‘avoidant-insecure’ attachment relationships lack trust and expect hostility, and may thus develop aggressive patterns of interaction with peers.” They’re the bullies. On the other hand, “children with ‘ambivalent-insecure’ attachment relationships with parents are likely to be getting haphazard care and doubt their own effectiveness in influencing the caregiver. While staying somewhat dependent, they lack self-esteem and confidence in their own worth; and are thus susceptible to being victimized by peers.” They’re the bullied.
By contrast, the research tells us, “children who had been securely attached were able to distance themselves and avoid bullying or being bullied.”
Looking back at all the bullying that I was prey to—starting with my own brothers, then into grade school, then culminating in the middle school years—a case could certainly be made that I was insecure/ambivalent or insecure/resistant. But even though I had been bullied and couldn’t really fight back physically against my brothers, I wasn’t exactly a shrinking violet.
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BEING SHUNNED IN eighth grade at a new school definitely falls under the category of things that—if they don’t kill you—will make you stronger. By ninth grade I had learned to like being alone; I rode the bus by myself into town, where I’d take myself out to lunch or look in stores at things I enjoyed imagining myself owning someday. I decided I didn’t need shitty friends and eventually made a couple of new—much cooler—ones. And then some of the girls from the bullying incident came around and even apologized, wanting to be my friend. Sometimes I said okay. Sometimes I made them wait for it.
By the beginning of tenth grade I was making a name for myself as a kind of funky “free spirit.” On the first day of school I met my soon-to-be best friend Tabitha, who was new to town. Soon enough we were trading vintage clothes, smoking her mom’s pot, and hanging out after school in her family’s small apartment, talking about the sex we’d had and hoped to have.
The next year Tabitha and I started hanging out with another girl named Cindy, and the three of us skipped school and drove around in Cindy’s car, listening to Led Zeppelin and getting high. Always on the lookout for sourcing advice, the three of us went to some of our older friends, including a bad-boy Eddie Haskell type named Scott. He was one of those guys who make you feel like you’re the only person in the world when he looks at you, then gets your name wrong. Which must be why, though I was attracted to him, I actually refused him on several occasions. As much as I craved the attention, I was even hungrier, I think, for respect. I didn’t just want someone to think I was doable; I wanted to be loved. And I wouldn’t settle for less.
Although I rejected him sexually, I signed right up when he called me from jail and asked me to break into his parents’ house to steal his younger brother Chris’s birth certificate. He had been pulled over for something and, not wanting to get busted for other tickets (or crimes?), he lied, said he didn’t have any ID, and that his name was Chris. He needed proof of identity, so he called me. And I said sure. He whispered the instructions to me over the phone; what a thrill to be the dependable go-to. Cindy and I drove to his parents’ house, then she distracted them at the door as I snuck into their den through the garage and found the file labeled CHRIS, just as Scott had said I would. I could hear his mother talking to Cindy through the front door as I grabbed the file and walked out the way I’d come in.
All in a day’s work of adolescent risk-taking.
Part of my willingness to do something so ridiculous was, I can only imagine, par for the course for a kid, or for a human being, for that matter, but I was always willing to put more on the line than other kids I knew. And I have always wondered why. I wasn’t the only kid whose parents were divorced or who were downwardly mobile. It seemed like something else was going on, and, from an early age, I wanted to know what.