November 16, 2012
I Was A Bully, But Now I Have A Feather Pillow
Seriously, I've only been sleeping on a synthetic fill pillow with the (approximate) comfort level of a starving gerbil for the past 12,334 nights (give or take), so take your time filling me in.
Or is this that karma thing all the teenagers are talking about these days?
Have I had to suffer through thirty three years of being denied the ultimate middle-of-the-night joy of smooshing my pillow up to optimum fluffiness and sinking luxuriously back into a feathery pillowy sleep because I was a mean kid in elementary school?
Figures.
I spent 95% of my grade school days with my face in a book, 3% being bullied, 5% being mean to B--- or T---, and 10% not paying attention in math class.
You know, I've been meaning to apologize for that (the bullying, not the math. At the bank, they give you a calculator, so math can suck it), except if I could find B--- or T--- and tell them how sincerely sorry I am for teasing them in school, I think I'd be giving my eleven year old self more credit for for their psychological development than she deserves.
I thought I was important. I'm 611% sure that I wasn't.
Which doesn't excuse the bullying. The ostracism, the outright meanness. Not at all. And although I was about to write something about how I was so unimportant that they probably don't even think of me now that they're adults, I caught myself recalling how much it hurt when M--- or M--- or D--- bullied me, and how the impact of their bullying still rears up in low moments when I catch myself assuming that of course the other woman dropping her kids off at school will think I'm a total weirdo if I smile and say hello to her...
They probably had to wait to find out about feather pillows too.