Personal Essay
A previous version of this was published in Georgia Writers News. I am attaching an addendum to it based on subsequent events. I am putting it up now because it is relevant to yesterday’s blog about the resonance of the novel and movie Carrie being because of Carrie’s depiction of the teased teenager.
Maria Ruiz, I’m writing this for you. Even though you’ll probably never read it. Your name is probably no longer Ruiz and hasn’t been for decades. You may no longer call yourself Maria.
I’m forty years old as I write this. So are you. You probably don’t even remember me. You never knew Denise Noe anyway. You knew Tina Dickerson.
Why would you remember a girl you hated when you were a girl? Why would you remember a girl whose name was Tina Dickerson when yours was Maria Ruiz?
You were so pretty, Maria (”the girl with the beautiful eyes” is what my mother called you — she didn’t know your name). You were a tough girl, Maria, a tough-looking “chola” with thick make-up and large breasts.
You placed the toe of your shoe against the back of my thong-exposed heel. “Sorry,” you said sarcastically. I turned around and saw that it was Maria Ruiz. But I did not say Maria, why are you doing that? You pushed down a second time hard enough to tear my skin so I bled down my foot. “Sorry,” you said again.
I thought you were a bad girl, Maria Ruiz. Mean. Just mean for no reason. Or mean to me because I was “a good girl” — no dates, no drugs, and the teachers liked me. According to some, I was so smart and mature for my age.
But sometimes people – adults — would ask my Mom, “Is she all right?” as they pointed at their heads. Smaller kids, lacking the ability to refer even obliquely to mental illness, said “That Tina, she’s retarded.”
For kids my own age, I was easily identifiable. “Dresses weird.” No 1970s-era teenager wore polyester pantsuits . . . except Tina Dickerson.
I was in Social Problems, hunched over a textbook, when you came up behind me and sprayed a bottle of perfume into my hair and the side of my face, making my eyes sting.
“Gawd, Maria,” the girl in back of me said with disgust, “It stinks.”
“Tina, you stink,” another girl called out.
I said nothing. I did not turn around and hit you. I didn’t even ask you why you did that.
I wondered why, Maria Ruiz. Why, when I happened to be in a bank one day, trotting alongside my mother, did you glare at me with a fire in those beautiful eyes, both hands angrily giving me the finger?
Much later, I realized that there was a reason you hated me, Maria. Some two decades, over a dozen medications, and as many headshrinkers later — I suddenly knew why Maria Ruiz had hated me in Sierra High School in Whittier, California in the year 1974.
I had not gone on to great things, as teachers and fellow pupils expected (and perhaps you and others feared, Maria) I would do. I had not gone on to good things, not even ordinary things. I was a chronically unemployed mentally ill woman fired from almost every job she’d ever attempted and receiving SSI.
On a bus, traveling to get my Rx, I overheard a question and something tripped in my memory, Maria.
“How high is your IQ score?” A stranger asked another.
So riding on that bus I remembered a pretty girl named Maria Ruiz asking, “Tina, how high is your IQ score?” in a high school history class when I was Tina Dickerson, the dresses weird, smart girl.
I had shrugged on that long-ago day, not wanting to brag about being so smart, and fibbed, “One hundred.”
“It can’t be one hundred,” you said. “Normal is one hundred.”
That was all I remembered of that brief conversation. But that memory triggered another one, equally brief. One of you saying “Stay here and talk with me.”
It was in the girls’ bathroom at Sierra High School. You were there, Maria, a tough, pretty girl sitting up on the sink and smoking a cigarette (trademark of a tough girl).
I washed my hands.
“Don’t go, Tina,” you said.
“What?” I asked. “Why?”
“Stay here and talk with me,” you said.
But I left, not knowing, not thinking, that you had reached out to me — the weird girl? the smart girl? the good girl? — with an offer of friendship and that I had rejected you.
So there was a reason for your hatred, after all. The events came together in my mind — after that, you tried to get my attention by giving me “flats.” Then you sprayed the perfume on me. The look of sheer fire in your beautiful eyes as you gave me two of “the fingers.”
It made sense. You tried to make friends with me and I rejected you.
You probably don’t remember any of this, Maria. But I’m writing this for you, anyway. Because anything is possible. And because, in a very real sense, I do not live in time (although I’m sure, that like most people, you do, Maria). I feel anything I have experienced with more intensity than when I actually experienced it. That is one of the properties of my mouthful of an illness: schizotypal personality disorder with obsessive and compulsive features.
So it is just possible that you will read this and recognize yourself. And that we will meet again someday. Not likely at all. But possible. Your name will not be Maria Ruiz any more than mine is Tina Dickerson. We might be in our fifties or sixties or, perhaps, two centenarians.
I’m writing this for you, Maria, just in case. Because wherever you are and whatever your name now is, I have something to say to you:
“Let’s talk.”
Addendum
I was able to find Maria Ruiz. She read the essay. As I had anticipated, she didn’t remember any of her persecution of me. Years after meeting Maria again, I saw a Dr. Phil about a woman who had had a baby in high school and given it up for adoption. Another girl had harassed her and led kids in ridiculing the girl who had been pregnant. The persecuting girl was now a middle-aged woman and came on to the show to say that she was sorry she had done those things but that she had no recollection of it.
As I also anticipated, Maria Ruiz had since married and was using a different last name. She had also adopted a different first name.
Maria wrote that she was “saddened” if she had in fact done the things described in my essay but that she wondered if I was certain I had the right person. She gave me her phone number and asked me to please call her.
I did. She told me that she had not worn thick make-up in high school but only lipgloss. I admitted that I might have been in error about this matter and could have gotten it wrong because I somehow confused her being “the girl with the beautiful eyes” as my mother called her with wearing make-up. She indicated that she had often been complimented on her green eyes.
She also said that she had not considered herself a “chola” but a “surfer.” Furthermore, she had not been a “bad girl” but someone who was kind of like a mother hen to other teenagers. She told me a story about how when she had been in junior high school, she had alerted the grown-ups when a kid had taken an overdose of drugs so that the boy was rescued in time to be treated. I had a vague recollection of this and her telling me about it led me to use it as the basis of a short story.
Maria had gotten confused about the bus incident in my essay and knew she could not have done anything to me on the bus since she had either ridden in a car or driven one to high school. I reminded her that the essay did not say that she had harassed me on a bus but that I heard something on a bus years later that jogged my memory of how she had initially been friendly toward me and how I had been (however inadvertently) rejecting and brusque toward her.
She well remembered smoking in the girls’ restroom. She also remembered Social Problems class and how the teacher told so many funny stories. We both laughed a bit about that.
I ended up comforting Maria, telling her that I felt I was to some degree responsible for the trouble between us. I also told her that teenagers often have extremely emotional responses to what they perceive as rejection and that pain of hers could have contributed to her cruelty to me.
When I hung up the phone, I felt pretty good. Talking to Maria Ruiz and knowing that she was really a nice person helped to clean and close this old wound.
But it also left me with a lingering sadness. I knew even more definitely that when we were young, we could have been – and should have been – friends.
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amfortas said,
And Mary Moriarty who tried to comfort me and got undeserved short shrift! I owe her an apology for that, even though she had dumped me when I was six.
January 30, 2008 at 6:43 am
Artfldgr said,
Maria Ruiz was a female sociopath. A Sociopath can be smart, but their smarts is dedicated to wining by other means.
THAT was the lesson you SHOULD have learned, not a whole life of therapy and now a long rationalization so that you can believe you understand someone that you probably cant fathom, as you have empathy, guilt, and other things maria ruiz will never have, even if she is smart.
to give a different example, at the SBA there is an 8a program, basically it gives tons of benifits for immigrants and women, what group does that leave out?
you see, there are many ways to move up, or down, and while our society says some of them are more favorable than others, what they failed to teach you is that while more favored, there are a lot of others that work too.
maria ruiz taught you that, and your explanation says you refused to learn the lesson!
maria, kept you out of the competition pool. this is why IQ is not a clear predictor of winners, and why a genetic hostility towards those that break the status quo can take out a mutant benifit that would confer on someone elses line a plus, that in total would give your lineage a negative.
think of that in the bigger picture.
maria ruiz may not have ben book smart, but she was smart enough to know that without you inthe world her children will do better.
just as the wealthy know that without the middle class to bridge the gap between poor and wealthy, the chasm is too wide to cross without speical dispensation from above. (the force that creates the worship of roualty in feudalism or its modern equivalents).
what she knows because she ISNT so smart, is that the worlds only real meaning is DYNASTY. without ideas to cloud her judgment, to convince her somethig else is important, she acted on her primitive instincts.
to her, you were part of her tribe. and since we cooperate and compete, she had a choice of each point. your intelligence actually removes her from cooperation. think about that. your smart, and you would pick compet would be where she bows out, but cooperation is where she is locked out.
she may need to come to you for answers, but she cant see you come to her for answers. she is forever your supplicant if she cooperates.
your walking away was not what you a person with empathy and caring would assume (watch house. he starts off in first season as a aspergers person, but now he is a sociopath who is curious as to the human condition and sees what he doesnt have as failings. what before was curiosity, has blossomed into sadism justified with a wrapper of medical science).
when someone doesnt want to be the freind of a normal person, everyone goes on with their lives, but you cant analyse the dynamic. you traded that ability for your smarts! she traded her smarts for that ability.
so your failure to cooperate was not the trigger of her bitter jealousy, your not that valuable as a person to her. however, your failure to become her freind, meant that she could not manipulate the situation between you and turn supplication to “topping from the bottom”. without your empathy and cooperation she could not make you feel sorry for the ‘dumb; girl and exploit YOUR need to be liked and not tormented to improve her life. if you did become her friend, it would have only seemed to be the lesser of two evils, but in truth you would have ended up even more a mess as her leash on you would pull you back over and over till it snapped.
so competition is her only next option. what she needed was to pick the battle field, and being sociopathic and more primitive, she decided that like cooperation, fair competition in a battle where the other chooses the weapon when challenged would fail.
your actions told her this. (i grew up a unattractive white kid with red hair in the years of race riots while living in the worst area of new yorks bronx- i learned a lot about sociopaths in a school with over 4000 kids, most of them armed)
your actions told her that her only option was compete, and that to win, she had to not compete in your expertise. your smarts made you decline working on the other parts of your social skills, and so THATS where she picked her battle field.
where you were most weak.
she could not compete with you by getting better grades, by wining an award. but she could compete with you in social standing and the regard of others in her IMMEDIATE group. the fake tribe you both call school
she knew the other proficiencies. that a person teased that doesnt respond moves down the social scale. intuitively, or biologically primitively, she was making sure that your biology would work against you. each time you let her get away with something, yoru body responded with lowering your perception of where you stood on the social ladder.
just as wins increase males testosterone, and loses decrease it, we have mechanisms to help us sort out ‘our place’ in the social herarchy. failure to do so can be fatal .
if you failed to take your place AND failed to oppose her, the situatino could lead to your death… either by your own hand to escape, or by her hand to finish off that whcih will not thake their place.
you see, failure to understand the cultures, and biology of our past, meant that you were left naked with a bunch of euphamisms.
in my case, i had a good family. i learned from much earlier than your experience about these people. dad explained them to me, and so did my uncle. each had cultural responses and history to dip into for what to do.
at that time i had more than 4 generations of expertise to help me and in doing so they created a person that was more effective.
i had my grandad, my parents, my great grandad, my uncle, teachers, and contemporaries.
with so much around me, the war zone i lived in wasnt as bad as it could be.
most of what harms us we do to ourselves. thats clear from your story. your inabilityu to understand it has made you carry your msiery like a precious jewel, and like now, when the times allow it, you take out your jewel and in one way or anotehr you polish it up and keep it shiny.
it should have gone into the dust bin the year you never saw her again.
by not giving you PC incorrect answers as to how to handle it, you were left alone. your parents had no tools, nothting to tell you. their options of going to authority means nothing, and increases your pain. because authority is only where it wants to be. Where it isnt, smarter marias prevail knowing this. this is the argumetn for knowing and being educated, and even for bearing firearms.
if one were to look at this genetically… maria was more lifesmart than you. you were more booksmart than maria. in adults the elite have more power than maria would ever have… you never realized that, that was marias golden age, and for her, everything else will be a mess and not right for the rest of her life.
its this desire for an authority to fight your battles and your fear of the same authority punishing you if you fight your own battles that served you up on a silver platter to maria…
[and is serving you and those you convince up to the same authorities that let you down, that are making the same promises. your desire to havce this resolved and corrected makes you try to relive it over and over, and over with the concept that "this time you will get it right". but your failure to drop it, and move on, has cost you your life. no matter how many abusive relatinships of whatever type you get into to fix this, it will nver be right. the other cant be fixed adn so the outcome will always be ill. till you realize that the correct play is not what you have been playing, you will not win. you will also keep playing like a gambler who has to win back what they lost, but cant stop since theykeep losing more]
in the real world game of dynasty, maria won. her children will be in the next round of the game.
in the game of dynasty, most feminists will lose..
one reason you keep leaning their way is that in their book dynasty is not the only game, and so you dont have to look at losing. but like the game where you keep making the same mistake trying to fix it, they are insuring that you stay in that state of loss. it brought you to them in the first place.
so maria, not very smart, shows that there are many ways to win this game, and IQ while being important, is not the completely dominating factor.
the dominating factor is an understandig of reality… and if a person with a high iq denies their participation in that reality, they then fill in those gaps with imagination. (ergo the lefts constant imagineing of what the world should be like rather than what the world is like. and why their polices are not much better than pin the tail on the donkey. they are constantly trying to connect two dots that actually dont exist)
so a high iq by itself leaves a person incomplete. this is why iq above 120 is not so clearly a benifit… a person that high, that aviods the real world, requires a fish bowl to be happy… a place where their assumptions of the world are not constantly being tested. that way they can get on with their very vertical work. they need the other side to complet them.
this is also why our eduation promotes this situation. a person with a high iq AND life smarts is now no longer an incomplete person who requires a controlled invironment to work in, and is willing to donate their work to ahve that.
what you get is a person who is serious competition for marias, and their kind.
remember the majority, the mean are 100s… so it behooves them to cripple the smartest and by doing so transfer their labor to the group that operates better in the real world but needs the products of the mental world.
america was founded by a group of peopel who had both. our old education system created both.
this is why our inventivness and such has dithered down a huge amount and the explosion stopped.
smart people can come upw ith solutions to problesm that less smart people ask them to.
but it takes a smart person with the same life knowlege to come up with things that work in the real world and based in it.
as for you…
your wrong.. these explanations are a way that a smart person tries to figure out every corner of the world to make sense. but thats just a failure to realize that it doesnt have to make sense otehr than the impiracle.
if doing something illogically makes for a win, like maria, then illogic is a fine logic when the outcome is everything. (this is why our minds are not forced to be referentially whole - ideas can float disconnected and can contradict each other. these contradictions are not caused by contradictiosn but in now knowking where in a spectrum a balance lies).
maria has little empathy… so she will not reason the way you do. if she did, then she wouldnt do the things your saying. yuo have to think like maria, and your thinking like you if you were maria. not thiking like maria.
maria cant make these leaps your making, her actions are more primitive, less fancy. dont be fooled that they are working becuse they are worked out like your plans. they work becasuie they are workgin on another simpler level that in society tends to be imagined not to exist, or is shunned so that we forget it as an option.
it exists… Stalin is proof of that… as is Radical feminism.. and other such things. these ideologies work on the premises i just let you in on. that winning by any means is more important than wining the right way. so all of these lessers pretending to be more use the same tactics. the uplifting of the lesser in relation to the greater as a means of creating the illusion among the lesser that they are as tall and great as the greater. its blackmail, since the only way that they can continue to feel this way, is to support the regime that is powerful enough to hold the greater down. which is why they decline to privation.
maria cant be rationalized to. you will never get to a rational explanation for her behavior till you realize that in the context of life, she was smarter, and she was right. in the context of society community and such she was wrong. but the latter depends on whether everyone is apart of a community or not. she wanted you out of hers or under her control. you gave her neither, and so she neutralized you - taken fartehr, she did it for her kids who wuold have competed with your kids.
till you rationalize that these actions are ONLY wrong in context of a better society, you will forever run yourself in mental circles.
maria was never worth the thought you gave her. her actions never really went past the days you saw her. you had to help her. you had to do the dirty work for her. she coudlnt reach you till you agreed with her to do it. you let her get to you, and you carried this baggage all your life.
your the one that made it more important than the rest of life.
you could have just as easily chosen not to. to accept that she was a dipshit… that she was not going to have a better life, unless you let her.
but you would have to have a whole lot of politically incorrect concepts to do that. you would ahve to devalue such peopel as her.
you confused elitism, with being safe… so in an effort to be egalitarian, your still trying to fit her into a world where she doestn belong.
your reasoning is also wrong because of the ideology that we are the same. your ideological bent is causing you to reason that she is like you and then rationalize how she could do that if you were her.
you and maria were very different…
if you saw that, you could have written her off…
but since she was the same as you, writing her off woudl be to write you off.
to quote the little aside in house last night…
things dont care…..
sociopaths are humans that are like things.. and like things they dont care.
they are not persons, they are incomplete - thinking their failings are superior.
you will not be able to reason from human, to thing, and get a meaningful answer. she has a lot more options than you… but she also has a lot more negative outcomes, and an inability to progress on merit.
January 30, 2008 at 1:02 pm