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. 

SU Basketball and one violent summer: Katie's Story

Raised in Syracuse, NY, Katie is an avid Orange fan who always roots for her boys. She grew up in the heart of Syracuse and is no stranger to the violence that can plague the city. But, while violence may draw the city apart, it's support for "the boys" that brings them together.

Description: Syracuse is a small town that wants to be a big city. We have a huge mall, a huge university, we are a big city, but you would never know it. You feel like you're in a small town because there's so much support for the boys. Everyone in Syracuse refers to the team as "their boys."

Positive: One of the most positive memories I have of Syracuse is in 2003 when SU won the national championship. You saw the entire city come together. There was orange and blue everywhere: in the streets, in the stores. Everyone was wearing blue and orange. People had painted their cars. They took markers and wrote of their windows "Let's go boys!" I was 11. 

I remember it because it was huge: in my school we were watching the games. If the game was on and we were in class, the teacher turned it on. We were a small town from upstate New York competing against these schools. For us, it put Syracuse on a lot of people's maps. Nobody thought we were going to win that year. We were a little city in upstate New York that nobody knew about until then. 

I think it changed the way our city viewed itself. We saw that our basketball team, that we could compete on this national level, that we weren't just little Syracuse, New York. We were Syracuse New York with Syracuse University. We gained a lot of national attention. All of our games are on ESPN and now we have our own local sports network: all the games are broadcast are there. I think we just inspired a lot of support for the boys.

Negative: Summer 2008 was just crazy. There was constant violence: constant stabbings, constant shootings. No one could do anything to stop it. I was disappointed in the city to a degree. We knew the police officers were doing everything they could, but there had to be something missing. There had to be 25 to 30 deaths that summer. It was really scary. 

There was a stabbing that happened four blocks away from my house. They were longer blocks, so it was little bit farther away, but it was still in walking distance. My parents were very scared. They pulled us in as soon as it started getting a little bit dark out. My little brother and I weren't allowed outside at night unless we were in our fenced in backyard with parental supervision. It was scary because there wasn't anything the police officers really could. They kept trying, kept arresting people, but there were still crimes. Not even the same people were doing it. It was just a huge crime wave that summer. I think we realized that as a city, you're going to have violent crimes, but they definitely cracked down. They put more officers out at night. Trouble areas were guarded more. In 2009, there were only eight deaths. 

I hear about violent crimes in Syracuse and I think about that summer, how scary that summer was. I'm definitely a little bit guarded at night. I have to drive by one of the most common spots for stabbings and shootings when I come from work. So if I come home at night, I take a longer way home to avoid it. I'm just too afraid to go past that place at night by myself.

Bottom Line: I love the city with all my heart, but that's not where I want to live the rest of my life. It's a great city to go home to, but it's just not the place I want to live in.

Bike riding and the loss of a student: Kerry's story

Kerry, originally from Queens, now makes Goshen in Orange County, N.Y. her hometown. She moved there when she was seven. These are her memories of her hometown, Goshen.

Description: Goshen is a small little Puritan society where nothing ever happens. Every knows each other, but doesn't, really. We have a lot of churches and there's no supermarket in my town. There are a lot of little cafes and small businesses that don't matter. If you don't live in the center of Goshen, you pretty much need a car or else you will be bored and resort to drugs. Basically we have a big drug problem in our schools. Whenever I ask people why they do them, they say "What else is there to do here?"

Positive: When I first moved there, the first thing that my parents did to distract me and my older brother David was to take the training wheels of our bikes to get us out of the house. I was seven and he was ten.  We learned to ride our bikes on our own. I didn't need any help, David needed a push and help stopping though. 

That's when I started to love riding my bike. First, it was just riding around my cul de sac in circles. Then, when they changed the railroad tracks that ran by my house into a bike path, it became my escape. 

You could go two ways from my house. If I went right, I could go to the store, get candy or ice cream, and my parents would never know. If I went left I could go as far as Chester which is what I did a lot with my dad. We rode a lot together when I was little. He used to try to teach me endurance by saying if we made it all the way to the pizza place we could get pizza. I would complain the whole way, but I would make it there. I think it was a good lesson for me. And it was really scenic. Sometimes we'd pass farms, sometimes we'd pass the highway or big, giant ponds. Before they put up fencing, you could just go get lost for awhile.

Negative: Basically, there was this kid that wasn't known for more than just being the quiet kid in high school. He went to high school after I had graduated, but I still heard about it. He committed suicide, left a note for his parents and everything. 

I don't know much of the details, but the biggest problem was how the school handled it. The administration wouldn't let students wear shirts that were in remembrance of him because they thought it would be promoting suicide and they sent letters home, I believe. They said that he couldn't even get a moment of silence on the loud speaker, which is what the students were demanding. 

There was another girl that was a senior when I was a junior who went to SUNY Oswego and died of meningitis. When she was at Goshen High School she was soccer player. she was very well known and popular. But being popular is vague, because to some of my friends she was a bitch. I think that's important, otherwise I wouldn't have said that. For her, they canceled Spirit Week. We weren't allowed to decorate the halls and we weren't allowed to participate in our clubs and activities. Every day that week they made an announcement for her. They even made bracelets for her. I have one.

I think it's just sad how one person's life is worth more than another just because of the way their life was taken from them. 

Bottom line: You have to make your own adventures to live there.

Awkward sex talks and stupid bullies: Sam's story

Sam is from a small suburban town in Hunterdon County New Jersey called High Bridge. The 3.5 mile town is filled with woods...and not much else. Sam didn't have the easiest time growing up in High Bridge. Kids were mean to her and teased her about everything from her short stature to the color of her hair. Her one escape was High Bridge's woods, where she spent time fishing in the lakes and streams.

Positive: The woods were my escape. There was always something to do among the various streams and rivers that ran through High Bridge.  My favorite place was Lake Solitude. On one side of it there's a waterfall that kids like to jump into, despite the signs saying they shouldn't. A couple of kids have died jumping into it. I never took the risk.

I also love to go fishing. There was one time, though, when fishing got a little awkward. In order for me to be allowed to have my first boyfriend in eighth grade, my dad took me to Lake Solitude to have "the talk." My family doesn't talk about sex. Ever. In my family, you literally have to sit in a car and lock all the doors to get anyone to talk about sex. My dad started "the talk" and I wanted to jump into the lake. It was so awkward. He kept asking me if I had any questions and I kept saying "I'm okay!" It was just so agonizing for both of us. And really funny. My dad talking about sex... I make sex jokes all the time and he can't flat out talk about it.

Negative: It isn't High Bridge itself that I have negative memories of. It  wasn't the town that bothered me, it was the people at school. Everything else was fine: I love the people at my church and my family. But school? The girls would gang up on my, beat me up. I was too short. Too ugly. Too weird. If it was one thing, it was something else. I didn't do my hair right. Wore my makeup the wrong way.

They told me no guy would date me because I'm too short. It's funny because right now, I'm dating a guy who's six-two and I'm four-ten. They used to tell me how ugly I was, how no guy would ever date me because I was a tomboy. Now I have burping contests with my boyfriend. He likes me for who I am and we've together two years now. 

The school system and the kids in the school system were just awful, but there was one positive: the middle school guidance counselor who was the only one willing to help out.

Bottom line: Beautiful town, ugly kids. (But Sam wants to clarify, the kids in her grade only. There are more good ones now.

Side note: Sam wanted to mention that most of her former bullies are now drug addicts and she is on her way to Army Officer Candidate School, as well as applying to the New Jersey State Trooper Academy.

Deep fryers and locker shoving: Matt's story

My little brother Matt also had the (mis)fortune of shared childhood memories in Mine Hill, N.J. Now 14 and going to high school in a different time, Matt takes a look at Mine Hill where he still resides.

Positive: I got my first job at the Mine Hill Beach when I turned 14 working at the snack bar. On my first day, the deep fryer overflowed. I was mopping up grease from all over the floor and countertops for what felt like forever. Then I went to the freezer to get something and a huge chunk of ice fell out and hit me on the back of my head. It didn't break skin, but it sure left a mark. I also got silly stringed by one of the lifeguards. The beach is relatively small. There's an area sectioned off for shallow water, but then there's also a few docks and a water slide in the deeper parts. I learned how to dive off those docks when I was 12.

Negative: At Canfield Avenue Elementary School I spent two of the most miserable years of my life. I was mercilessly  bullied for being smart and called a teacher's pet. It got to the point where I was being shoved into lockers. People also wrote threatening letters and shoved them into my books. I remember going to the principal and he said the only thing he could do was put them in detention. It didn't deter them and they kept on doing it.

Bottom line: Nothing stays private in this town, it's too small. I'm so happy my high school is in a bigger town where people don't treat you as an outcast just because you're smart.