Note: I started this a few months ago and put it away, thinking it was too serious for my blog. But whenever bullying appears in the news, it catapults me back into the sixth grade. Also, many people seemed confused about the topic. I picked the article up again and finished it so that I could share what I understand. Here it is.
The worst part about the bullying was not the bullying. It was the way it crawled inside my brain, burrowed into my sense of who I was and, over time, set my mind against itself.
The antagonists were a gang of five girls in my sixth grade class. The leader, who hated me, was wildly popular and conscripted all her friends, including kids in other classes, to join her in a school-wide campaign of ridicule on a scale that must have inspired Stephen King to write Carrie.
She once explained to me in a reasonable tone that she was only bullying me because I was shy, and that if I would talk more and be more like the others, she would stop. She smiled. \”Why are you like that anyway? Why are you the way you are?\”
I could give her no satisfactory answer. She continued to roam the playground in her pack of five and follow me. She screamed epithets behind the megaphone of her cupped palms, especially when a lot of kids were around. Her friends joined her in a chorus of taunts and threats. \”Are you just shy, or are you a snob? I think you might be a snob.\” I hated having attention called to me, so being thrust into a spotlight every time I walked into their view was torture.
Whenever I did try to \”talk more,\” my words were painfully scrutinized. \”Say that word again. The way you said it was weird. Like you have a speech impediment. Do you?\”
Because the bullying – taunting, threats, and ridicule – was coming from kids from other classes as well as the ones in my own class, the illusion that everyone hated me was powerfully convincing. I wanted to disappear, but by law I was forced to attend class six hours a day, five days a week, with kids who wanted to hurt me.
I shut down.
I stopped talking. I was embarrassed to even get out of my seat, because standing would mean drawing attention to myself. I dreaded walking in front of anyone, because my manner of walking was declared \”wrong.\” I created a safe place inside myself and I tried to stay there.
I felt like the world had split in two. There was the inner self, where the real me was. And then there was Outer Me, the shell that tried to get through the day without seeming to exist too much.
I read a lot that year.
I liked to pretend that my daily experiences were something I was reading in a book. “She ambled down the hall toward the library” or “The girls surrounded her and she ambled away.” I was always getting word obsessions, and that year I had fallen in love with the word “amble.” I loved most all words.
I got glowing praise for my creative writing assignments that year. I thought reading fiction was like reading minds. I imagined that I could live out a separate existence as a thought person, swimming in a flow of words.
Despite the abuses going on outside my creative bubble, I never got really angry. I was haunted by a feeling of personal failure. I had been told all my life by adults as well as children that shyness was very bad, and failing to “overcome” it filled me with shame.
And though I was no fan of my bullies, everyone else seemed to like and respect them. The consensus was that they were normal; I was not. Seeming to confirm this, my teacher sent me to a counselor, but not the bullies. My impression was that bullying was considered robust childhood behavior, while being bullied conferred a stigma and was seen as failure.
But shame was the wrong emotion; I wish that I had gotten angrier. At that singular instance in my personal history, I needed to lash out at my bullies, openly and without reservation. I needed to throw a temper tantrum, yell, and call them names. It would have been far better than closing myself off and shutting down.
Anger would have said, “The problem is with you, not me.”
But because the ridicule was coming from so many different classes, I had to consider that the problem really was with me. I imagined some distortion, like a badly placed mole, that marked me as innately unlikable.
But there was another reason I had trouble hating them. I could not view them as evil. Hate is a call to action, and the more villainous you believe the target is, the stronger the response.
I did dislike my bullies.
But they were human. I saw them every day for about six hours. They worried about their hair looking bad. They fretted about gaining weight. Sometimes they said things I thought were funny.
When they passed kindergartners in the hall, they gushed over how cute the children were, unleashing a string of “Awwws.”
They liked things I liked: puppies, birds, turtles, and Cabbage Patch dolls, and they liked each other. But to them I was many things depending on the moment: a snob, a freak, and at one point a suspected drug addict.
If I could have viewed my bullies as inhuman, as dark avatars of pure evil, I might have saved my ego. Instead, the daily personal attacks distorted how I saw myself.
The distortion was so convincing that I failed to recognize a chance to get a clearer view. Selected for Project Challenge in art, I got to be in a different group of kids once a week, transported by bus to another school.
Though I said hardly a word to anyone, they liked me and invited me to play ball with them in the few minutes before class began. A boy even asked me to be his girlfriend.
I thought he was making fun of me, but he made it clear that he was serious. The change in how I was treated gave me emotional whiplash. Despite my confusion, my ego enjoyed its moment, and I left Project Challenge that day, soaring.
I never went back.
It seems incomprehensible now. But I believed that I had fooled the art kids. At the same time, their acceptance gave me hope, and that hope was painful to me, because I could too easily envision losing it.
Going back to Project Challenge seemed like too great a risk. As long as the feeling of being accepted was a memory, I would have it forever. But if I went back and the newkids turned on me, then I would be thoroughly convinced that – no matter where I went – things would never change. I thought it would end me.
It seemed safer to stay in my prison than to inhale the breath of freedom, only to be thrown back into my cell.
It was years before I could grasp that there was no mark of shame, nothing innately “wrong” with me for the new kids to uncover, and that my treatment was due to power-seeking egos. Years later, I regretted my decision not to go back to a place where I had been embraced.
Even inside the fish bowl of my own classroom, there were signs that not everyone hated me, but I couldn\’t see them. For example, a boy in front of me in the line returning to class from lunch began hitting me, thinking that because I was shy, I would passively accept abuse.
I struck back. Hard. In shock, he drew away. Then he rallied and started swinging his fists. I ended up with a black, swollen eye, while he had only a few scratches, but on that day many of my classmates said I “won” the fight.
The boy never hit me again and even apologized. But the fact that my classmates were supporting me never penetrated. I was so blinded by the belief that no one could possibly take my side, I was unable to see that the kids who said I won probably wanted me to win.
Part of what confused me was being overly conscious of the numbers against me. I operated on the belief I that if I lashed out at the gang of girls, it would only make everything worse. In reality, I probably would have won supporters. Mentally healthy, happy people generally dislike unfair treatment of those who only want to be left in peace.
I sometimes wish I could go back in time and tell my twelve year old bullied self the things I know now. But to even begin to make sense of what had happened, I had to get away from the distorting glass of the sixth grade.
I finally did.
The following year I enrolled in a private school to get a fresh start with new people. The new group of students accepted me, although I was withdrawn. I reveled in the peaceful space around me and began to feel safe.
A couple of months into the first semester, my English teacher gave a writing assignment: to take the point of view of an American slave in the south.
This was the type of assignment I loved, the kind my sixth grade teacher had given every week. I fell into another world as I wrote, imagining a slave who tries to escape and ends up frustrated. I remember only one sentence: “We were just the property of other people.” I had often imagined how that would be, to be viewed as a thingthat belonged to someone, an object without any rights.
The following day the teacher came to me at my desk and knelt beside me, his face even with mine, his eyes wide. “Lisa.” He broke into a grin. “Yousurprised me. This paper you wrote is incredible.I want to read this aloud. Do you mind?”
Stunned, I said he could, and he asked if he could keep it. I let him. A little later the class was silent as he read my paper aloud, and after he read the last sentence, the room thundered with applause.
Afterward, one by one, kids kept approached me and told me how good they thought my story was. And I knew it was no dream; I had escaped the sixth grade.
Gradually, I made friends.
And some resolutions: to seek the company of nicepeople, regardless of their social standing or physical appearance; to like myself unconditionally; and to focus on things I could control directly, like my grades. I resolved to make an A in every class. And during the following years I did all those things, as time granted clarity.
Years later I could see that not everyone in the sixth grade had hated me and not everyone had liked the bullies; that their personal agenda had nothing to do with me; and that if I had been more vocal about disliking them, I likely would have found allies.
It took me too long to reach these insights. But bullying is taken much more seriously now than when I was a kid. However, I worry that adult-led anti-bullying campaigns, replete with pink \”awareness\” ribbons, could make life harder for bullied kids.
In some ways they elevate the bullies, endowing them with the coveted respect associated with power and danger. Plus, appearing to need adult protection makes victims look tantalizingly weak to the bullies.
While current adult-led efforts to stop bullying may yield some results, they will always be limited. Short of installing totalitarian rule in schools, it is impossible to micro-manage every micro-exchange between children.
More is needed. For example, I wonder if anyone has ever explored humor as therapy for bullied kids. I think making fun of my bullies, even in my head, would have been powerfully therapeutic. Humor would have reduced them to non-threatening caricatures.
What else would have made the sixth grade more bearable? Aside from being removed from the situation, I would have loved to meet with someone who had emerged from a similar experience and ended up with self confidence, a sense of humor, and a love for life.
Preferably this would have been someone a few years older — not someone to solve my problems for me but someone to offer understanding and a fresh perspective.
A high school student could have shared the epiphanies of hindsight, while also “looking down” at the younger bullies, viewing them not as powerful forces of evil, but for what they really were: pipsqueak kids trying to augment themselves.
But anyone, regardless of age, could have helped as long as I sensed that they were being completely honest with me. My biggest vulnerability at age 12 was lacking the life experience to effectively deal with an alien situation. My life had not prepared me to deal with full-scale ostracism.
Ultimately, I needed to be removed from the situation so that I could work things out for myself and regain my emotional balance and feeling of self-worth. I did it, but it took me a long time.
And I did it alone. But anyone who has been bullied, learned from it, and risen above it could give invaluable emotional support to kids who are struggling. Someone who has crossed the rickety bridge from bullying to empathy and understanding could give them a hopeful glimpse of the other side.
Stopping bullying-in-progress is not nearly enough because it ignores the emotional damage that is already done. By far, the worst part of being bullied was the inner reality: the loss of self-esteem, the inarticulate confusion, the feeling of failure, and the despair — feelings that lasted long after the bullying had ceased.
But I could have endured most anything if I had known that there was life after bullying, beyond more bullying; that my present would not define my future; and that happiness was possible.
I wish I could go back in time and tell my younger self those things. I wish I could tell her that one day she would think nothing of the bullies or what they thought; that she was not to blame; and that having bullies like you is no compliment. I would tell her to be honest about not liking them, even if it meant retaliation.
But every time I see a tragic news story about bullied kids, I am reminded that my story continues; that experiences similar to mine are happening every day. And while I can never go back in time, I can tell others: There is life after bullying.
And, many decades after my escape, I am glad I am still here.