Why ya gotta be so mean?

Stop Bullying! 

 It isn't often I find myself at a loss for words. I generally have more than enough to say on just about everything.  I've remained quiet on the subject of bullies even though I often find myself writing comments on other people's statuses and then deleting them before I hit send.  I wasn't planning on saying anything now but earlier this week I spent part of an afternoon talking to a friend about his sister-in-law's reaction to a recent teen suicide and when he said "I don't get it. The stuff that girl went through wasn't so bad.  My brother and I survived worse and we didn't kill ourselves." I think I saw red. Possibly crimson. As if any of us can really ever understand what goes on in the mind and heart of someone suffering at the hands or mouths of bullies. 

I was bullied growing up though I never really thought of it that way.  I was teased.  I was picked on.  In reality you can call it whatever name you want to make it prettier but it doesn't change what happened to me and others as I was growing up.  I'm not naming names because that isn't what this is about; but I do remember all of them.  Not only do remember their names I imagine I probably remember the details of incidents the bullies involved have probably long forgotten.  I'm not writing this to call people out or to get an apology. I've kept quiet on this subject simply because it is a part of my life and my past that I hate thinking about.  It makes me feel weak and hurt and scared.  I've kept quiet because I don't want to seem petty or unforgiving.  But I can't keep silent anymore.  Another week has gone by and yet more teenage suicides are making the news.  More bullies with no idea the pain they're causing; or even worse, who realize it and just don't care because whoever it is they're picking on deserves it somehow by virtue of being different, by being gay or fat or smart or not smart enough or poor or too skinny or wearing braces or glasses or out of fashion clothes or whatever it is that sets them apart.  I never thought I'd ever write the following but suddenly I’m thankful my experiences in middle and high school weren't that bad. After talking to a few people about their experiences at least I've never had someone try and kill me, never been pushed down stairs or been attacked and permanently, physically injured. All my injuries were to my psyche, not my body. Compared to some, my childhood was darn near idyllic.  Except, well, it wasn't.  

I've always been fat. Well, okay, not always. It didn't start until I was about 4, just about ready for school. Wonderful timing, no? I don’t ever remember really being thin though. That was a large (you'll pardon the pun) part of a lot of it. Fat jokes, mooing, the quaking and jumping as if the earth was shaking when I walked. My weight and I have an uneasy peace now but that has been a hard fight over the memory of classmates stage whispering that if they pissed me off I’d just sit on them.

First grade started with a girl who hated me (I don’t remember why) and she’d call me names. I vaguely remember her pushing me into the bathroom door when we were in first grade but I don’t honestly know if that really happened or not.  She called me names through most of school though they changed over the years from simple taunts to harsh comments until senior year when a strange sort of truce occurred and we were, not friends exactly, but I didn't internally cringe anymore when I saw her.  I don't know what changed but like so many of our peers maybe her hell was similar yet different from my own back then.

Fifth grade I had a “friend” tell my crush I liked him and was teased because “how could I think anyone would like me?” I still have a problem thinking anyone would like me. Sometimes it’s better, sometimes it’s worse but it’s still there, a low level background hum of waiting for the other shoe to drop. Even now, I’ll look at whomever I'm dating and wonder what on earth they're doing with “someone like me.” Finding out someone is actually interested in me having seen me? It’s enough to knock my socks off. I have to resist the urge to look at them and tell them, "You know I'm fat, right?" as if it wasn't readily apparent.  Someone actively pursuing me is enough to send me into a daze. It was ingrained early after all, "how could I think anyone would like me?"

From the time I was in sixth grade until I graduated from high school I never participated in regular P.E. classes. Every year I went and saw my therapist and he sent a note to the school removing me from gym classes in public. Public showers? Undressing in front of my classmates? No.. no I couldn't  I literally became physically ill. I was in therapy from the time I was in eighth grade until sometime in tenth I think. And I only stopped because it was getting me no where so why keep spending my mother’s money for something that didn't help?

I think it was late middle school when my house was vandalized. Chocolate syrup, whipped cream, ice cream, toothpaste. Spray paint. I’d forgotten the spray paint. Forgot waking up to find someone had taken blue spray paint and wrote the words “fuck you” and “fat” and other things on the outside of my home. How on earth could I forget that? The police were called and it was investigated. I can still recall knowing and acting, even then, as if I didn't have any clue who did it because I learned early on that if you keep quiet and don’t draw attention to yourself things are easier. Like I said, I learned some things young. I still do this, still keep quiet, still try and shove attention away from myself actually. 

In high school came the fat jokes, more so than any other time really. I had obscenities yelled at me as I walked home. “Fat cow” and “bitch” mostly. I had students follow me home, teasing and laughing at me, though I was never actively afraid of them. (I was bigger than they were after all.) Here’s where the exaggerated movements of a trembling earth started. Jokes about donut factories and jelly rolls. I had stopped crying over the comments by then. Too many years of too many comments and my tears had dried up.  Sometimes I'd finish them before the person making the joke could.  I think once I turned to a whispered “fatso” comment and responded with “oh my GOD! when did THAT happen?!” As if telling me I was fat was something I didn't know.  It was something I couldn't escape.

Then they changed again, or rather added to their arsenal of verbal weapons, calling me smelly and stinky though I showered every morning before school, religiously. I still do unless I know I’m not leaving my apartment. To this day I’m hypersensitive to what I smell like, showering and making sure I wear some perfume or some other scent. Anything that isn't me. I have a small vial of essential oil in my purse. It’s a scent one no one else wears since I chose the blend of it myself, but it’s still an attempt to make sure I never smell like me; once again, it was drilled into my head early that how I smell is bad.  

Those years of my life were a living hell, so much so that I contemplated suicide actively from probably age ten or eleven until thirteen. No, it didn't get better when I turned thirteen; if anything it got worse, I just got better at hiding it. The reason I didn't do it was my mother and my nanny. I couldn't do that to them. 

I'm not a parent.  I'm don't teach in middle schools or high schools.  My interaction with youth aged 10 to 18 is limited at best.  So I understand I'm not tuned into the current adolescence culture.  But I do remember what it was like to be 10, 13, 17 and scared that this was as good as it was going to get.  That the future was going to be just as bleak and black as my present because nothing was going to change.  And in some ways it seems, nothing really has. The names and faces have changed over the years...decades but the actions haven't.  The things teens (and preteens!) do to each other now are perhaps even worse than what I had to deal with.  Thank God I didn't have to deal with camera phones and the internet spreading hate and hurt.  It was bad enough without the anti-social media.  Had I had to contend with that as well I might very well have committed suicide.  Thankfully I got out, got to college and learned that my worth was not defined by the numbers on a scale or the size of my IQ. But high school is still hell for so many of our young and they feel just as stuck and just as scared as I ever did.  That breaks my heart in ways I can't even begin to explain.

I read about or hear about all these amazing young people taking their own lives and I can understand the pain that brought them to that point.  I know what it feels like to believe it would all be so much better if I just didn't exist anymore, how nothing or no one could hurt me any more, how I wouldn't have to try and fake happiness I didn't really feel.  It is a dark, black place and so often I felt alone and powerless even when I was surrounded by people that knew my name.

We need to do all that we can, and then do more, to protect our youth, our future.  We are losing part of a generation to hatred and bigotry and intolerance just when we need all the best and brightest we have.  And I am not just talking about the young lives we are losing to suicides, though that loss is great, but the promise of those bullies as well.  Because they are learning their hatred, their intolerance, their bigotry and ignorance and contempt some place.  By staying silent we are complicit in their actions and their hatred.  By not speaking up we let the bullies think what they are doing is okay and those that are being bullied continue to feel alone and isolated because they can't see that anyone cares.

Start showing our youth that we care.  If you see a child being picked on, teased, pushed around, bullied, step in!  If your child comes to you and says they're having problems at school don't brush it away with a "kids will be cruel" line or tell them it will get better because, having lived it, chances are it won't.  Push for anit-bullying policies in your schools and not just for children and teens who are gay but for every child.  Parents, if another parent or teacher comes to you and tells you that your child is bullying other students, don't refuse to believe it and say "not my boy [girl, child, etc]" because I can guarantee you that the parents of my bullies growing up said exactly that.  Their little princesses would never do something that mean, horrible, and cruel.  Except they did.  

The kids that bully aren't inherently bad.  It took me a long time to understand that but with age came greater maturity and I understood that the kids who were picking on me were fighting their own battles, ones that I couldn't see and that they wouldn't let other people see either.  Yes, some bullies are just mean and cruel but so many aren't and my heart aches for them as well as the kids they are picking on because their lives are just as broken and just as lonely at times.  

So please, talk to your kids.  Learn about what is going on in their lives.  Talk about what happens in school and at after school clubs, practices, parties.  Everything.  Know their friends.  Know their teachers.  Get involved in their schools and their sports.  Lift them up when they need it and knock them down a few pegs when they need that too (kindly and constructively, of course!)  Help them fight their battles, whether it be with themselves or with the outside forces that are battering against them.  We can save the next child from hurting themselves.  We can work to keep our schools safe.  We can turn the bullies into the kind of leaders this country needs.  But we can't do it by sitting on our asses and wondering what is wrong with this generation.  

Talk to your kids.  They'll tell you what's wrong--with their generation, their school, their coaches, their lives.  But hopefully, hopefully, they will also be able to tell you what's good and right and if they can't, then at least you can start fixing things.  Together.