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My Year of Being Bullied by 8th Grade Girls
My life fell apart, one bad decision after another
It was 1994, and on paper, my life was perfect. I was on the verge of graduating summa cum laude from Washington University in St. Louis. At the end of the summer, I would start a coveted Fulbright fellowship to teach English in France. After the Fulbright, a doctorate program Spanish at Emory University awaited me.
I thought I had it all figured out at the age of 21.
Life laughed at my hubris.
My world slowly unraveled. Everything fell apart with one bad decision after another that, like dominos, were hard to stop once the first one fell. It was only later that I would come to understand how each choice I made was an act of desperation.
The first bad decision was that I turned down the Fulbright.
The reason I told myself was money. The government wouldn’t defer my student loans because I was teaching, not studying. My living stipend, though, wasn’t enough to cover loan payments on top of my living expenses, and my parents couldn’t help me.
The real reason is that I was in love. My college boyfriend and I had been dating for 6 months, and he was spending a year St. Louis after college to decide whether he wanted to pursue a doctoral…
