The Alien

Six years of hell: that is how Johanna describes grammar school and junior high. Johanna wanted to be herself, not to conform. But to be yourself and not give in to group pressure has its price. “Every school class can be regarded as a little country all of its own, in which a queen or king is chosen. In my case, it was a queen. She always sits in the center. Close to her are her vice-queens and lackeys and the like. And everybody blindly obeys the queen; everybody is at her beck and call.” But Johanna refused to conform – she wanted to go her own way. The punishment was being frozen out. No one saw her. Johanna did everything in her power to be seen, but it was in vain. “It became a kind of law that you weren´t supposed to be with me. Though I opposed them the whole time, challenging the queen and her followers continuously,” Johanna says. “I wanted to give them something to talk about. Because I had nothing to lose. I had no friends; they were already ganging up on me. If I had done as they wished – adapted to the prevailing order, invested in clothes with trendy labels and the like – they would have won. And I could not let that happen. I´d have sooner gone under.” “When I started the fifth grade I enjoyed wearing provocative clothes just to get back at them. I had reached a breaking point, where it was a matter of all or nothing. Either I could have internalized everything or overreacted, which is what I did.” Johanna´s parents noticed that things weren´t quite right. But Johanna did not want them involved. “I wanted to deal with it myself. Though now, in retrospect, I realize that was stupid. But I didn´t want my mom and dad stigmatized by an “abnormal” daughter. Because that is how I felt. That I was abnormal and all the others were normal.” Changing schools broke the evil circle. But the path there was a long one. In this film Johanna talks about her hell and about how she surmounted it.