What are they teaching these kids in Sunday school?

Yesterday I got an email message from a former student telling me that I am “fugly” and I need to get on a treadmill and have plastic surgery.

Sure, I’m hurt by this message, but not on a personal level as much as on an intellectual one.

For instance, it doesn’t really hurt my feelings that the student called me fugly or implied I’m overweight. Since I don’t think he really believes I need plastic surgery, his attack is rather toothless. In that sense, it's kind of obvious to me that he was just trying to wound me.

But what really hurts me is that he doesn’t respect me. Because if he did, he wouldn’t be trying to wound me at all.

Like most of the teachers and college professors I know, I work my butt off trying to help students learn the material and become better writers. I give it everything I have, and when school is in session I basically live and breathe my job. Though I don’t have “summers off” in the sense that I still have to work on my writing, I honestly don’t know how I would survive if I didn’t have these three months away from the classroom to recharge.

So when a former student sends me a hateful message—and it happens almost every semester, though it’s usually not this personal—it bothers me because it tells me that the student doesn’t think I work hard or care about my job. Because if the student believed that, he wouldn’t intentionally try to hurt my feelings.

To be honest, it’s hard to imagine any student—this one included—not knowing how hard I work after spending a semester in my classroom, and that’s what really burns me about this message. This kid knows I bust my butt for my students, and despite this, he’s basically saying, “I don’t care how hard you work or how much you care about your students because I still hate you. “ He’s pissing all over my attempts to be a good teacher.

It also bothers me because it’s the kind of comment that’s designed to attack me where I’m most vulnerable, which seems especially cruel. Most of my students learn over the course of the semester that I have a blog about body acceptance, so it’s clear this student thought he could undermine my self-confidence by attacking my physical appearance. It’s a cheap shot, but one he apparently thought would work.

Finally his comments bother me because they imply—especially the “get on the treadmill” comment—that I don’t exercise just because I’m not thin.

Twice every week on this blog I try to send the message that curvy does not mean unhealthy and a curvy person is not necessarily a person who doesn’t work out, but I’m clearly not getting the message across.

Not only do I work out, I work out religiously. I walk every morning—lately for eighty minutes, during which time I alternate between walking and running—and I usually exercise almost every afternoon and evening as well, which is my attempt to follow my own advice that we should all “play and play often.” So when this student told me to get on the treadmill, it actually hurt me more to think he assumes I don’t work out than it does for me to realize that he thinks I’m overweight.

So let me be clear—just because I’m lumpy or imperfect does not mean I am sedentary or lazy. It just means I’m no longer young, and I have a little wear and tear on my body. Of course, when you’re twenty-two, you have no idea that you can do everything in your power to be thin and still fail.

Though all of these issues are a problem, the biggest problem is why anyone—student or otherwise—feels comfortable saying these kinds of hurtful things to anyone else. Whatever happened to the golden rule?

I am not a religious person in the sense that I don’t read a Bible or go to church unless you count communing with nature every morning, but at times like these I find myself thinking of Leviticus 19:18—“You shall not take vengeance or bear a grudge against your kinsfolk. Love your neighbor as yourself”—or Matthew 5:39—“But I say to you, do not resist an evil person; but whoever slaps you on your right cheek, turn the other to him also.”

Which makes me wonder, what makes a human being want to harm another person this way? What kind of issues must one have to be so hateful?

I don’t have the answer to that question, but I do hope that each of us—myself included—will think twice the next time we are tempted to lash out at another.

If need be, think of the Torah, the Bhagavad-Gita, the Quran, the Bible, the Tao Teh Ching. Think of Socrates, Buddha, Jesus, Matthew, Luke, and Confucius. And treat others as you wish to be treated.

People don't change, but that doesn't mean you can't

When you’re young, the haters let themselves be known—they toss ugly comments at you in the hallways of junior high and high school like emotional grenades—causing you to cry in the bathroom but also making them easy to identify.

At that age, you’re too immature to understand that these people are not worthy of your tears, but by the time you’re in your twenties, you realize how much time you wasted worrying about what that jackass Tad Hightower said about your pimples in fifth period Spanish class.

But as you get older, the haters become harder to spot.

Like the rest of us, they learn that certain behavior—puking in the bushes, mocking the kid with glasses in the hallway—is not acceptable for adults. At least adults who want to make it in the adult world.

Because of that, it’s easy to think that the haters die out as we age, that people mature and become more kind. That’s why people are always quick to point out that kids are cruel—as if their cruelty can be excused by their age.

The thing is I don’t believe that kids are any more cruel than adults. It’s just that the cruel adults are better at hiding their depravity. No, they can’t call the obese woman in the office a whale like they did in middle school, but they can do other, less obvious–but almost equally hurtful—things.

They can casually mention the fact that they don’t eat sweets after three in the afternoon while everyone else is noshing on the snickerdoodle cookies your best friend brought to work for your birthday. There’s nothing obviously wrong with turning down the cookies, but deep down, the comment hurts—you and everyone. And you think, “maybe I wouldn’t be ten pounds overweight if I didn’t eat sugar after three either.” And for years, you let comments like these eat away at your self-confidence, like a twenty-four-hour buffet of your soul.

But eventually you grow wiser, and you see that even though they are veiled under a screen of politeness, comments such as these are meant to wound. They’re not coincidental. They’re meant to undermine and destroy—without you even knowing that you’re being attacked.

And when you finally figure this out, it’s as if someone has just turned on all the lights in the room. You can finally see things clearly. These are the same people who beat up the boy in the glasses after school, the same ones who wrote the word “slut” on your best friend’s locker after she lost her virginity. These are the haters. Only they’re smarter now and much more sly.

And when you figure this out, you remind yourself again what you’ve known for years . . .

The haters don’t matter.

All that matters is you. And what you think of yourself. The fact that you know you look beautiful—with or with those ten pounds—and that you are intelligent and funny and a hard worker and successful and a good friend, a good person even.

And the next time the haters start to spew their venom-filled crap, you won’t even hear them because you’ll be too busy listening to your internal monologue: you are amazing, you are amazing, you are amazing, you are amazing . . .

A few years ago, almost everyone I knew from grade school and high school got on Facebook and started friending each other. Since I moved away from my hometown in high school, the experience was incredibly cathartic for me—finally, I was able to find out what happened to all of my old friends, finally I had the connection to my childhood I had lacked for so many years.

But after a few months, I noticed that one of my “friends” had unfriended me. This wasn’t someone I barely knew. This was one of my closest childhood friends—I say this despite the fact that it was also someone who hurt me on a regular basis. Still, it wasn’t something I ever said anything about when we were kids—like so many people, I just put up with the cruelty, and we remained friends as long as we knew each other. So I couldn’t figure out why she had unfriended me on Facebook and stayed “friends” with the rest of our classmates.

It was so confusing to me that I emailed another good friend from grade school and asked her opinion about it. I will never forget what she said to me.

“Molly,” she said, “People don’t change.”

She didn’t explain much more than that, but I knew what she was saying—that it may seem like people are mature, responsible adults, that it may seem like they are good people, but that deep down, a person’s character is somewhat set in stone, that someone who hurt you then will hurt you now, and that all we can do is accept that, move on, and focus on ourselves.