This post was brought to you by A Misandrist.
In fifth grade, my class studied the Salem Witch Trials as part of the social studies curriculum. This was a terrible thing to teach in middle school in the early 2000s, just as Sabrina was losing its cool and before Rookie’s articles about witchy style icons and Tumblr covens would make being a witch admirable, even aspirational. Witches weren’t empowered femmes with sweet magic powers and flowing lace dresses, they were ugly, cackling women with warts on their green face and big, hooked noses.
Fifth grade also happened to be when girls in my class started realizing who is pretty and who wasn’t, and consequently was when I realized I really didn’t like my nose. It wasn’t what I later learned was called the “ski slope” shape, a graceful and elegant curve anointing my face. It wasn’t cute. It was bumpy and large and dominating. It stuck out when I looked at myself in the mirror from the side. I had a habit of pressing the bump in the middle down thinking I could make it go away.
Even before we got to witches in social studies, girls in my class had started to ask me where my mole was, because my big nose made me look like a witch. They cackled as I walked by. It could have just been another tool in their arsenal of teasing, but I knew the Salem unit was coming and it could only get worse. I needed to prepare, so I decided the best course of action was to hide.
Instead of just my nose, I wanted my whole self to go away. I went from being the girl who raised her hand to answer every question to pretending I didn’t know the answers in class. I tried to wear trendy outfits that looked like the ones everyone else wore, even if I didn’t like them. Much like the women of 17th century Massachusetts, I was paranoid about everything I did that could lead to being labeled out of the ordinary. But there wasn’t much I could do about my face. I thought there could be nothing worse than having a nose that could bear some resemblance to your typical Halloween store broom-flying green-faced witch when your class was studying how women were being put to death for being witches.
Except there are actually two things.
The first I would find out when my teacher showed us a short documentary on the trials in class one day. In one scene, a graveyard in Salem was shot as filler over some spooky narrative about the town, and on one of the headstones the movie made sure to spend a good long time hovering over you could clearly make out my last name. Later research showed that it turns out Salem’s tourist attractions include Pickering Wharf and the Pickering House, so it makes sense that a few Pickerings had made their way to church graveyard. I’m not sure if I’m related to any of them or if my maybe-relatives had anything to do with the trials, but that doesn’t really matter because with one girl’s gasp and shriek of “That’s Amanda’s name!” my already awkward “brainiac” poorly-dressed, definitely not popular fifth-grade self was now officially a real-life witch. History said so.
The second one came that night for homework when my teacher decided an awesome assignment for middle-schoolers would be to write an essay accusing one of our classmates of being a witch. I think she wanted to show by example how silly and arbitrary the accusations were, how anyone’s peculiarities could lead to a death sentence and how that was terrifying and weren’t we glad that part of history is over? But I’m not sure how she expected anything good to come of it. It’s like, hey, you know how you guys just realized how your raging pubescent hormones make you all emotionally wonky and really, really mean to each other? For homework, do that!
The next day my teacher read the accusations aloud. There were 20 people in my class, 20 potential witches to burn. Every single one was about me.
I don’t know if my teacher knew what was coming, but I did. The night before I had decided that the best course of action would be to “confess” in my essay instead of accusing someone else, since at this point I really wanted to be an actual witch, that being anything else was better that what I was now. I said my family didn’t have a car not because we couldn’t afford one but because we had broomsticks, that I drank potions for lunch, that I was good at math because of spells I chanted over quizzes. I wrote that they better watch out, because I could curse them all the next time they made fun of my face. I could make their faces even uglier than mine. At that moment, it felt good to be evil. To be something.
What I wanted to do was take hurt and craft it into something magical and powerful by owning up to being the most ugly, the most strange. When I was put on trial after the accusations were read, it felt good to stand in front of my classmates, stare them down, and scare them for once. I wasn’t going to try to fit in anymore–I was, after all, a witch. I was sentenced unanimously to be burned at the stake.
But in this hell that was middle school, I couldn’t keep it up. While my classmates realized they couldn’t actually kill me, they still wanted to get rid of me. Some pretended to be so scared of my “powers” they told the teacher they couldn’t sit near me. I had always been alone by being unpopular, but this kind of avoidance was worse. Then people said couldn’t have me in class, it was too scary, what would I do to them. I was probably cheating on my tests too. I went to a private Christian school on a scholarship, and I began to fear that some of the more well-to-do kids who threatened to try to get me expelled would somehow succeed once they told their parents there was a real-life witch in their class. I had tried to stand up for myself and failed, I could have come out of my shell but instead I crawled deeper inside, until the hysteria died down. I learned what women had been learning for generations–keep your head down and don’t draw attention to yourself, or else.
Eventually I went to a public magnet high school full of fellow nerds where I met my best friends, and my weird hand-me-down dresses were considered original and cool. One of the first days of freshman year, a girl in my gym class complimented my super stylish dress over pants look by saying it was “unique, just like you!” and she was sincere about it and I couldn’t get over the shock that this was a good thing, that expressing myself could actually gain me friends.
When I told people about my family’s relation to Salem in my 10th grade U.S. history class, instead of thinking I was sent from Hell to destroy them and must be stopped, people thought it was awesome. It made me interesting. And I wouldn’t have to use my powers for protection and revenge, as I had wanted to in fifth grade to get back at my classmates for making fun of me. If I wanted to crawl out of the shell I was at this point so deeply hidden in, I just had to realize I had some at all.
Somehow, being a witch might be pretty cool.
Soon enough I would be right. Teen culture today loves witches and being witchy. Tumblr has tons of resources on Ouija, crystals, and the best herbs to burn when you have a crush (and I’m sure the people posting them aren’t all social outcasts). Tavi, arguably the coolest teenager on the internet/ever, brags about being called a witch in her Twitter bio. Then, right after I thought I had written this essay, my friend forwarded me an article about the coven that meets at the bar around the corner from my house in Brooklyn (“HAHAHAHA! YOU LIVE HERE!” he said) that was published in the New York Times. “Calling ourselves witches is cool because witches used to be shunned,” one of the women in the article says, and I wonder if I’m even cool enough to show up to one of their parties as I read about their fancy hairstyles and jackets and saging your apartment, which I’ve never done. Plus, I totally have a corporate job, which apparently isn’t a witch thing–and suddenly, after a childhood of worrying I was an evil heathen, I’m not witchy enough.
It’s hard to accept that you can not only be a witch to be in with the trends, but be a witch at all when memories from middle school are whispering warnings from the back of your mind to remind you that women once died for this. But I don’t want let them get to me this time. Being a witch is embracing a historically female power (and for me, family history) to have control over your life and decisions, to not take shit from other people if they think you are weird or ugly, that taking weird and turning it into power can work out in your favor. I just have to keep telling myself over and over that it’s in my blood.
And in the end, life as a witch since middle school hasn’t been that bad at all. Now that witch style is in, I wear black all the time. Since I’ve been hexing before it was a thing I can give my friends tips and tricks now that they want to be witches, too, and no group of people has tried to murder me in years.
But I still cringe when I see my face in profile. I can’t stand my nose.
Tags: amanda pickering, childhood, magic, noses, whoa, witches
THAT TEACHER IS A MONSTER
YES.
That teacher reminds me of the generally benign youth group leader I had, a thirty something man who thought it’d be a good idea to play the lifeboat game with his gaggle of vaguely Christian and/or weirdo outcast and/or there by parental pressure youth group, who were mainly junior high and high school girls.
The lifeboat game involves going around in a circle, deciding who you would push out of a lifeboat in order to save the group, AND SAYING WHY. I have no idea what this was supposed to teach us – The Greater Good? The importance of sacrifice? Christ’s love is like SURVIVOR: GETHSEMANE?
Anyway, it ended in tears.
“Now let’s all play a fun game called ‘Cast the First Stone!’ “
She’s either evil or incredibly dumb. Either way, probably not a great teacher of preteens.
For real. This article was really great, though.
Can we have a whole separate post about the worst things teachers made us do in class? In eleventh grade we were reading The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison, and one day my teacher asked me to read the rape scene, out loud, to the entire class.
NOW YOU GUYS GO.
My teacher once pulled me out of a class to stand me up in front of another class to lecture me on how SKINNY I was, & if I got the flu, & couldn’t eat, what would I do?
In 6th grade my gym teacher stopped the entire class to have them watch me demonstrate how not to set a volleyball. You will be deeply shocked to learn that this did nothing to change my opinion that team sports are Not My Thing.
We had a horrific day devoted to talking about PSE (Personal and Social Education) stuff in our tutor groups when I was about 13. We watched The Breakfast Club (not horrific) and then had to say which of the characters we were, and all of my friends loudly insisted that I had to be the nerd, there was no other character I could be, while I tried to argue that you can’t just pigeonhole someone according to one character trait (did you not watch the film?). Then we had to hand round pieces of paper with our names on for people to write comments about what they liked about us. All of mine were to do with being smart, while the rest of my friendship group were giving each other kind, heartfelt comments about why they liked each other. I cried a lot.
We had a similar “compliments” exercise and I ended up with a sheet full of “nice.” I understand what it means when all you can say about me is “nice,” fellow middle schoolers.
Why do teachers think it’s ever a good idea? It really isn’t. (A YA book I love has a teacher deliberately use it as a way of alienating one girl further from her classmates. Far more true to life.)
I got pregnant my junior year of high school, and was miserably sick for the first few months. I missed a lot of school, not only because I was sick but because I was so miserable in my own skin and so petrified of being judged by my peers.
So of course, I had a teacher (male, of course) who told not only my class but all of his other classes that he couldn’t release a test because one student who was “pregnant and thought she was above it all” hadn’t taken it yet, and encouraged them all to confront that student and tell her she was being lazy. Which, of course, made me so uncomfortable I wanted to crawl in bed and not get out until I had given birth.
Needless to say, I never set foot in that classroom again. I got a C by turning in work through a friend though!
Holy shit.
Yeah, it wasn’t the best.
From 6th to 7th grade, we were assigned THE WORST FORM TEACHER EVER (TM). If we girls leant on the desk, she’d be like, “Stop putting your breasts on the table!” and if we were perceived to be overly lethargic, we had to get up and do a song called Under The Chestnut Tree which came with hand movements.
But the worst thing she ever did was to force us to celebrate our birthdays. In class. For 20 minutes. Birthday kids had to be seated in front of the class, isolated from everyone else who went on to eat chips and drink fizzy drinks. (We brought our own refreshments.)
Of course, when my birthday rolled around, I refused to get up and go to the front of the class. I said, I’m not doing this, it’s MY birthday. I ignored all her threats and ridicule until she said she’d call my parents. I gave in. 🙁
Ahhhh, I wanted to be a witch so bad in the late 90s (/right now) – I even tried that Henry Sugar thing of staring at candle flame forever to boost my mind-control skills. This was right around the time I started wearing all black, burning incense in candle-lit ceremonies, listening to Rob Zombie (?), and buying Wicca books at the mall, mightily intrigued by the spell for female orgasm one promised. It involved a bath and some cinnamon sticks (??).
“Spell for Ancient Hallowed Yeast Infection of the Gods”
“My herbal bath brings all the boys to the yard where I promptly hex them and revel in my misandrist power until I achieve female orgasm.”
Wow, are you really Penn Gillette’s daughter? 😉 (For everyone else: yes, he really named his daughter “Moxie Crimefighter”)
OMG THAT TEACHER why would anyone think that is at all appropriate to do to a group of teens aiuhosihgoidsg
THIS IS THE GREATEST HEADLINE OF ALL TIME
Oh man. Middle School is Hell. I had a similar experience. I wore boys clothes and glasses and played D&D, so I got called “The Natural Disaster.” It escalated until someone brought in a picture of Big Foot for our Community Sharing board and wrote my name under it.
With the rise of Geek Chic, I’ve been wondering. Is our current cultural currency due to the fact that, as my middle school self dreamed, our higher intelligence has allowed us to become more powerful/influential/etc than our shiny-haired bullies? Or did the awkward nerds outnumber the cool kids, and we were just too scared to see it?
In all honesty, I think a lot of the bullies really DID peak in middle/high school. The rest of us bided (? is that a word?) our time until we escaped into the great wide world and found kindred spirits…which coincidentally is right around the time we have the power to make things like Geek Chic trendy 😉
I think it’s actually the rise of diversity and the internet amongst the young. Multiracial is one of the fastest growing racial groups in the US right now, and the younguns are much more racially diverse than at any point: “Among the 4.4 million 18-year-olds in 2011, for example, 56% were white, 21% were Hispanic, 15% were black and 4% were Asian.”
2050 or sooner is when the US becomes an majority minority population, the majority minority will happen a lot faster for the kids- 2028 election will have a majority minority age bracket of 18-29. And being gay is fine with the young- 75 of americans age 18-29 support gay marriage.
Not that there aren’t still lots and lots of homogeneous pockets all across the country- racial and class segregation are still massive, but if you are a teen, have the internet and know kids of different backgrounds, your sense of what “cool” is has to be much more wide open than our 80s and 90s era of the mall. That opening in the country, that sesame street level willingness to extend your compassion to people who aren’t like you, I think is happening. Unevenly, but I think that’s part of it. You don’t get to be cool just by being Brad in Tommy Hilfiger who plays soccer. And you can see communities and styles online, and so i think cool now maybe has shifted to the “undiscovered, the unusual, the first to wear x,y,z”
I ride a morning bus with kids who go to a local magnet arts school and watching the way they dress and interact, its like a whole other world. Their fashion choices are so amazing and so varied and so rapidly changing from month to month- whereas I remember the kids in my school- we all had our particular uniforms and stuck with it, these kids look like one day the kid who was goth yesterday is now preppy. The kids of different races are talking to each other and wearing the same things, the boys and girls don’t act like separate species. They’re still youths and therefore total monsters, but it’s really really interesting to see.
Diversity is, indeed, the key. I was so very isolated in my parents’ house. There was no internet back then and had there been, my fearful parents would have prohibited it. Only the large public schools saved me. I was surrounded by kids of several faiths and of two races. And all of us were taught by adults who were accustomed to that variety. If I had been home-schooled or educated in some small town or institution, I would have been a very young suicide. I am most serious.
So, I know how you felt, Amanda, both during your middle-school isolation and in the more diverse school where you could be yourself and feel safe at the same time. My heart hurts for the child you were. And I am glad you wrote this. Thank you.
What the hell was wrong with that teacher?!
Also as someone who just wrote a book about a (actual, magic-wielding) witch enduring 5th grade, this went right up my alley and into my brain. This was fantastic.
Fellow nose-hater, ahoy! My mom once told me she’d understand if I wanted to get rhinoplasty. I was 11.
ETA: Based on the photographic evidence submitted here, I think you look great!
the kids at my school were slow, they didn’t point out my witch nose until the 7th grade. losers.
My mom told me all throughout high school that if I just pinched the sides of my nose (slightly above my nostrils, where it starts to get cartilage-y) every day it would stop being so big.
This is my nose.
Which is to say, not at ALL, no one knows anything and should not be talking about noses. Yours are lovely! There is no such thing as an ugly nose unless it is green and warty.
Well, you obviously did a fine job; looks great!
Chills
“…women once died for this.”
I’ve managed to memory-block a lot of grade school, but I was also in a private Catholic school and also was called a witch, although why, I’m not sure. Despite me supposedly being the witchy one, my other classmates would cast spells ON me, to de-witch-ify me, I guess? I also had willfully ignorant teachers which naturally made things ten times better. I was a big fan of the Beatitudes at the time: the meek shall inherit the earth? Fuck yeah we will AND THEN YOU’LL BE SORRY.
But I don’t want let them get to me this time. Being a witch is embracing a historically female power (and for me, family history) to have control over your life and decisions, to not take shit from other people if they think you are weird or ugly, that taking weird and turning it into power can work out in your favor. I’m with you Amanda, all the way.
How did that teacher let it go so far!?!
My father was primarily a high school choir teacher, but occasionally taught elementary. He refused to teach middle school – he knew his limitations. He once told me middle school kids, particularly 5th graders, would learn more if we just released them into the wild for the year. Having had a terrible 5th grade year myself, I agreed with him.
ps. I’ve been a long time stalker of the toast, but I’m trying to come out of my shell a bit (hi – I’m shy) so here I am. Be gentle.
Hi!
Hallo fellow toastie!
For me, 5th grade was the year of finally figuring out elementary school (and I had the best teacher I’d had since 1st grade, so it was pretty cool all around). 6th grade was when we were thrown to the jackals.
Ugh, I have heard the same thing about middle school, and I have the scars to prove it. I also learned practically nothing. I think I would have done better with a few years in the wild.
Hello another Nose With Character person here! I do have a mole so, yes, I’ve heard the witch comments before. An assignment like that would have ruined me, like school isn’t bad enough. That teacher was an idiot.
I actually like my nose now (not everyday, but most.) I follow the Fuckyeahbignoses Tumblr. It’s very pro-nose. It amazes me the people who have beautiful faces thinking their noses are big!
Thanks for linking to this! I am mostly over my nose angst now, but it tormented me until college. I wasn’t even really bullied for it–most of the negativity came from inside my own head. My freshman year of college, one of my friends told me that a mutual (hot guy) friend had said that he liked my nose because it made my face look really interesting. That kind of popped the bubble and got me moving toward my current and infinitely healthier pro-nose stance.
ETA: Amanda, you and your nose are both gorgeous!
I am also a Nose With Character person and I still struggle with it but I am getting there, kinda. I love all of you. Amanda, this was hella awesome, may I please join your coven.
THANK YOU FOR THIS BLOG
I have a nose that people have described as having “character” and “vaguely ethnic!” – Wait what? What does that mean?
I’m still trying to come to terms with it, and yeah it’s going to take some time.
ARE YOU ME
NO, ACTUALLY
ARE YOU ME
-The nose, the nose, the nose. I used to stand in front of a mirror and cover my bump with a finger, too, just to see what it would be like to have a pretty profile. It’s the one universal signpost of unattractiveness, I feel (in that it’s the first thing transformed by Halloween masks and horror movie make-up) and it’s hard to explain to people with ‘normal’ noses what it’s like. There are no YA protagonists with noses like ours, and it smarts.
-Being haunted by witches (ranging from a lifelong obsession with ‘Kiki’s Delivery Service’ to a misguided Wiccan phase to a photo of me in eighth grade being captioned ‘WIZARD OF OZ??’ and passed around because those kids were too fucking dumb to know the difference between the Wicked Witch and the Wizard.)
-The joy/slight…melancholy? (I guess? Don’t know what else to call it) at the relatively recent reclamation of a witchy aesthetic. Both the feeling that it’s now slipping away from me by being too cool (girls with perfect noses and skinny arms and ombre hair and a Brooklyn coven, I see you). And then, like all fads, it will pass away into being desperately uncool in a few years, which also makes me sad.
This might, selfishly, be my favorite thing I’ve read on the Toast.
I can relate to thinking that the nose is the #1 indicator of attractiveness–but I wonder whether people feel that way about whatever it is they feel insecure about. Like, things that *I* don’t think of because my own (whatever feature) conforms to the predominant standard of beauty. And people with, say, perfect noses don’t even notice and are too busy being envious of my lips, or something.
ALSO, if you watch Courtney Love’s behind the music, she talks at length about “mating for a nose” so her kid would be cute and choosing between Axl Rose and Kurt Cobain because they had the best noses in rock, and I am sure that non-problem nose people were like wtf, BUT I TOTALLY GOT HER.
Yes! Even though I don’t want children and I know genes don’t actually work that way, I worry that a guy’s large nose could…multiply with mine and create elephant children.
First, what up to a fellow problem-nose person!
I don’t mean to sound like a Debbie Downer! I actually feel pretty secure about my body and my looks. But I also think I’m allowed to be secure in my looks and talk about a feature I have that can be REALLY hard to swallow, you know? I sometimes worry it’s a dialogue that we self-censor, where we get so wrapped up in ‘EVERYONE IS BEAUTIFUL!’ that we don’t get to have a discussion about the lived experience of having a truly unconventional feature.
My nose is NOT conventionally attractive, and it gets more negative attention (at least in my experience) than things my friends are self-conscious about: frizzy hair or thin lips, for example. We’ve talked about it, and nobody comes up to them in bars and suggests they get keratin treatments or collagen injections. Rhinoplasty? I’ve had multiple suggestions. Just last week, an acquaintance (gay man, so not ‘negging’ or whatever) applauded me for being so ‘brave’ and keeping my nose. Thank you, how kind.
And at the same time, I don’t hate it! It’s a part of my face! A part of my face that a lot of people (including myself) still find beautiful and sexy! Men and women who I can’t believe would give me the time of day have fallen in love with this nose! But I can’t pretend that people don’t notice it. I don’t want to pretend that people don’t notice it! It’s part of my face, it’s part of my life.
Thirded or fourthed or whatever! My best friends in 4th and 5th grade and I were truly convinced that we were witches. We even had witch names (though not very imaginative–I was Rebecca) and sacred trees and all kinds of serious, secret stuff.
And I also have a big nose with a bump on it and I still sometimes cover the bump with my finger in the mirror and wonder if women with dainty, straight noses know how lucky they are. Luckily, I didn’t get teased for it much in school (maybe because I come from a very Jewish area), except for a now ex-friend saying that the reason my sunglasses hurt my nose was because it’s so big. I mostly got over it in college, though, when I had class with a Middle Eastern girl who had a nose bigger than mine but was so, so beautiful, and I realized that big noses didn’t automatically make you ugly. I still rub the bump with my index finger when I’m thinking hard, though.
I feel like the whole witch thing as a trend comes in stages – cool as hell during the 90s (The Craft is THE GREATEST MOVIE OF ALL TIME, Sabrina, Charmed, etc – definitely when I jumped on the bandwagon), lame during the early 2000s as you pointed out, and currently becoming in vogue again – is it all those Ouija tank tops at Brandy Melville?
Also, I watch “Practical Magic” several times a year because all of the women in it are so feisty and awesome and damn gorgeous (even though it’s kinda not great) and I want to live in a creaky old Victorian on a windswept Massachusetts isle.
PRACTICAL MAGIC
That movie is terrible but Nicole Kidman is a beautiful stunning human
I’ve stalk-read for ages, but now feel compelled to post: I was dumped by my first boyfriend for being a witch. To be fair, it was freshman year of high school, I did in fact watch the Craft on a loop, and after my best friend and I performed a spell, a girl we didn’t like TOTALLY COINCIDENTALLY ended up with diabetes and some how people found out about it and he dumped me because I was a witch. Ah, high school.
My husband jokes about how I give people heart attacks because, two years in a row, people who really were obnoxious to me got heart attacks. To the point where, when I was telling the story, one of our jerkier acquaintances actually slipped out of the room – & told people later that he was pretty sure he was next…
Oof. This is great and heartfelt and makes me a little sad. Despite being an outcast in elementary and middle school (in fifth grade, my dad was my teacher), somehow I don’t remember much bullying. Mostly I didn’t have any friends and the other kids ignored me, so I spent all my time reading. It could have been a lot worse.
Me, too! My family moved 3 times while I was in elementary school, so I was an outsider everywhere. I’ve always figured that if other kids were mean to me, I was just too clueless at the time to notice. (Aside from the time when nobody came to my birthday party. That smarted.)
I have an ancestor who was a judge at the Salem witch trials, there is no redemption for me. No cool gaggle of judges gavelling it up around the corner from my apartment in long black robes, no super-awesome teens emulating them… nope.
But you have my favorite kind of nose! I don’t even know what I like about that nose shape so much, but it’s so beautiful!
Like, there are so many ways the teacher could’ve stopped the madness. Not giving that terrible assignment, anticipating for a second that at least one or two would contain shitty personal attacks that would get a big laugh. Reading them first. Anything.
Fellow 5th-grade witch here! I read The Mists of Avalon at a very impressionable age and I’m pretty sure there’s still a stash of candles at my parents’ house somewhere with crescent moons and my crush’s name in magickal runes carved into them. That book also gave me some unrealistic expectations about sex – there were definitely no stag-headed gods involved when I lost my virginity.
Yesssss Mists of Avalon. Tried rereading it last year, could not slog through.
Reminds me of the day when our teachers let the kids “take over the classes” for “April Fool’s Day”. And yes, I got targeted in two separate classes – once by a kid who used the “Prejudice Experiment” (used to show kids how BAD it is to arbitrarily decide you hated people) to make sure, by arbitrary decisions about clothes & physical characteristics, that I was in the despised social class (thus proving that what that little bastard learned was not that “prejudice was bad”, but that “absolute power corrupts absolutely).
But (to get back to the article) by the very second paper that was read out with Amanda’s name on it, the teacher should have figured out what was going on. That stupid/lazy teacher deserved to be the one burnt at the stake. Followed by every other little bitch in that school.
Sometimes teachers are in on it, too.
In my case, I think they were just lazy. In the one class, the teacher was definitely just a ditz.
DEAR AUTHOR! this piece was lovely but also assuming you’re talking about the coven that meets at Tandem we live in the same neighborhood (hi!) and I would 100% go with you because I’ve wanted to check it out for ages but am too socially anxious/non-witchy (scientist!) to go by myself.
This has been creepy importuning a stranger with MollyculeTheory!
I live near there too! I am not very witchy though.
Your nose is great! I mean, feel however you want, but I think it’s great. One of the first things that attracted me to my significant other was his large, hooked nose. I think they look really elegant and also somehow confident, like your nose needs your face doesn’t need to hide.
Your post had me cringing with sympathy. I hated my nose enough that I had a nose job at fourteen, before I’d even finished growing. I am now grateful that the guy who performed the surgery didn’t really change my nose too much, because having a big nose is more of who I am than I’d realized. It’s still big, just not quite the same from the side, but I do wish I’d waited to grow into myself rather than having my face smashed up and rearranged.
I’m so sorry you were put through such a hideous experience. Teachers can be so cruel. I’d forgotten until I read this, but a high school teacher I didn’t even have told one of my friends that he’d heard I had horns. (I did tarot readings for fun sometimes, which apparently rendered me demonic?) I wonder how many nerdy big nosed girls have been accused of adolescent witchcraft, because it seems like there are a lot more of us than I’d have imagined.
OMG Was Diana Wynne Jones’s Witch Week an integral part of anyone else’s childhood? (I mean, if it wasn’t, you don’t need to read it now, because its plot is exactly what happened to Amanda, except that you do need to read it, because it is wonderful.)
Huge!
And traumatic when I had read it once, hadn’t thought about it for awhile, really wanted to reread and could. not. remember. the. title. All I remembered was shoes and witches. Which meant I spent a few hours going through every potentially relevant card in the library card catalog. Where was Name That Book! when I needed it?!
(DWJ has a new story coming out, finished by her sister, in three weeks. I’m conflicted, but optimistic?)
I already have it. It’s great. I am so glad there was this one more thing by her, and now I’m even sadder that this is *really* it now.
I was just coming down to see if anyone had mentioned this yet! And yes, all read it.
I only read it last year, but it would have helped my tweenage years a lot, I think! Diana Wynn Jones really understood adolescence.
I loved Diana Wynne Jones’ Chrestomanci Chronicles. I named my cat Throgmorten.
I can’t believe you thought to write a confession. What a completely bad-ass fifth grader! What did the (horrible) teacher do about that?
SERIOUSLY. That’s the best response, I was never that brave as a kid.
I am imagining the dirtbag as Charlie Sheen circa Ferris Bueller's Day Off, obviously. My romcom spec script will be in the pipeline shortly.
SERIOUSLY. That's the best response, I was never that brave as a kid.
You are about ten years younger than I am, but I am 99% sure you went to my high school. (Go Cougars!) My husband says from my stories it sounds like a magical land of acceptance and nerdery (I am paraphrasing) and that’s probably why I can’t get into Freaks & Geeks. So glad it remained that way!
I have a witch nose, I am only 14 and I am at high school my mum dosen’t say anything about it but my old class mates from year 8 bullied me on my large bumpy nose asking me: are you a witch? Did you go to hogwarts? Why isn’t your face green? Did you ride your broom to school today? It got so frustrating and I got to the point where I’d go to my local shopping centre, where people from my town would stare at me and give me dirty looks I know they think “she’s a witch” straight away. It does my head in so bad and I have gotten to the point where I’d want to commit suicide, I hate Australia and the judge mental people. My own friends dis me and I’ve had so many fake friends. One boy at my school told me “I don’t like you because of your nose, you look like a little witch”
I know you wrote this a long time ago, and that you might not receive any notification of this reply, but I just want to say I hope things have improved for you. This cruel treatment in no way reflects on your worth or your beauty. Take care.