Childhood Trauma

The tagging of the previous post got me thinking about the biggest of all childhood traumas: gym class. There are very few people who thoroughly enjoyed gym class. I once heard someone on TV or in a book or something describe it as "45 minutes of Lord of the Flies in the middle of an otherwise ordinary day." And it was.

Let's throw a bunch of wild kids out on a field and give them an excuse to throw things at each other and exclude the weird kids and be more competitive than they already are.

There are so many ways to get into trouble: trying too hard; not trying hard enough; tripping; falling; dropping something; having the nerve to cry when something hard gets thrown at you; wearing the wrong gym clothes; getting picked last; picking the wrong kid last; liking the wrong game...

Even the moderately popular/athletic kids had their bad moments in gym. In sixth grade gym, one of the cool girls who made my life miserable got pantsed. In tenth grade gym one of the cool boys knocked an uncool kid's tooth out in a basketball game and was immediately deemed evil. In ninth gade gym a know-it-all smart kid walked right out of the locker room wearing nothing but his sky blue briefs.

The biggest torture of all was the annual volleyball tournament. From seventh grade through twelfth grade we were forced to partake in a class-wide volleyball tournament every winter. Do you know how lame it feels to be picked last out of the entire grade? Even after the weird semi-punk girl who won't take her jewelery off for gym? Or to be the kid who keeps getting shoved out of the way when the ball comes her way.

One year, I was on a team that decided we didn't care if we wanted to win. We were just going to enjoy ourselves. A four and a half foot tall freshman decided he didn't agree with the rest of the team and started pushing people out of the way and insulting them. I was a full head taller and a girl, so I was silently nominated to handle him. I threatened to inflict bodily harm if he didn't stop. The gym teacher overheard and, rather than yell at me, offered to put him on another team. See, the environment turned me into one of them.