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3:08am December 31, 2014

What are the weirdest nicknames bullies have given you, if any?

This thread probably needs a blanket content warning for insults, slurs, and everything in between (this isn’t the time or the place for an argument as to where to draw the line between an insult and a slur, please don’t turn it into one, but you will see both insults and slurs in this post). I’m not gonna censor myself when discussing words that had a profound impact on my life.

That’s my choice to make. If you want to censor certain words from your own life, that’s your choice and I have no desire to dictate to you what you should do, as long as you respect my own choices. When someone chooses different than me, I try to assume we both have equally good reasons for our choices. I try to assume good faith unless given good reason (by my standards) to assume otherwise.  Especially since I’m well aware I need to have good faith assumed about me, in order to communicate at all – like many other auties.
So long obligatory disclaimer and content warnings aside, here’s my personal answers (this is a long, long, post… there’s a TL;DR at the end if you feel like skipping to that):
I think for me hands down it would be “the Aztec goddess of death"  They didn’t even know whether there was one, or what Her name was, or Her rules in society or temperament was. They just decided to start calling me that in my three month stint in a regular mainstream high school.
I’m not sure the Aztecs even had one particular goddess of death.  Lots of cultures have lots of gods and goddesses with overlapping and intertwined roles.  Lots of cultures have gods that are not a "god of” any particular thing.  They get associated with having certain roles, personality traits, abilities, and interests.  But just like a human is not “the human of doorknobs” even if they use doorknobs every day, design doorknobs, or fit doorknobs onto people’s doors for them… lots of cultures have gods that aren’t gods of anything.
However, being called this stirred my interest, and I poked around the web a bit.  One candidate is Mictecacihuatl, who, according to Wikipedia:

In Aztec mythology, Mictecacihuatl (pronounced /miktekasiuat͡ɬ/) is Queen of Mictlan, the underworld, ruling over the afterlife with Mictlantecuhtli, another deity who is her husband.

Her role is to watch over the bones of the dead and preside over the ancient festivals of the dead. These festivals evolved from Aztec traditions into the modern Day of the Dead after synthesis with Spanish traditions. She now presides over the contemporary festival as well. Mictecacihuatl is known as the Lady of the Dead, since it is believed that she was born, then sacrificed as an infant. Mictecacihuatl was represented with a defleshed body and with jaw agape to swallow the stars during the day.

Oh I see, not only weren’t they willing to put in the research time, but they probably weren’t able to pronounce Her name.  ;-)  So even if they did know of her, they’d still have called me “The Aztec goddess of death” because of pronunciation issues, and because most well-off white kids (this was a private high school in which my friend and me may well have been the poorest people there, and we weren’t poor by any stretch of thhe imagination) wouldn’t have understood who She was even if they could pronounce Her name.  Mind you, she was Queen of Mictlan only, and Mictlan was not the only place the dead could end up (here comes another Wikipedia quote):
In addition to Mictlan, the dead could also go to other destinations:
  • Warriors who died in battle and those who died as a sacrifice went east and accompanied the sun during the morning.
  • Women who died in childbirth went to the west and accompanied the sun when it set in the evening.
  • People who died of drowning — or from other causes that were linked to the rain god Tlaloc, such as certain diseases and lightning — went to a paradise called Tlalocan.
So in my admittedly shallow understanding, Mictecacihautl was the Queen of the underworld, which was one particular destination for the dead, possibly even the most common destination (after a grueling journey which required the aid of a god to even get through it).  But she was not the queen of every place the dead ended up, so presumably not all of the dead were her subjects.
Wikipedia also lists three goddesses as goddesses of “fertility, life, death, and rebirth” (click on each one for more information):
  • Coatlicue
  • Chimalma (also Chimalman) 
  • Xochitlicue (I can’t find much information on Her, and Wikipedia doesn’t have a page.)

Anyway, after that long side-note…

I was talking about what the weirdest nickname bullies have called me, were, and asking what other people’s weirdest nicknames were.  And for me the absolute weirdest was “the Aztec goddess of death”.

But “Spock’s sister” would deserve at least an honorable mention. Also “Saddam Hussein’s wife”.  Interesting how they’d pick someone and then attach me to them in some way, rather than just calling me Spock or Saddam Hussein.

Those all took at least minimal creativity. Unlike ree-tard, tard, spaz, idiot, computer, alien, and all the usual ones. Homo, druggie, hippie, troll (as in ugly girl, not as in internet), crazy, psycho, she-male, schizo, robot, tetched, subhuman, etc.
My dad called me “half a bubble off plumb” but only in a friendly way, and in his own way rebelling against psych labels. He’d also sometimes refer to me as “going apeshit”, but again this was not in a cruel way.  You’d have to know him to understand why this wasn’t meant to be cruel.  At the time it sometimes hurt, but I grew to appreciate that he was thumbing his nose at the psychiatrists and their endless and pointless labeling of my behavior.  I grew to do the same thing, especially hanging onto a non-human identity  long after I would have otherwise ditched the idea, because it was my way of saying “I get to define myself, you don’t get to define me.”  Nobody ever understood that.
Also sometimes I wasn’t allowed to have a nickname if the nickname wasn’t nasty enough.
I had a really hard time dressing and undressing myself. Still do. I can do it but it takes more time than usual. So in gym class I’d be the last person in the locker room. Always.  People would say things of me like “She gets naked before she changes her clothes” and I couldn’t figure out any other way to do it, even after watching how other people changed.  Nor could I figure out why nudity was a problem in a locker room… still can’t.
One day two gym teachers were in there watching me change, slow as usual. As if I couldn’t hear them, they started discussing how slow I was and how I held up the entire class.  I’ll call them Molly and Jess. 
Molly was a gym teacher stereotype. A drill sergeant type with no room for nonconformists in here class.  Even if the nonconformity is totally outside your control. Especially if it’s out if your control. No room for neurodivergent people in her class. 
Jess was more quiet and understanding and would play to each student’s strengths. She never put us down our raised her voice or hit me while telling me she was sick to death of me like Molly did.  Jess knew that I had problems playing basketball (she didn’t understand the perceptual underpinnings of those problems, but she knew they were problems) but she always emphasized to me that I understood the game better than most of the people who played better than I did.  She always had some way to make you feel better about your shortcomings in a sport.
So anyway…

Jess said “She’s so slow, maybe we should call her Pokey?”

Molly said “No way. Pokey sounds too cute. And she’s just not cute.  She’s slow and annoying.”
So in that case a nickname meant in fun was taken away because it wasn’t mean enough. Go figure.
I’m sure I had other nicknames just as weird as some of the ones I remember above, but those are the ones I remember right now.  Looking back, these nicknames felt terrible whenever anyone used them on me.  But now I kind of have to look back and laugh at the work some people put into being mean.  It’s not funny on the one hand, but it is funny on the other and being able to laugh at my bullies makes me feel better about things that used to just make me feel depressed, self-hating, and hopeless.
TL;DR:  I was given a lot of ridiculous nicknames by bullies.  Among the weirdest were The Aztec Goddess of Death, Spock’s Sister, and Saddam Hussein’s Wife.  If you feel comfortable talking about this kind of thing, what were some of the weirdest negative nicknames bullies gave you?  And can you ever laugh at them or does it just hurt too much still?
Notes:
  1. clatterbane reblogged this from withasmoothroundstone and added:
    This outgrew the reply box again. (Surprise!)I’m surprised mine weren’t bigger on nicknames, actually. Probably the most...
  2. ruairidhohboy said: I got “medusa” because coordination issues meant so much time dressing between my swimming class and my gym class meant my hair went uncombed and therefore stringy, and was also going slightly green from the chlorine… Also Godzilla.
  3. katisconfused said: my bullies were incredibly uncreative and just yelled “pokemon” at me. A+ insult bullies, the only effective thing was that sudden yelling is startling.
  4. withasmoothroundstone posted this