When I was 13, a teacher made me believe I was a failure.
I was thirteen when Mrs. Cook* told me to stand on a chair and speak to the class. I worried that the navy blue, metal school chair might wobble beneath my feet. I had a vision of falling face first into a mouthful of gross, middle school carpet. How would I explain the rug-burn on my chin to Mom and Dad?
I gawked at my teacher. Was she serious? Her eyes narrowed. I swallowed my fears and made the climb.
I was a small kid — Halloween skeleton bony, and with translucent skin that only burned and never darkened. I used to joke that I looked like a glass noodle before it was cooked, when it was still hard as a bone and easy to snap. My friends used to joke that I could blend into walls.
I was so frail, in fact, that when we learned about eating disorders in health class that year, one student pointed a finger at me, and shouted, “is that what Laura has?” I happened to have my fist deep inside a bag of Lays that very moment. The teacher sighed and looked at me. My fist was so small that the bag had swallowed my hand, attached itself to my twiggy arm. Laura Chip-Hands. The teacher ignored the student’s accusation and scowled at me. “No eating in class, Townsend.”
I tried hard to overcompensate. Small, to me, meant invisible. It meant less. It meant unimportant. The fact that I was the younger sister of two rambunctious, troublesome brothers didn’t help.
I worked hard to be seen. I created languages in gibberish just to make people laugh, wrote irreverent parodies to pop songs, went to school wearing googly-glasses, had a YouTube channel where I’d perform goofy skits in elaborate costumes.
When people were laughing, it felt like a victory. If they were smiling, they were noticing, and that meant I wasn’t blending into the wall. It also meant they liked me, and let’s be real, as with most kids in middle school, I really wanted to be liked.
And then, one fateful day, I found myself standing on a chair in lit class. For the first time in my life, I was taller than the other kids. Not just taller — I was towering over them. I had a better view of their hairlines than their eyes. And they were all staring up at me, waiting for me to speak.
In retrospect, they probably weren’t looking that closely. I’m sure their eyes were glazed over in the tired, numb kind of boredom of a school day afternoon. I’m sure they were checking their phones beneath their desks. Passing notes. Whispering about their favorite flavor of Frappuccino (The right answer was strawberries and cream. The cool girls met at Starbucks every Friday after school, where the boys would be waiting for them with strawberry fraps, paid for using bar mitzvah money and birthday cash from Grandma).
In my mind, though, I was a car crash that they couldn’t take their eyes off of.
I had waited for this opportunity for ages — to speak to the class, to have all eyes on me, to be the center of attention. I didn’t want it like this, though. I wanted a cool girl to tell me that my Hannah Montana t-shirt was poppin, or a boy to wait for me at Starbucks. I didn’t want to be noticed in a three-car pileup kind of way.
I felt the heat rising in my face when I opened my mouth — not sure if I should look at Mrs. Cook, my feet, or the two-dozen hairlines below me. I decided to look at my feet and noticed I was wearing mismatched day-of-the-week socks. The words “Wednesday” and “Friday” peeked up over my sneakers. Great.
Finally, I built up the courage to open my mouth and let the words out. The words that Mrs. Cook directed me to speak. The words I really didn’t want to say, but did anyway, because I thought that I had to.
“I am bad because I didn’t do my homework.”
There. It was out. I looked at the sea of students below me — waited to hear their laughter, their mockery, their blame. They said nothing. Just looked at me. Pity. I think I was crying.
I’m twenty-six now. In college, my metabolism finally caught up to me — and it was eager to make up for lost time. I’m no longer that scrawny little kid, more bone than skin. I look more human now, I suppose, less like a skeleton costume on sale at Spirit Halloween.
I am no longer worried about not being noticed. I have learned that the most important people in my life, my friends and family, will always see me. (And that I am not defined by the number of strawberry fraps I’ve been gifted on a Friday afternoon).
While I still feel insecure about my looks from time to time, most of those anxieties have been cured through a mixture of self-love, self-care, and getting the hell out of middle school.
What has stuck with me is something else. A single word. “Bad.” I spent the next decade terrified of that word. If who I was as a person could be defined by a missed homework assignment, what else could it be defined by? There was no room for error.
For over a decade, I suffered panic attacks if I was unable to finish an assignment.
I was riddled with terrible guilt if I skipped a class or called in sick to work. Every time I made a mistake, I texted four or five of my friends to ask them if I was “bad” for not being perfect. I was desperate for some kind of validation, some kind of relief, but when my friends gave me just that, I still did not believe them.
When my teacher told me to stand on a chair, I was a 13-year-old girl. Like most 13-year-old girls, I was learning what it meant to grow up. I had zero self-confidence. When my teacher, who was supposed to guide me and lead me and build me up, told me to announce that I was “bad” to a group of my peers, it crushed me.
It wasn’t until now that I realized that was the root of so much of my anxiety. My pain. My guilt. My worry that I am not good enough. My paralyzing fear that I am “bad.” It took me a year and a half in therapy to come to this realization.
When I was a junior in high school, I burst into tears in the middle of English class. We were taking an in-class test and I panicked. I didn’t think I would have enough time to finish it. I was the only one in the entire class still working.
As tears flowed down my cheeks in front of my peers, I felt like the girl on the chair again; two dozen witnesses to my failure.
My teacher pulled me out of the classroom. He sounded genuinely concerned when he asked me what was wrong. Why I was crying. “I’m bad,” I said. “I’m bad at this. I can’t do this. I’m not good enough.”
In the calmest, gentlest voice, he told me, “whether or not you finish your test does not define who you are as a person. If you believe you are good enough, then you are good enough — even when you fail.”
It took me until now to believe him.
*names have been changed to protect identities.
