Morgan Gavaletz
Reprinted from the Jan. 10, 2005, issue of the CS Sentinel.
High school can be hard, especially if you’re bigger than the average cheerleader. Morgan’s prayer takes her beyond coping to triumph…
1. I was shy and insecure throughout junior high and most of high school.
I didn’t think I was cool enough to notice or talk to. That was my view of myself. As with most of the kids my age, what other people thought about you was so important. And at Medfield High School, in Massachusetts, where I graduated, we were no different. Those last three years of high school weren’t easy ones, but through some tough experiences-and a lot of prayer-I grew more confident and came to appreciate myself.
2. Cheers and jeers
At one point, I was the biggest girl on our high-school cheerleading squad. There were girls on the team who were thinner and shorter, who just didn’t understand what I was doing there. Fortunately, our coach was more interested in what you could do than in what you looked like or how much you weighed.
But there were lots of times, mostly during high-school basketball games in the winter, when some of the fans made fun of me, sometimes incredibly harshly. During football season, we couldn’t always hear their comments because we were outside, far away from the fans in the bleachers.
But during basketball games, we sat in the bleachers in the gym with all the other high-school kids when we weren’t doing our cheers. And when we went out on the basketball court to do a cheer during a time-out, some of the fans would scream things like, “Get the cow off the court. Go back to the farm.” There were times when I wanted to quit because I was so humiliated and hurt by their comments. Pretty much every game became such a challenge that I would go home crying.
There were times when I wanted to quit.
At one point I tried to lose weight, and I didn’t have anything but water for two weeks. If I couldn’t make it through the day, I ate a little bread. I was nauseated all the time, and one day in practice I was so weak I just fell down. My coach was really upset and told me she would tell my parents about things if I didn’t. So I told them.
After talking with my parents, I quickly realized that by depriving myself of food, I had been punishing myself for not looking thin. I saw it wasn’t so much the physical weight I needed to get rid of, but the mental weight of thinking I wasn’t good enough, which I’d been carrying around for so long. Right away I went back to eating normally.
At the same time I was dealing with all this stuff during my sophomore year, there was a girl who was bullying me at school. She thought I was trying to steal her boyfriend. And she would do horrible things to me: spit on me, laugh at me, scream swear words at me.
3. A great tool
During this time, I began to turn to Christian Science more than I ever had in my life. I’d have many talks with my parents, and I asked for them to support me through prayer. I needed them to reaffirm that they loved me and that God also loved me. Cheerleading was something I loved to do, and I wasn’t a quitter.
I had this great tool-prayer-why not use it?
Eventually I realized that ignoring the problem was just a really cowardly way to handle it, because I had this great tool-prayer-so why not use it? My Sunday School teacher would tell us great stories about healings he’d had, and other experiences where prayer had worked for him. What he shared encouraged me, and I began to see that Christian Science was something that could help me through difficult times. It wasn’t just a label, but it was something I had to work at, something I had to use.
So I read the Weekly Christian Science Bible Lesson (found in the Christian Science Quarterly) every morning, which showed me ways to pray for myself, and that helped me get through the day. It really calmed me and helped me see I didn’t need to be afraid of this girl.
I think it was my Sunday School teacher who suggested I read an article called, “Taking Offense,” in a book by Mary Baker Eddy (Miscellaneous Writings 1883-1896, pp. 223-224). That was also a big help. I read it every day at school for about a year, during our 20-minute reading periods when we could read whatever we wanted. The one sentence from the article that really jumped off the page at me was this: “The mental arrow shot from another’s bow is practically harmless, unless our own thought barbs it.”
And I realized that the hurtful comments that the girl or the fans made (which felt like arrows being shot at me) couldn’t hurt me unless I let myself be offended by them. I was a bigger girl, and I did have a hard time finding uniforms that fit, as well as doing some of the jumps. But I could dance, and I had rhythm, and I could lift other cheerleaders up high pretty easily. I had a purpose for being there.
I refused to stop trying to respond in a loving way.
But the girl continued to bully me for about a year. There were days when I would fake illness so I didn’t have to go to school because she scared me. She was small, but she was mentally aggressive. I was shy, and felt so insecure, that to have somebody in my face all the time was difficult. But I refused to stop trying to love her-to see her as God saw her, which had to be good.
She had had a rough life. I knew her parents had been divorced and that she felt unloved. We had been friends at one point, but she turned on me when her boyfriend refused to take her back. She had asked me to call him, and I did, and he had said, “No, I’m not getting back together with her.” And she blamed me for that.
My mom would always tell me: “Let it go. Being kind is the most important thing.” I knew that this was the Christian thing to do. And I knew she deserved to feel loved, like everyone else. For me to hold on to the mean things she said or did to me wasn’t going to help her feel loved, or help me. It wasn’t going to get me any further along in my prayers, or improve our relationship, either.
God sees what’s true about us.
My pop encouraged me to think about her the way I knew God would-the way God sees every one of His children. God doesn’t ever see a mean person or a bully, because He sees what’s true about us. And the truth was that God made her His loving child, who couldn’t be hurt or hurt other people.
4. “I’m so sorry’
I’d been praying nonstop to see that girl this way the entire year, and then one night she actually apologized to me. I was at a school dance with one of my friends, and I wanted to leave because she was there. She was crying, and it turned out that her uncle had died. She was just standing there awkwardly, and I went over to her. I didn’t really know what to do, or if she was going to lash out at me again. I was trying so hard to know that it wasn’t really like her to be mean, and that there didn’t need to be an incident between us.
She looked at me, and I said, “Can I give you a hug?” And she said, “OK.” I think she was a little nervous that I was going to do something to her. I gave her a hug, and she started crying even harder and said, “Oh, Morgan, I’m so sorry for what I did to you.” She said she had been so unfair, and knew it wasn’t my fault her boyfriend wouldn’t take her back. She said, “What I did was wrong, and I’m really sorry.” She and I had a math class together that year, and after everything had been resolved, she actually asked me to sit next to her.
It was one of the most wonderful healings I’d known up to that point.
This was the first healing I’d had that was actually tangible to me. I remember thinking, “Oh, thank you, Father. Thank you for helping me through something that I knew I couldn’t do alone.” It was one of the most wonderful healings I’d known up to that point.
This experience gave me a lot of faith and confidence in my practice of Christian Science. I learned the importance of loving yourself the way God does, and that cruelty cannot hurt you unless you make the conscious decision to let it. I also learned the power of prayer and how important it is to pray for yourself each day. But most of all, I learned to trust God, and that with His help I was strong enough to tackle any challenge.
5. Turning point
During football season junior year, I realized that joining the basketball cheerleading squad again was not for me. Why put myself into a situation that wasn’t reinforcing my self-worth? My cheerleading career wasn’t hurt by this decision, but benefited by it.
I continued to be a football cheerleader and was elected captain of the squad by the other girls, and then again my senior year. This experience brought me a rich understanding of what it takes to be a leader, and brought me out of my shell a little bit, too. Soon I became a confident leader-the funny, friendly Morgan, instead of the insecure, compliment-seeking Morgan.
I discovered acting.
Interestingly, during the time I would have been cheerleading for basketball, I discovered acting. This led to an opportunity to perform in a few high-school plays and musicals before I graduated. I’m so grateful because it later inspired me to study theater in college.
The feeling that I was unaccepted by my peers was something I’d been fighting my whole life. “They don’t accept me. What do I do to make them accept me? How do I behave differently to make them like me?”
But my last year of high school, the seniors had a picnic at the end of the year. I had come to a turning point, and I realized that the insecurity I had seen in myself could just fall away. That day the entire class just came together. Everybody was having fun with everybody else. People I never would have spoken to before seemed to be enjoying my company.
That was another day where I had a huge healing, because I just felt so accepted by my classmates. Yet I realized I’d come to the point where I didn’t need to be accepted by them to feel good about myself and to be happy. I really felt that God accepted me, and that He was the one who brought me my friends.
People have noticed the change in me.
People have noticed the change in me. A girl I met while I was in high school, who later met me again in college, said to me, “Wow, you’re so different.”
I still struggle from time to time. There are situations where I think, “Oh gosh, what do I do? What do I say?” But for the most part, I ask myself, “How do I make this a good situation?” as opposed to, “How do I keep from looking bad?” That is a big thing for me.
At some point my motives became more unselfish. I started to worry less about looking good, or not looking good-being accepted or not being accepted-and more about being loving and being kind. Sometimes it takes a lot of persistence, but if you’re really loving to someone, they can respond with nothing but love.
Morgan Gavaletz is a recent graduate of Principia College in Elsah, Illinois.
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