so sorrowful for the harm that I caused on the way to healing and health. I also believe that my mother was one of God’s instruments in my healing, for though I believe she knew what I was going through she never once derided me or belittled me and was and is wonderfully supportive of my personhood.
I’m still recovering to this day from those events and what is amazing is that I am 57 years old, I hold a PhD in love and leadership, I’m well educated, and well experienced and yet those memories still have the same sting today that they did then, an emotional sting that’s so affected a 12 year old kid in seventh grade setting a course for life that today I know better than to go down.
My question to you is: are you still living in your zone of hurt and if so, how can I help you get out of it? My hope is that by reading this blog, by reading my book, by reading the things that I post, by reaching out to me or someone else for some form of help that you will start the journey to healthier view of you. I also hope that you will find people that you trust, who will help you heal. By the way, thanks so much for reading such a long blog post, I do appreciate it.
