The crucible of bullying April 23, 2012

There are two wonderful articles that I’ve seen today about bullying. The first is from Geekmom, and is about her experience raising children who were bullied, and their responses to the new movie “Bully”. The second is from the Sioux City Journal, who devoted their entire Sunday front page to an opinion piece titled “We must stop bullying. It starts here. And it starts now”.

In 1988, when I was 15, the bullying got so bad that I had regular dreams every night of walking into a classroom with a gun, and pointing it at my tormentors… asking them is this what they wanted, were they trying to break me? And if so, good fucking job, because they’d won, they’d broken me, but at the very least, with a gun in hand, they’d have to listen to me with ears open and eyes wide and see, really see what they’d wrought. And was it really fucking worth it?

And every time I’d wake up from that dream with my face and pillow wet with real tears… crying not because of what I’d felt in the dream, but that the dream wasn’t real. Because if the dream wasn’t real, then it meant that I hadn’t quite broken yet, and I had to go back in for another day of hell and just doing my very fucking best to oh god please please please not be noticed.

I tell you now, so you can get an accurate emotional barometric reading (if the above didn’t suffice), that if I had access to a gun at that age, I would not be here today. I know this with a stone-cold certainty that I would have offed myself. And more so, I would have taken at least a few of my tormentors with me, expontentially radiating out more and more damage.

And while, for many, it does get better, and there is a light at the end of the tunnel, the mere fact that people come out appearing to be intact is so easy to misread. It doesn’t speak to the fact that bullying isn’t that bad – it speaks to the resiliency of the human spirit to come back from horror and pain and shame. And for those that look at those false-faces, who are still plying the skill of just trying to fit in to keep a low profile… even if they survive, where do you think all that self-loathing and terror and pain and humiliation goes? Because it doesn’t just vanish. It’s trapped inside the heads and hearts of the victims, and everything they are, everything they aspire to, and every achievement and moment they experience will be marinated, at least in some part, in those horrid feelings and sensations.

These children walk out into the world with scars just as brutal as any you could physically inflict, but they have to carry them inside.

Let’s never stop talking about this. Ever. Teach empathy and compassion and humility. What’s the worst that could go wrong?