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.