Jeremiah Tolbert

Warning: this is a pretty per­sonal post con­tain­ing some of my child­hood expe­ri­ences and they might make you uncom­fort­able.  It won’t hurt my feel­ings if you skip this entirely.

My good friend Paul recently had an inter­est­ing blog post about bul­ly­ing.  Bullying has been in the news a lot lately, he says, which I seem to think I’ve noticed some talk about it on Twitter.  Paul’s argu­ment is that we’re blow­ing bul­ly­ing out of pro­por­tion, which I agree is usu­ally the case with things like this.  We have two modes of reac­tion cul­tur­ally in the U.S.—full blown over­re­ac­tion and com­plete apa­thy.   I could spend a lot of time won­der­ing why that is—is it an effect of our increas­ingly polar­ized polit­i­cal sys­tem?  Is it a side effect of a media that seems to go into a news cycle feed­ing frenzy on a topic every once and a while, lead­ing to con­stant cov­er­age and debate about it?   Anybody remem­ber the Summer of Sharks? 

The way I learned that life wasn’t fair was by being bul­lied.  I was a shy kid to a cer­tain degree, and not very good at under­stand­ing other kids.  I liked what I liked and I didn’t think much about what oth­ers thought about it.   And I didn’t spend a lot of time think­ing about whether I liked other kids.  I guess I liked most every­one pretty well, when I wasn’t lost in a book or whatever.

Other kids didn’t like me for a lot of rea­sons.  I was a know-​​it-​​all.  I wasn’t very socially con­scious.  I had a weird name and huge, funny-​​looking ears. I was poor.  Eventually, I had glasses.  How weird is it that kids picked on other kids because of glasses?  I guess it’s just any­thing dif­fer­ent from the herd that gets you tar­geted?  But what a silly thing to mock other kids for.  I never got that.  Anyway, I was that stereo­typ­i­cal last-​​kid-​​picked-​​for-​​the-​​team kid.  I was obsessed with read­ing and fos­sils and nature, and I didn’t care about sports.

I was bul­lied and mocked pretty mer­ci­lessly. They called me Dumbo and any other name they could come up with over my appear­ance or my stu­pid name.  They’d taunt me with that song.  I was prob­a­bly over­sen­si­tive.  It never failed to get a reac­tion out of me.  I cried a lot.  I didn’t under­stand why every­one hated me so much.  I didn’t have any real friends until 4th or 5th grade, and they were junior high kids that played D&D.  I didn’t start hav­ing friends my own age until I was myself in junior high, and that was a whole new kind of hell (mostly one where I was reg­u­larly accused of being gay for some reason).

The thing that both­ered me the most, the part that made it hurt so much, was that it felt like nobody did any­thing to stop it.  I told my par­ents, I told my teach­ers.  And some­times they might have had a word with some­one, but it never really stopped.  Adults have no con­trol when they’re not around, and grow­ing up basi­cally a latch key kid in a poor apart­ment com­plex where a lot of the par­ents were sin­gle work­ing types, adults were not around a lot.   I went out of my way to avoid other kids. I spent hours alone in the woods, or in my bed­room.  But there was always school, and the way to and from it.

Somehow I was blood in the water for them.  I was an irre­sistible tar­get.   And it wasn’t fair.  I didn’t want to hurt any­one the way they wanted to hurt me. I couldn’t wrap my head around it.

Hm.  I’m about to write some­thing I’ve never writ­ten about, but it’s impor­tant here.  Bullying was how I decided I didn’t believe in God as he’d been described to me.

I wasn’t just bul­lied by other kids.  I was bul­lied by my step­fa­ther too—a hor­ri­ble man who later went on to abuse my mother, nearly stran­gling her to death.   I can remem­ber him com­ing home in a fury over some­thing. I silently begged God that he wouldn’t tear into me.  I don’t remem­ber over what, just that utter hor­ri­ble fear that he was going to come after me.   He tore into me any­way.  Physically abu­sive, to some degree, sure.  He smacked us around when he thought he could get away with it. Mostly he shouted, called us names, called us stu­pid. I don’t remem­ber the time too clearly except for this incident.

In this case, it’s not the bul­ly­ing and emo­tional abuse that sticks in my mind.  I remem­ber this moment because it was the moment in my life when I con­cluded once and for all that I didn’t believe in God.  Afterward, I lay in my bed in my room sob­bing, say­ing “you’re not real. There is no God” qui­etly to myself.  Because I couldn’t under­stand how the lov­ing God I was sup­posed to believe in would allow a man like my step­fa­ther to get away with slap­ping us around, call­ing us names, and being a gen­er­ally evil fuck.   I thought in small terms back there.  My life was full of pain and emo­tional dis­tress, I prayed and begged for help, and it never came.  Thus, God did not exist, as far as I was con­cerned. My rea­son­ing became more com­pli­cated later in life, but that was the start of it.

My step­fa­ther was spy­ing on me out­side my door, lis­ten­ing to my sob­bing.  He stormed into the room and began slap­ping me around and shak­ing me.  He pulled me out of my bed and forced me into a cor­ner and began to berate me.  You see, he over­heard what I was say­ing.  But what he thought was that I believed he was God. He was a reli­gious man, and if I thought I had it bad before, this was much worse.     I think that assump­tion of his, that I some­how wor­shipped him, was how I first real­ized that he was absolutely fuck­ing insane. 

It took a few more years for my Mom to leave him.  Haven’t seen the man since, and I’ve always been afraid that if I ever did meet him again, I would kill him, that I wouldn’t be able to stop myself from going after him with any­thing I could impro­vise as a weapon.  I sus­pect my sib­lings feel some­what similarly.

There were times later on when he would be in a shout­ing match with my Mom, slap­ping her around or worse, and I would run away.  I never stayed gone for very long.  I didn’t really have any­where to go, and I was not good at plan­ning things like tak­ing a change of clothes and some food.  I always came home before any­one even noticed I was gone.

Eventually, run­ning away turned to thoughts of killing myself.  I just wanted out.  I wanted to stop hurt­ing.  I had dark thoughts as a teenager, as most teenagers do, but I was closer to killing myself when I was 11 than when I was 16.   The whole world had con­vinced me that I wasn’t worth a damned.  Even my teach­ers thought I was an idiot until I scored in the 99th per­centile on some stan­dard­ized test and sud­denly every­one real­ized I was kind of the oppo­site.  Funny thing was… I think if I had still believed in God and Heaven, I would have done it.  The notion that sui­cide was an unfor­giv­able sin wasn’t one that my church going had got­ten across to me, so whereas some people’s reli­gion might stop them from that course of action, it wouldn’t have been a bar­rier for me.  I’m pretty cer­tain that my atheism/​agnosticism was the only thing at one point that kept me from doing it.  I was afraid of obliv­ion then as much as I am now.

Life got bet­ter with time and I got on with the busi­ness of liv­ing it.  I’m still not very good at tak­ing crit­i­cism or rejec­tion because bul­ly­ing eroded my self esteem pretty badly. As I get older, and I’m sur­rounded by won­der­ful, lov­ing friends and fam­ily, it gets eas­ier.  But some­one call­ing me a name or belit­tling me can send me right back to that cor­ner of my bed­room being shouted at and belit­tled by a man whose breath smelled of cig­a­rettes and beer, shout­ing at me for “believ­ing” he was “God.”  

Externally, I’ve lived a pretty suc­cess­ful life. College, mar­riage, good career.  Yes, I’m okay now. But bul­ly­ing did seri­ous dam­age to me.  Parts of my psy­che may never be nor­mal for the shit I went through (although, what’s nor­mal?).    So while I can under­stand where Paul’s com­ing from,  I have to dis­agree on its long term effects.  And if I had been gay, if they had had that to use as a weapon against me, I would not have made it.  I know this.  I would not be here today.   I was mocked with that as a taunt enough with­out it being true.    I should point out that I don’t think there’s any­thing wrong with being gay, but I grew up think­ing there was because every­one around me used it as an insult—the worst insult.  There was noth­ing worse than being gay.  So these kids who have been com­mit­ting sui­cide from bul­ly­ing have noth­ing but sym­pa­thy from me.  I’ve been there.  A flip of a coin, switch of a gene, and things might have gone dif­fer­ently for me.

I’ve always sworn that as an adult, I won’t stand for bul­ly­ing among chil­dren.  The oppor­tu­nity to do any­thing about it hasn’t  arisen much, but I do hope to have a kid some day. I won’t be one of those adults who doesn’t do any­thing if my kid is bul­lied. I won’t think it’s a nor­mal part of grow­ing up.  I’ll fight back.  Because if there’s one thing I can do dif­fer­ently, it’s that I can carry on the illu­sion that the world is fair for my kid a lit­tle longer than I was able to believe it myself.  Maybe that’s tan­ta­mount to let­ting them believe in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny.  Sheltering them may not do them any favors, but I’m not sure.  Maybe shel­ter­ing them for a part of their life will help them develop the self-​​confidence that I never had, and that I’ve strug­gled to grow ever since.

So that’s a lit­tle of how I feel about bul­ly­ing. It’s shaped who I am as an adult, and yes, I sur­vived, but if I could go back and stop it from happening…

you bet your ass I would.

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Tags: bullying, childhood, personal