My, aren’t all these bullying posts cathartic? Necessary? Sure.
Similarly, a wave of anti-bullying sentiment went around the YA writing community a few months ago. Notable stories surfaced there as well, stories that made my soul ache for the children who underwent the horrible things that happened to them.
But you know the most notable post for me in this recent rash of posts?
Diana Francis stands up to a bully
And I’ll talk about that, but first I’ve got to get to the point where it makes sense, the comments that I make.
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These posts about bullies are important. They serve to show solidarity and identification, and show that there’s a problem out there, and that it hasn’t gone away. They point out to young people being bullied (although I’m not sure how many of them are reading our exploits in the blog-o-sphere), that lives can get better, or that there is a tribe for the geeks.
All this has its purpose.
This is the point where I have to talk about myself a little bit. And these days, that makes me uncomfortable.
You have to understand that I am Angry Writer (TM). Not at you. At blaming myself for a wide variety of ills and hurts that were done to me in my early life, and repressing those hurts so I could get on. The mantra, yes, I had a bad past, but I am the poster child for recovery, applies.
The good news is that my counselor thinks my righteous anger is healthy for me. I just had a lot of it stored up, you see, so sometimes it feels like an endless supply.
We’ll call this next part of the essay, so you’ve been bullied and you know what that’s like. What happens next?
Don’t go under here. There’s some self indulgence under here. It goes to a point, but we’re in the really dark part of the forest and you may not want to go there.
Let’s begin with this: my history on a stick. I have been bullied. And I’ll do this really bluntly. I have been raped, beaten, locked outside on a winter night, belittled, neglected, and hit when I stood up for my siblings. That was my parents.
Then I’ve been beaten,molested and stabbed. That was my older brother.
How does this translate to the community at large? We were “those” people. Dirty, nasty, foul, dangerous to the children of others, that described what I heard about my family. I was petrified of life around me. Of course I was bullied. I was a traumatized child. I had no social skills, not even the geeky social skills that were light years behind others. I had no idea how to stand up for myself or respond.
At least I wasn’t raised in a basement. I learned to read and write. I was white and afforded some of that privilege. And yes, I didn’t try to kill myself.
I’m really angry I just told you how much better off I had it than others. *breathes* Okay. Abuse isn’t a contest, right. It matters, regardless of degree.
I suspect people suspected about our home life. People didn’t make waves in that backward part of the world, at that backward time. Yes, I am angry about that too. Teachers and books were my life preservers, but there were no home inspections, no movements from social services to take us away. In a modern environment, mandatory reporting may have saved my brothers and myself.
I have established, then, that I was bullied because you could see and smell that my family was just wrong, and that I was just wrong. My existence was bleak, especially in elementary school and junior high. It was this time which taught me to make up stories, these days spent alone or hiding, the times I had to detach from the horrible things around me. My whole life. One big script of rescue.
There was someone like Diana in my life. I will never forget her, although I didn’t always make her life easy, and to this day, I wish I could tell her how much I appreciate what she did for me, every time she did it.
Her name was Shari Henderson, and she was the richest kid in town. I mean, her family bought a VCR in the early 80s! We became more and more friendly because we were the only two girls in many of our college prep classes, but even before academics began to buoy me up, even in elementary school (rural school. Same 20-30 people all the way through), she treated me like a human being. Even when I doubted it myself.
It wasn’t Diana’s very brave gesture. It was always the reminder of how you would feel if you did that to someone else, or that you should behave a certain way that was common and decent. Kids would laugh at her, but they would leave me alone. At least for the time she was there, the time she noticed, and the time she took to teach them what their parents should have been teaching them about behaving.
Do you want to know why I became a teacher? There is nothing I believe in so much as education to better and change the human condition. I thought maybe I could help and see kids like myself in addition to giving them the knowledge they might need to improve their situation.
The day a principal told me a child had left my classroom because her step father had been sexually abusing her made me feel that I had failed somehow.
That day, I realized I couldn’t see everything. I didn’t have some sort of special bullying sense because I’d been bullied. I cried all free period.
What we do see, of course, we have to stand up against, like Diana and Shari did. As adults, we have to teach kids to be okay with difference too, and teach them that intolerance is not appropriate, even if everyone else is telling them to be a dick.
It’s not going to work all the time. The impulse of a child is to be a little savage. There’s immaturity to handle, fear of difference, and the desire to fit in. All the kids are insane, and the kids who are obviously insane are the ones who suffer at the hands of those less obviously so. We can help by giving our kids good, solid models on how to rein in the insanity.
I’ve spent a lot of time in the dark. I hid the dark inside of me in pockets and crevices, and painted a professional, wise face over the shadows. I am VERY angry that this happened to me, has happened to many of you, and will happen to others. I understand the whys and I used to let that soften the impact of my response. Now, I just let myself be angry in great rolling waves. Which is why I think we will always see cathartic live journal entries.
I keep fighting it, personally, and with the teaching I do. Empathy is our greatest weapon. I don’t think we are less bullying when we get older. I think it becomes much more subtle things, like privilege and power abuse. Empathy is still our greatest weapon.
Just as long as we don’t stop at the catharsis, wring our hands, and not do the listening and the work. Of course the bully is the one with the problem, but the silent society lets the bully exist, like a cancer.
If it can be said that bullying gave me a gift, it is this empathy, above all things, that was left, a sort of hope flying from Pandora’s box.
I guess there’s nothing left to do, but to say I’m sorry to some of you in the spirit of empathy, I’m profoundly grateful to those of you who have stood up for what was right, and I’ll keep hoping that we can make the world better.
Catherine
