Outliers, part 1: Someone had a bad day

In sixth grade, sometime at the end of math one day, the teacher handed back some graded something. As I was returning to my desk at the back of the class, L.O. stopped me and asked me, "What did you get?" I was kind of reluctant to tell her. She asked again, "What did you get?" I don't remember the grade, but just guessing, it was a 95 or 100 because that's just the way my math grades were. Then she said, "I hate you!" and stomped away.

I have lived for 20 years crushed by that encounter. When I think about how it felt to be effortlessly good at school, I think about that moment. Me being me was cause for a classmate to hate me, to see me with contempt.

I've been processing the experience of being an outlier lately and found that I kept running into grief. And when all roads led to this afternoon in sixth grade, I was finally able to reconfigure the moment. I had taken the experience completely personally which isn't surprising. Twelve year olds are only just coming into mature empathy and I was a late bloomer in that area. But with some perspective, I bet that L.O. was herself having a bad day. She was frustrated about her own grade and whatever else was going on in her life. Her pain was not meant for me, even though I carried it around for a long time.

It feels immensely freeing to give that memory and the emotional associations back to God. I've asked about half-a-dozen outlier friends about their childhood experiences and none of them seem to walk around wounded the way I was. I choose to believe that their positive experience is possible and that I had the more rare experience.

UPDATE: Links to Part 2 & Part 3