Katie Britt was hit with eggs as she endured teenage bullying: âI still have woundsâ
Alabama U.S. Sen. Katie Britt writes in her new memoir that as a teenager in Enterprise she endured bullying by classmates, something she says forced her to find the strength to be her true herself even when it meant she “stuck out.”
In her new book, “God Calls Us To Do Hard Things: Lessons from the Alabama Wiregrass,” Britt said most of the bullying took place between 8th and 10th grades.
Someone took a textbook from her hands and spat in it, she wrote, and once she was called to the office to pick up an envelope addressed to her. Inside was a note full of derogatory comments and a drawing of her “looking like a man.”
See also:
- Katie Britt reveals how family’s cherished Alabama football lost in tornado was found
- These are Katie Britt’s favorite Alabama restaurants
“That was certainly a different day and age in how schools operate,” Britt wrote. “Things were rough back then outside of the school walls, too.”
In 10th grade at Enterprise High School, a truck pulled behind her on her way home.
“I could see through the mirror that in the bed of the truck was a group of the usual suspects who normally gave me a hard time at school,” Britt wrote.
“The moment I got out, they began to egg my car, our house, and me….I begged them to at least let my little sister go inside. They laughed some more.”
Britt said the two worst parts of the episode were that they wanted to see the “total devastation” in her face and that her sister “was beyond upset.”
It later happened again. “We had been invited to a party on someone’s farmland….It was an ambush,” Britt recalled.
“People came out of every nook and cranny, eggs in hand. They waited until we opened the door, and then they started egging us and the car. There was no party. We were the entertainment.”
Britt wrote that she was the target and she felt “guilty” that her friends who were there with her were only “in the line of fire.”
Britt said most who bullied her have since apologized and she holds no grudge.
“I still have wounds that are not quite healed and other scars that I’m not ready to talk about. I may never be ready, and that’s ok. They are my wounds, my scars.”
Britt’s family even considered sending her to a different public school (they could not afford private, she wrote.)
Britt worries now about online bullying and “comments that live on for eternity. Bullies today are injected with false security in cyber space, and they are emboldened to say things online that they would never have the nerve to say face-to-face.”
The episode helped form her into the leader she is today, Britt concluded.
“Conforming or changing would have been the easy thing. It would have made my life easier, without a doubt. But I wouldn’t have been me,” Britt wrote.