I was in seventh grade when my paper-thin confidence was shattered by a boy.
My school grade team, the Humuhumunukunukuapua’a’s (Humus for short — terrible I know) We were coming back from a cabin retreat in Estes Park, Colorado. It was April 2002, and I was 13 years old.
When I replay the memory in my head, it’s almost like a movie. An aerial interior shot of a school bus, where I am sitting backwards talking to the boy in the seat behind me. I know I was wearing my color changing Vans shoes, a dark blue pair of Old Navy cargo converter pants and a red shirt with a gold horse on it.
A lot of people in my grade had siblings in high school who were friends with my sister. We used our older siblings as a crutch to seem cool, and injected them into conversations any chance we could. So, when my sister tried out for the cheerleading squad and made it, I was proud and thought it made me seem cooler.
His name was Josh G, and he had initiated the conversation with me. I remember wondering if he liked me, since he bothered to talk to me at all. I felt a rush of joy and teen hormones wash over me. Little did I know, this discourse would change me forever. The conversation went like this:
Josh: Hey Bianca, I heard your sister made the cheerleading squad.
Me: Yes, she did!
Josh: Well, what does she look like? I like going to football games, so I want to know who she is.
I will stop you here, readers, as what I said next was too painfully obvious and stupid to have been said to a pubescent boy in the seat behind me. Why I said the following statement, I will never be able to understand. However, it came out of my mouth.
Me: Well, she’s pretty… Prettier than me. She has brown hair, and is about my height.
As soon as those words were said, I saw an evil grin come across his face, and his eyes light up like a Christmas tree. I knew I had said the wrong thing, and that this was going to hurt. There was no way to brace myself from the words he was about to say.
Him: Prettier than you? Then she must be really good looking, because you’re ugly.
Everyone around me erupted into a fit of giggles. I was suddenly a zoo animal on a bus full of my peers. Mortified, I faced forward in my seat. I told myself I would not cry in front of them.
It was only two words, but it felt like a million knives stabbing my tiny shred of confidence apart. I felt the wall of rejection wash over me, and spent the next 30 miles holding back tears. When my mom came to pick me up from school, I was inconsolable.
This was my first time having someone say something that I adopted and placed on my own self-image. The mirror I looked in was now carrying a dark passenger: someone else’s opinion. Gone was the ignorantly positive person, and in her place moved a dark and miserable presence that never left my side during my adolescence.
I was no longer Bianca. Instead, I was How Others See Bianca.
This crack into my self image and perception has haunted me for years, even winding me up in some therapy at the age of 15. Though it was my first chip into peer-perceived self-hatred, it was not my last. There would be more Josh G characters who would come into my life, and they would be worse.
It took me years to let go of those two words. At 25, as I type this, it still stings. I will be the first to admit that it wasn’t easy, and I was not able to let the phrase go until I confronted Josh in college.
Here’s the funny thing about boys going through puberty, they don’t remember the shitty things they said to other pubescent peers. His words shattered my confidence, but he had no recollection of the matter.
Kids are mean.
