Wow! High school is hard! To be clear, I am an adult. A teacher, of high school English. And, yes, I have had a hard year this year in high school to the point of wanting to do anything but go to school some days. Seriously, I was thinking it was the end of that career for me because I had a group of girls, the mean girls you see on movies, who included me as a target of their bullying. Bizarre as it may sound, I was in the principal's office four times this year basically defending myself and putting my words against teenagers on what "I said"supposedly.

True, being a lesbian added fuel to their fire. Certainly my morals are in question, right? Because I love my wife with all my heart and she is also a woman, I surely must have a gutter mouth. (As if! Just ask my own children how much they are chastised when they have a hint of vulgarity in what they say.) But, people's perceptions are what they are.

What did I gain from this? Well, basically, the advice that I have given my socially struggling students for ages: you need to rise above and let it flow past (and it will pass) and not get sucked into the whirlpool that will drag you under.

Still... having been in the shoes of those kids who go to school feeling like there is a dominant faction who "do not like you," I found that sometimes it is much easier said than FELT.

Thankfully, menopause is letting up. (Big smile) And my emotions aren't so heightened. I don't really know what to tell the teenagers with decades of hormones ahead of them.