With a little help from my friends

Last week I wrote about formative experiences that gave me an incorrect worldview. I was also thinking about the experiences that caused me to start unlearning. Often it took more than one experience for the sake of reinforcement. It was also interesting how often it was my friends that started to show me that I wasn't horrible.

That is an area where I have been really blessed, and there was some twisted luck, but it also leads to one more memory that I only recently think I understand.

One of the girls in my first grade class was Keena. We talked once about our middle names. If I remember correctly, her father told her that her middle name was Canadian Bacon and she was really embarrassed about that. In retrospect, I think he was just teasing her and she believed him. I can relate to that. She moved shortly after we talked and I was very sad.

We did not spend a lot of time together, so I always felt that it was weird that I remembered her so clearly, but then I put it together with two other things that happened in first grade, and I think I've got it now.

The other one I have written about, which was when a group of girls surrounded me on the playground and started talking about how fat I was. That was when I first saw myself as fat, and began disconnecting from my body, so it was a defining moment in that way. The other part, though, was the ringleader of that, Suzy, I kind of pictured as ruling all of the girls, so if she was against me I was out. I felt cut off from girls socially.

That might not have been so bad. I played with boys more anyway. At the time, it was pretty much all Star Wars and Buck Rogers, but that worked for me; I loved those things. I played with Casey a lot. He even came to my house for a Halloween party. I like him and thought he was cute. For reasons that I can only assume were silly, I wrote a list of boys I liked and put it in my desk. Shawna looked in my desk, saw it, and blabbed it, and Casey never spoke to me again. That kind of cut me off from boys.

I think that I did still play with other kids sometimes, but I really got to be a loner. I was already reading a lot, but I might have escaped more into it then.

In third grade I got lucky. Jennie moved here from Pennsylvania, and with a new kid I thought I had a chance. She became my first best friend.

I wasn't just lucky that someone came, but that it was her. She was also smart, and nice, and she was independent enough that it didn't matter if I wasn't popular. We played Dungeons & Dragons together (not with dice, we just made things up), and spent the nights at each other's houses.

Jennie also made it easier for me to be friends with other people. I know I had hung out with Josh before, but then we started hanging out again, first with him and Jonathan, and then Stephen. She is the reason I did Campfire in 6th grade, which led to my first time at a real restaurant, and my first attempts at woodworking and cooking. We did not always play together. One year I was almost always playing basketball at recess, and she might play Wall Ball or Four Square, which I never did, but we often jumped rope together and played imagination games. I still read a lot, but it wasn't my only option.

Then there were boundary changes, and all of the people I mentioned were going to Mountain View while I was going to Five Oaks. I imagined that the next three years would consist of hiding in the library, but against my expectations, I made friends. I found Karen, Anne, Ericka, Nicki, and Danielle, and then we ate lunch together, and sometimes had slumber parties, and did normal things.

Something that has been disturbing for me as I read about young girls is the concept of "frenemies". My friends and I were not mean to each other. I wondered why not. Was I missing something? Kind of.

Everyone else knew about frenemies. Jennie sat next to a pair in English, Ericka had a friend who pressured her to quit hanging out with us, and Karen got put on trial for being a bad friend before we met (they must have read Blubber). But we never did that to each other.

When I referred to twisted luck, what I meant was that I never realized that hanging out with people who were mean to you was an option. If they were mean to you, you were supposed to go away, I thought, and that's what I did.

There are pros and cons to that. I am socially awkward at times, and not skilled at small talk, but I am also straightforward, and have skipped many opportunities to have others whittle away at my self-esteem. There are girl things that I am bad at, but I feel like that is okay.

Here is the important thing: a weird, socially awkward kid was able to stumble upon great friends, who would be nice to her, and that she could cherish. There were kind people out there.

I am not still in touch with everyone. I have found some friendships that for a time were really good, and then we kind of outgrew, but it doesn't make the times when we were there for each other any less real. I have also found people that I know I will always want to hang onto. Sometimes there are long breaks between seeing each other, but then the catching up is good. Honestly, the busy lives aren't surprising when you see how talented and capable some of them are.

So looking back now, I think the reason Keena's move was so devastating was that it felt like my last shot at having a friend had evaporated, but it wasn't my last shot. It just took some time.

I still wouldn't mind catching up with her. I hope she found good friends where she went too.