My hometown, but not really: Aimee's story

Aimee grew up in Peekskill, New York, but attended a Catholic school in a neighboring town. This is her story on the connection, and lack there of, she feels toward her hometown.

Description: Geographically, Peekskill is pretty small, but it has a big population. It's right on the Hudson River too. It's a big immigrant city too. A lot of people are from Mexico.  Mel Gibson is also from there. The schools have low test scores. My mom teaches third grade in Peekskill's public school system, but she didn't want my sister and I to go there. I went there until I was in third grade. My mom tells me I used to have nervous habits: biting my hair, chewing my nails. I don't remember being scared there, but my mother noticed. She said that I stopped them when I changed schools.

Positive: I feel like I was pretty disconnected from my hometown so my positive memories are about people, not the place itself. My whole life, I just wanted to get out of there. When I came to Oswego, I started to miss the people, the nostalgia of being home. Every time I go home, I appreciate it more. Like being able to spend time with my family and friends.  I always get pizza at Anthony's Pizza. 

Negative: There was a murder in my neighborhood. It was a girl who lived down the street. Her boyfriend killed her then committed suicide.  It was pretty crazy. There were crimes at the school: you'd always hear about people bringing in weapons and stuff. My school was half an hour away and it kind of sucked driving all the way there my senior year, even though it wasn't as bad as the bus.

Bottom line: It's my hometown, but I don't feel that connected to it.

Bullying and the best friends that made it better: Laura's Story

Laura was born in LA and her family moved to Scotts Valley when she was nine years old. This is her story about growing up in a suburban California town. Now working as a writer in New York City, she says that in a way, the bullying encouraged her to work harder 

Description: It's a very, very small town, five minutes from Santa Cruz. I moved there when I was nine. Before that, I lived in LA which I liked because there was more diversity. With Scotts Valley the school was 98 percent white. I remember being really surprised, moving to a town with so many white people. I was also really surprised that there was no graffiti like there was in LA. I had my parents drive around the town twice to confirm it. It was a nice place to live at first and it was safer, but the kids were a lot meaner there.

Negative: I really started getting bullied a lot in seventh grade. Sometimes, I liked to indulge in being the victim, but it got to the point where it was beyond my control. It wasn't just one group of people who targeted it me: it was people from all different cliques. There were the stereotypical popular kids, the punk kids and the jocks who weren't that smart (but very malicious). 

I had a famous duel with the most popular girl in the grade. She would write swear words on the wall, with my name below, but spelled wrong. I caught her once. She was writing it all over the white boards and walls in school. She also had a boyfriend who would make fun of me. One day he opened a stapler and started flinging staples at me in science class. Then he pretended to accidentally trip into me from behind and put a "kick me" sign on my back. I didn't realize it until I went up to the board and everyone started laughing at me. It was like a scene from a movie.

In eighth grade the girl stopped bothering me. It was after we had both joined cheerleading and we were told by the principal that we couldn't communicate at all with each other. But by that point, she had damaged my reputation so much, the entire school knew I was this bullied kid. While she stopped, her friends didn't. 

In cheerleading we had to perform at the school dances. In the middle of the dance, everyone would go to the bleachers and watch us perform. My parents were chaperoning one dance and when we performed, some of the girls started cheering for me, but it was insincere. There were mean comments mixed in with the cheers. After the performance was over, my mother asked me why they were yelling at me and I was ashamed. My parents knew that I was being bullied, but it was the first time they saw it.

I just kind of took it because I thought I was guilty, that if the bullies were saying things, they must be true. I blamed myself.

At one point, we had a unit on school shootings: how to prevent them, what the signs were. One of the boys that was mean to me came up to me and asked if I thought about bringing a gun to school because I got picked on all the time. I was angry: there's nothing in me that's violent. I don't have it in me to do something that terrible and it really hurt my feelings to have such things said about me. 

He knew how badly I was being bullied, to the point where he thought I could do something like that, yet he and his friends continued to make fun of me. They assumed that people who were bullied would do it. They knew that what they were doing to me could drive someone to do it and they continued to be mean.

In a way, the bullying was more traumatic than the death of my father, who passed away while I was in high school. I was OK with his death because he raised me really well and I didn't feel shortchanged on family life. The bullying, however, kept going on and on. 

Positive: The best part of Scotts Valley were meeting my best friends Crystal, Lauren and Nikita. It was the first day of fourth grade and I was assigned the seat next to Crystal. We became best friends that day, after we found out both of our birthdays were in July. When you're a little kid, something like that means you have to be best friends. We still are. 

She introduced me to Lauren and Nakita, and we became a group of four. We had so many asinine inside jokes. We'd have sleepover and create mischief: throw bottles of nail polish in the street, glue dollar bills to the road. 

The last time we all hung out, we had dinner. We were still ridiculous together, still telling jokes. It just goes to show we're never really going to lose that side of ourselves. It's a positive tie to our childhoods. Their childhoods weren't perfect either, but we had each other. 

I think I came out luckier than I thought I did. Some people don't have friends that they've known for that long. I went through two years of hell in middle school, but I had people to make it better.

Bottom line: It was a classic, small town experience. 

Shared, miserable experiences: how our definitions of "home" can tie us together

When I was home over Thanksgiving Break, I stumbled across an old journal that I kept when I was in sixth grade. Looking through it, I found the typical anguish that anyone at the age of 11 has: my parents making me go to bed too early, the English teacher who seemed to single me out for humiliation and annoyance at my little brother for pulling my hair.

But there were entries in there that weren't about my parents making me eat spinach for dinner.  I wrote about girls who would pretend to be my friend one day, then write mean things in a notebook about me another and "accidentally" let me overhear them talking about it. I wrote about mean notes shoved in my locker and hearing vicious rumors spread about me. I wrote about, what I'm finding is more and more common now, being bullied.

I started this blog because I am fascinated by the way people define their hometowns and the associations they have with it. I didn't know what to expect when people began telling me their stories. What I didn't expect was to find out that school bullying had such an effect on so many people.

Bullying was almost regarded as a "right of passage" when I was in elementary school: something that you just had to deal with it, because it "will always get better." And while that may be true in the long run, when you're 11 years old, it's not easy to believe. 

Bullying may not leave permanent scars, but it does, while indirectly, have an impact on the way we run our lives. For one of my friends, it was constantly questioning her appearance, even years after girls stopped calling her ugly in the hallways. For others, it's the constant doubt that they are never good enough.

For me, it's been the fear of letting people get too close to me.

While this may paint a bleak picture for the millions of kids that are bullied each year, it also gives me reason to hope.

The people that I've interviewed that have been bullied are compassionate and giving. They are nice to other people. They remember what happened to them and they try their hardest to not let it get repeated.

When I started this blog, I kept getting asked what my story was. What did I like about my hometown? What did I despise? I'm still having trouble answering that question, but I'll try to answer it in a way now.

Description: Mine Hill, a small town where everyone knows your business whether you want them to or not.

Negative: The elementary school I attended where bullying was treated with a slap on the wrist, and possibly a lunchtime detention.

Positive: The amazing people I have been able to connect with later in my life over shared, miserable experiences.

Bottom line: It's not a place I'd like to return to, but it's not a place I despise entirely.