During my grade school years in the sixties, being labeled a “drip” was considered an insult of the highest order—right up there with “retard” and “spaz.” If you were a drip, it meant that you lived in poverty and your mother sewed all your clothes, badly. You had no social skills and were always chosen last in gym to be on someone’s team. Or you might be afflicted with a physical deformity of some sort—a huge, honking nose, say, or buck teeth.

Now, I did not suffer from any of these afflictions. My social skills were average and I don’t remember being the one kid no one wanted to play on their side. My nose was proportionate to my face, and my teeth, though a tad bit crooked, were not the least bit bucked. Still, I felt like a freak every day of my life. My unique spirit had caught frostbite from my stepfather’s frequent acidic comments regarding my appearance, and intelligence.
“Ugly,” “Stupid,” and “Klutz” were his favorite means of describing me, and I had no defense against these horrid accusations. Who was to say I wasn’t all these things, and more? I slunk about, furtive, feeling like a deformed hunchback, not wanting anyone to see, much less comment on, my grotesqueness.

Somewhere along the line, someone came up with a good retort to the “drip” accusation. A typical exchange went like this:

“Hey So-and-So—you’re a drip!”

“Oh yeah?”

This was said with as much bold scorn as possible, in spite of a pounding heart. The accuser was nearly always twice your size, or in with the cool crowd, in front of whom nothing, absolutely nothing, was worse than being teased. “Thanks for the compliment!”

Baffled, the bully’s reply was sure to be, “What compliment, dummy?”

“You called me a drip,” came the rattled out reply, words tumbling over one another with haste, “and a drip is a drop, a drop is water, water is nature, and nature is BEAUTIFUL. So thanks for calling me beautiful!” With which you’d turn and run like the wind because, as everyone knows, bullies do not like to be embarrassed either.

From the vantage point of adulthood, I admire the keen audacity with which such insults were deflected, the deft (and creative) evasion of an intended curse, turning it into a blessing.

Where did I get the courage to stand up to these bullies? Sure, it was only pretended courage—but they didn’t know that. I never cracked, never let them see me tremble or worse yet, cry.

Perhaps my inability throughout my childhood to stand up to my in-house abuser is what egged me on when faced with lesser threats. I’d lived, was living, for most of my childhood with the worst kind of bullying possible, and from someone much more to be feared than the coolest cat in school. Did this embolden me to stand my ground when cornered by some bored popular classmate, surrounded by his snickering, supercilious friends?
I’m amazed every time I remember my younger self, hotly indignant in the face of such insult. Good for me, I can’t help but think. Sometimes we’re so used to thinking in terms of being a victim that it’s hard to realize there have been times when we were bold, even in the face of fear. Bold and determined even when all odds seemed against us.

If you’ve lived through child abuse of any kind, or fled for your life from an abusive relationship, you have more strength than you know.

May this be the year that survivors everywhere (male and female) begin to recognize their own audacious strength, disdaining the label “victim.” May we every one of us learn to evade taunting insults (especially those which originate in our own minds), deftly turning every curse into a blessing.