Authors: Brittney Griner
Soon enough, I became a regular target.
The first time it happened, I was walking with a friend between classes. The hallways were flooded with kids, all of us buzzing as we scurried around like animals freed from a cage. Then suddenly, out of nowhere, one of the Cool Girls was standing in front of me. I could see her friends gathered off to the side, watching, as if they had all been talking about something. Then this girl started patting my chest. I always wore really plain clothing, like a white T-shirt without any graphics on it, and my hair was pulled back in a tight bun. Instinctively, I stepped back, startled and confused. She immediately turned to her friends and said, “See? I told you. She doesn't have a chest!” Then they all walked off, laughing, and I heard one of them say, “She must be a boy. She's not really a girl.”
This kind of thing started happening all the time. Somebody would come up close, in my space, and call me names. They'd say things like “What are you, some kind of freak?” Or they'd walk by and say to each other, real loud, “Better watch outâshe'll make you gay!” They were constantly making fun of how I looked and dressed, how I walked and talked. I'm not sure I can express exactly how I felt in those moments, because I usually went numb. When you're on the receiving end of insults every day, they chip away at your self-esteem. No matter how much you try to ignore it or tell yourself it's just kids being stupid, you can't avoid the pain that comes with it. You get to a point where you imagine everyone is looking at you and thinking there's something wrong with you. Whenever we had class changes, I would walk with a friend, never alone, always on the lookout for certain girls who made it a habit to harass me. It was almost always girls. I would try to duck them, just get to where I was going as fast as possible, but when somebody got in my face, I got mad. I'd push the girl away and keep walking, as the anger rose inside me. And then I would often act out later in the day, saying something rude to a teacher or cutting another kid down with a nasty comment. It became a terrible cycle, how I passed along that meanspirited behavior, ruining someone else's day to match what was happening to me. It was like a twisted game of Pay It Forward.
During those years, whenever I imagined my future, I pictured myself enlisting in the military after high school. College was just something that other people did; it wasn't part of my plan at all. And sports weren't a factor for me yet. I started dabbling with soccer and volleyball in seventh grade, but the only thing I knew about basketball was that my sister SheKera had played it in high school. I wanted to follow in my dad's footsteps, and that started with joining the military, just as he had done when he was eighteen. After I served, I would pursue a career in law enforcement, same as him. (People might find this hard to believe, but I still think about becoming a police officer someday, when I'm done playing hoops for a living.) The point is, there was nothing going on in my life forcing me to focus on my behavior, to make me think about how my actions in middle school might affect my future. Quite honestly, I viewed what was happening at this timeâall the confrontations, the emotional beating I was taking, the tough exterior I was developingâas preparation for the military and police work. There's not a lot of clearheaded thinking when you're in sixth grade, especially when you're carrying around so much anger.
I began to think the only way to make it all stop was if I forced kids to stop, if I made them see I was ready to fight anyone who cut me down; then they would leave me alone. Obviously I realize the flaws in that thinking now, but at the time I thought it was absolutely necessary I be seen as someone you wouldn't want to mess with. The tougher I seemed on the outside, the less likely it was that anyone would see how I was crumbling on the inside. So I allowed my anger to get the best of me.
Until middle school, I would just get in harmless little skirmishes with boys on the playground or in the lunchroom, over silly things. One time in elementary school, I got sent to the principal's office after scuffling with a boy who was mad that I was bragging about beating him in the Punt, Pass, and Kick competition. (Girls and boys competed separately, but I made sure to keep score, and I brought my trophy to school.) Those tussles were nothing compared to the trouble I ran into a few years later. In sixth grade, I got into a full-fledged fight with one of the girls who kept messing with meâa fight that ended with me being sent to an alternative school, basically a reform school, for two weeks. There had been a lot of tension between me and this girl for a while, because she didn't like that I was hanging out with the boys. She was convinced I had a crush on her boyfriend, and she kept threatening me, saying things like “If you try to mess with him, I will come after you. I'm tired of seeing your ugly-ass face in the hall.” She was telling other girls to keep an eye on me, that I couldn't be trusted. This was my life at the time: I made some girls nervous because they thought I looked like a boy, and I made other girls nervous because they thought I wanted to steal their boys. But nobody was more nervous than I was, because I was constantly on edge, wondering who was going to provoke me next. My anxiety and anger were fueling each other, and eventually I just exploded.
I was eating lunch one day, sitting with a friend, and I saw the girl walk into the cafeteria. As soon as she set foot in there, I knew she was heading directly for me. I nudged my friend and said, “Here she comes!” And my friend, who was probably nervous, too, said, “Oh, she's definitely coming!” I jumped out of my seat and stood as tall as I could. Sure enough, the girl came up to me and started jawing at me. She was standing so close I could feel her breath. So I took my hand and mushed her face back. That's the best way I can explain it; I covered her face with my palm and pushed her. Well, you can imagine what happened next. When she regained her balance, she came at me swinging, and I didn't back down. This was the whole point of the moment: to show everyone how tough I was.
We became a tangled ball of flailing arms and legs. One of the lunchroom monitors, a member of the school support staff, tried to break us up, but I was so wrapped up in the moment, I shoved him out of the way. A minute later, the school cops showed up and got between me and the girl, holding us down so we couldn't keep fighting. I was sent straight to the principal's office, a place I was pretty familiar with, thanks to my habit of mouthing off to teachers. This situation was much worse than usual, though, because I had pushed a school employee. I was given a misdemeanor ticket and had to appear in juvenile court, where I was sent to reform school, put on probation, and ordered to do community service. (I walked dogs at PetSmart for a few months.)
I didn't feel like I had a choice when it came to fighting. My father had always told me, “Don't start a fight, but don't walk away if someone comes at youâor else you'll get hit in the back of the head.” And I was too scared to tell my parents or my teachers about all the name-calling, because I couldn't even begin to verbalize it. Saying the words out loud would only make them more painful. I already felt different, like there was something wrong with me. Why give anyone else a reason to think it might be true? I had no idea how to express all the emotions swirling in my head, and no confidence that anyone could change the situation. I would walk around school with my fists clenched, trying to squeeze away the anger. And every day when I got home, I would retreat to my room, the only place where I could let my guard down, where the anger gave way to the sadness underneath.
I HAVE SOME GOOD MEMORIES
of my childhood bedroom. The floor next to the dresser was covered with my favorite toys, including the stuffed animals that my dad had won for me playing arcade games. (He was really good at the one where you have to maneuver the big claw to grab a prize.) Next to those were the Hot Wheels and G.I. Joes I played with when I was really little. My mom had bought me Barbie dolls at some point, but I cut off all their hair and painted them green and black, which I'm sure will surprise no one. My twin-size bed was tucked into the corner, and there was one really big window facing our yard and the road beyond it. I had a small TV on top of my dresser; my Nintendo and Xbox were hooked up to it. I might have been the laziest kid in Houston, because at some point I had lost the remote control for the TV, so I kept a pool stick next to my bed, and I would use it to click the buttons on the console instead of getting out of bed to change the channel. My parents made me turn off the TV at a certain time of night, but once they checked on me, I would often turn down the volume all the way and continue playing my games, keeping one ear focused on the noises coming from the living room. If I heard the creaking of my dad's chair, I would quickly press power on all the devices and flop back into bed. (Funny how I didn't need my pool stick then.)
But I also had some of my lowest moments inside that room. I would often sit on the carpeted floor between the bed and the dresser, drawing pictures and writing stories, trying to make sense of what was happening at school, how I was constantly being ridiculed for the way I looked. I had a lot of time to myself during those middle-school years, long afternoons that dragged on into longer nights. I was under strict orders from my dad to come directly home after school, so I had hours to occupy myself when I wasn't doing homeworkâtime that many of my friends were spending with each other, busy being the “normal” kids I so desperately wanted to become. Sometimes at night I would lie in bed thinking about the same things over and over, wondering what the heck was wrong with me, crying into my stuffed animals. When it was really bad, and I couldn't sleep because my brain was on an endless loop, I would take out a spiral notebook that I hid under my mattress or stuffed inside a game box beneath my bed. It was the same notebook I buried myself in when I got home from school, drawing and writing, and now I would scribble all my thoughts and questions:
Why am I so different? Why can't I be like everyone else? Will I ever be happy? Please just make me normal when I wake up.
The irony, of course, is that I was wishing away so much of what would eventually make me successful at basketball: my size, strength, and tenacity.
I drew really dark, depressing scenes. Somebody was always crying in my pictures. The main character, who was always a version of me, would be sitting under a tree, her back against the trunk, with crows circling and rain pouring down from a black sky. I would use a red pen to show the tears coming out of her eyes. I wrote stories about kids getting picked on and then beating up the bullies. There was a lot of fighting in my stories, and they never had happy endings. Once I wrote about a girl who cut her wrists and died. I would sometimes imagine what would happen if I did something like that, if I didn't exist anymore. In those moments, I pictured how sad my family would be, how much suffering it would cause my mother. I know now that a lot of kids have similar thoughts, when they think no one understands their pain and that life won't ever get better. I know now how important it is to acknowledge those thoughts and to share them with others. I know now that no matter how much you're hurting, you're not alone, because other people have been in your shoes. Because I've been there myself.
I think I was hoping if I put the pain down on paper, tried to capture what I was feeling, I could find some answers in the process. Not that I was consciously aware of this at the time; it simply felt like what I wanted to do, what I needed to do. Now I see it as a form of therapy. I think kids have an amazing capacity to try and heal themselves, to find whatever outlets they can to express the emotions inside them. When I look back at my twelve-year-old self, I can see I was searching for some kind of release, for a way to break the cycle, even as I continued to act out at school. My world had become so small, it felt like I had nothing to lose.
I would soon learn how wrong I was.
AS IF I DIDN'T HAVE
enough to worry about, my life was briefly interrupted the summer after sixth grade, when my parents decided to move. My dad wanted to get out of the city, so we packed up and headed to a house in the country, in a town called Dayton, about forty-five minutes outside Houston. We barely stayed six months, and the whole time we were there, it felt like we were in a constant state of transition. My sister Pier was a senior by then, and she drove back and forth each day to Houston so she could finish high school with her friends. Meanwhile, I missed my old school, which should tell you something about how things were going for me. I was used to the social dynamics of a city school; I knew what to expect every day in Houston. I knew when I had to watch my back, and when I could let down my guard. But in Dayton, I didn't know anybody. I was an outsider, a loner, and I retreated even further into myself.
I liked the idea of being in the country. I had a go-kart and a dune buggy, and a few acres of land to ride around. But when you're in seventh grade and school is miserable, your whole life is miserable. I was skipping classes, mouthing off to teachers, getting bad progress reports. I was a bloody messâliterally. One day during gym class, we were running outside, doing this little crosscountry course through the trees, and I turned my head for a second and somehow managed to smack right into a big old oak tree. I roughed up the right side of my face pretty bad and got blood all over my shirt. I was sent to the school nurse's office, but she just told me to wash myself off, so I did. Needless to say, when I got home and my parents got a look at me, they were none too pleased with how things were handled.
Turns out, I wasn't the only one struggling. My mom wasn't happy living there either. She felt isolated, and she was worried about me. She saw a snake in the front yard one day, not long after I had run into the tree at school, and that was the final straw for her. She said to my dad, “I'm sorry, but I'm not a little country woman.” It was time to go. So in the middle of the school year, we moved back to Houston, into a two-story house in the Memorial Hills neighborhood, and I enrolled at Teague Middle School. I was happy to leave Dayton, but I also felt like I couldn't get my footing anywhere. I was just thrashing my way through one school to the next, always trying to assert myself as tough.