Bullying

*** I WROTE THIS A FEW MONTHS AGO.  I posted it on my Tumblr after I finished writing it (it took me about 4 or 5 days to write because I kept having to stop.)  I just wanted to post it on here too.  I wrote it while I was reading a book called By The Time You Read This, I'll Be Dead by Julie Anne Peters, and for my lit circle project for Young Adult Lit for that class, I chose to do the connector essay, where I connected my life and society in general to the book.  This isn't my essay for class, but this is what I wrote to kind of organize my thoughts and my own experiences with bullying before I wrote the essay.  In my Health class, we have to write an essay where bullying occurred in our own lives, and that got me to thinking about this again, which is why I wanted to post it again. ***

I’m reading By The Time You Read This, I’ll Be Dead.  It’s not the first time I’ve read this book, but it really gets to me every single time I read it.  It makes me think about bullying in my life, and how much it sucks.  It really fucking sucks, and I very rarely ever swear.  And it’s not something that’s easy for me to write about.  I have a playlist of songs that make me feel good about myself, and I have to listen to it in order to be able to type this.  I can’t do this without the music.  Because even just thinking about it all makes me feel broken inside again.

I think back to second grade.  I was seven.  And I was tiny.  I was born almost a month early, and only weighed 4 pounds 9 ounces when I was born.  So I’ve always been small, ever since I was born.  Even now, at 20 years old, I’m 5’2 and just barely over 100 pounds.  But, second grade, this girl in my class kept calling me fat.  The constant taunting.  “You’re fat.”  “You’re gross.”  “You’re disgusting.”  “You’re so fat.”  “You shouldn’t have friends because you’re too fat.”  Things like that.  And the girl who did the name calling, the taunting, she was overweight, and so my little seven-year-old brain thought that she must know what she’s talking about, so I must have been fat and gross.  No one cared.  Or maybe they just didn’t notice.  Adults never notice kids.  Even if that kid is hurting inside.  If they can’t see the “hurt,” then it doesn’t exist to them.  So I stopped eating.  Food was bad.  Food was gross.  Food is what made me “fat,” so I was going to avoid it.  Food was the enemy.  I was a clever little seven year old, so I thought.  You see, back then, seven was old enough to walk to a friend’s house alone as long as when you got there, you call whoever was in charge of you to let them know you got where you were going without getting lost or abducted or anything like that.  I would find out what we were having for dinner, then go to dinner at a friend’s house.  When I got to whatever friend’s house I was going to, I would say I had already eaten.  “Oh, it looks so good, but I’m full from dinner at home.” And then when I got home, and would be asked what I had for dinner, I would say whatever food my friend’s family had eaten.  I figured out back then, that after a certain point, you don’t feel hungry anymore.  After a while, you can tune out the feeling of needing to eat.  After a while you get to the point where you’re so hungry that you’re not hungry anymore, and then once you have that not hungry feeling, it’s easier to not eat.  And that worked, up to a point.  The whole dinner thing.  But when you spend the night at a friend’s house, and you don’t eat dinner, then you turn down a snack later that night, and then in the morning, instead of eating breakfast you just push it around on your plate trying to make it look like you had eaten something… that’s when people start to notice.  And start to get suspicious.  And get mad that you’re not eating.  But they didn’t understand.  To me, I thought that if I ate – anything – I would get fat, and at seven, I thought that that was about the worst thing I thought a person could be.  That whole thing could have been avoided if anyone had listened.  If anyone had noticed.  But no one ever notices.  “It’s just words,” they say.  “Words don’t really hurt,” they say.  They’re wrong.  They’re so wrong, and they don't even know it. 

That same year, second grade, everyone in my class had a pen-pal in another school.  There were two different schools that, the following year, would both close and all the students would go to the same (bigger, new) school.  They wanted us to have friends from the other school before we merged together, so after being pen-pals all year, at the end of the year the second graders all went on a field trip to the other school to meet their pen-pal.  Mine was a girl named Nicole.  I remember that because I thought it was so cool that she had the same name as my sister.  I was so excited to be her friend, to meet her.  So excited, you know?  She took one look at me, one look.  And she said in her snobby, too-good-for-you, seven-year-old voice “I already have enough friends. I don’t want to be friends with you.”  With so much emphasis on the “you.”  The fucking “you.”  Like I wasn’t good enough.  And I knew why.  It was because I was fat.  (So I thought).  She turned up her nose, and her pretty face with her pretty brown eyes and pretty dark hair was ugly with hatred.  With hatred she felt towards me, and she didn’t even know me.  She didn’t know me, and I wasn’t good enough to be her friend.  And something told me inside that no matter what I did, I wasn’t ever going to be good enough.  You.  One stupid little word.

And then middle school.  I had been invisible before that.  Once the schools merged together, I had my two really good friends and they were all I needed.  I liked being invisible because no one noticed you if you were invisible, and if no one noticed you, then no one made fun of you.  You got to avoid the teasing, the taunting, all of it.  But middle school.  Mike.  I don’t know why he didn’t like me, but all that matters is that he didn’t.  I wasn’t good enough.  He was friends with one of my friends, and so I figured he would be friends with me too, but no.  He hated me.  For no real reason at all.  I was in the club that did the news to the middle school in the mornings, and I was the one who read off the lunch menu to say what lunch was on that day.  I was always so happy to be there, to be a part of something, you know?  And so I’d start out “Goooood morning! Today for lunch….” with a huge smile on my face and I could always make the other people in the club smile... but Mike…. when I had class with him, he would mimic the way I said “good morning” on the school news channel, making fun of me, just loud enough for me to hear.  And the people who hung out with him, the more popular kids, would look over at me and just laugh and I just wanted to crawl into a hole and disappear forever.  I wanted so badly to just be invisible again.

And there was a time in computer class in middle school where we had to use our email for something, and it had to be our real email address because our teacher was going to email us part of our assignments or something like that.  I was a fucking middle schooler.  Horses were my favorite animal, and 6 was my favorite number, so my email address at the time was horselover6 @ something.  You know?  You understand?  And we had to give some of the people in class our email address to, and Mike was in my class.  I was going to avoid him, but he came right over to me and again I wanted to be gone.  To be anywhere but there.  He messes up my hair, then tells me that it’s a mess, that it’s gross because it’s messy.  He tells me my nose is too big, it’s ugly.  He tells me I’m ugly.  I’m stupid.  I’m not ever going to be good enough for anybody.  I’m not good enough to be friends with my friend who he’s friends with.  And by the time the teacher looks over and asks if something’s wrong (does my face clue her in?  Does my face look as broken as I feel inside?) he says that nothings wrong, and asks for my email address, and because the teacher’s looking, I have to give it to him, and as soon as she looks away again he’s got a new thing to tease me over.  “Horse lover??  That’s disgusting.  That’s nasty.  You’re disgusting.”  Because of the stupid name thing I’d used for my email address.  I was in middle school.  Everyone’s middle school email addresses were stupid, right?  Everyone’s.  Not just mine, right?  But mine was wrong.  Mine was just like me, not good enough.  Wrong.  Bad.

Another time, that same class, that same kid.  Our teacher left for a few minutes, left us to do our work quietly.  Don’t leave, I scream silently in my head.  Please don’t leave.  He’s sitting by me.  Please.  Please don’t leave the room.  But she does.  I’ve finished my work already, it wasn’t too hard to do, but Mike didn’t want to do it.  Too cool to do his own schoolwork, you know?  “Do my work for me.”  “You’re stupid.”  “If you’re really smart, you’ll do my work for me.”  “Do it.  You’re too stupid to, aren’t you?”  “You’re stupid.”  “You’re ugly and stupid.”  I tell him no.  I try so hard to tune him out.  I’m better than him, I know I am.  I’m not going to do his work for him.  I tune him out the best I can, but next thing I know… pain.  I’m too shocked at first to react, until I hear him say he’ll do it again if I don’t get his work done.  Tears filling my eyes, I realize what happened.  He hit me with his chair.  He hit me with his chair because I tried standing up to him.  My eyes are full of tears, and I’m telling myself silently not to cry.  Don’t cry.  Don’t let them see you cry.  Don’t feel anything.  I do his work.  I do it because I know he’s won.  There’s nothing I can do about it.

Walking to my bus, computers was the last class I had during the day, my 5th grade social studies teacher asked me what was wrong.  Seeing as I was in 7th or maybe 8th grade at the time, it had been at least two years since I’d even spoken to him.  But still, he used my name.  “Kimberly, is something wrong?” Why was he the first to notice?  Why didn’t anyone else?  Why didn’t anyone notice when I was at my locker, getting my backpack and everything?  Don’t cry, don’t cry, don’t cry.  When cry was all I wanted to do.  Nothing’s wrong, can’t you tell?  Don’t cry.  I’m fine.  I’m wrong and bad and horrible and ugly and why am I even here?  Why did I have to wake up again this morning?  But no, I’m fine.  Please, please don’t cry.  Someone just hit me with a chair for reasons I don’t understand, but I’m fine.  I’m wrong and terrible and just a mistake, and that’s all I am and all I’m ever going to be.  But I’m fine, don’t I look fine?  Never let anyone see you cry or it’ll only get worse. Fine.  He asks me if I want to talk about it, and I do but I can’t.  Because I know things will just get worse if I tell anyone.  Especially if I tell a teacher.  Things always get worse if you tell because they know that they’ve won.  The bruises heal.  But the words and feelings don’t ever go away.  They stay there in the back of your mind and even though you were only 7 or 8 or 11 or 12 when it happened, and you’re 20 now, the words are still always there and you know, no matter what anyone ever says, you know you’re not ever going to be good enough.

And I try to become invisible again.  Why can’t you be invisible when you want to be?  Why are you only ever invisible when all you want is for someone to really be your friend?  To be a friend who won't leave when someone else come along?  To be a friend who's there for you no matter what?  When all you want is someone to notice what’s happening, to just tell you they care.  Someone to listen.  Someone to make the hurt go away, when you know that no one ever can.

High school, and I’m still not invisible.  People still saw me, and what they saw was just that girl who’s never been good enough for anything.  For anyone.  I had more friends in high school.  I let myself get closer to a few people.  But there were these three boys...  They hated me.  Either that, or I was just an easy target because they knew I wouldn’t fight back.  Because they knew I wouldn't do anything about it.  They knew that I had given up trying, and was just going to let it happen to me.  One of them, I’ve known him for forever.  I’d never had a problem with him before.  We were never friends, but never really not friends either.  We were just two kids who were the same age, lived in the same town, went to the same school, and often ended up in the same classes.  One of the three found out my locker combination.  Oh my god, the ketchup.  At first I thought they had just squeezed the open ketchup packets in through the vents in the locker.  Why do lockers even have those damn vents anyway?  Nothing lives in there.  But no.  The ketchup was all over my books, my binders.  In my backpack.  In my lunchbox.  Everywhere.  It was a mess.  And they laughed about it.  I knew it was them, they’d been teasing me all school year.  I told this time.  But nothing happened about it because I had no “proof”.  I should’ve known nothing was going to happen.  Nothing ever happens.  Adults don’t care.  The one apologized for it, the one who I’ve known for forever.  But still, the fact that he was one of the three who did it.

And then my first year of college.  When you think it’s finally all over, and you think that now you’re going to meet new people and it’s going to be great and it’s going to be so much better than high school.  I didn’t know I was wrong about that too.  Wrong.  It’s all I ever am.  Because I thought for sure college would be better.  But no.  It wasn’t any better.  I still wasn’t good enough.  I was wrong.  God, I knew I was defective or something.  That was the only explanation.  Because it had been happening since second grade, and here I was in my first semester of college, and it was still happening.  I still wasn’t good enough or smart enough or pretty enough or anything enough.  I don’t know why I hung out with him.  Probably because we were friends at first.  Because I trusted him.  But no, he changed.  Nothing I did was good enough.  When he was mad at other people, he would take it out on me, yelling, raising his voice, making me afraid.  I was so nervous around him after a while, but what was I supposed to do?  All I could think was that reincarnation must be real, and I must’ve done something terrible in a past life to deserve getting treated that way.  And I put up with it and dealt with it and wished that, somehow, I just wouldn’t wake up again because there was nothing else I could do.  There wasn’t anything I could do except for to let it happen.  To accept the fact that I still was just wrong.  Messed up.  Or something.

And I’m ok now.  I think.  I’m mostly ok now anyway.  I can laugh about some of it, if I try, but the words still haven’t gone away.  Their words are still there.  Their facial expressions won’t leave the back of my mind.  Their horrible, cruel laughs haunt my nightmares.  They’re the reason for so much of the way I am now.  Why I’m so scared to talk in front of other people – because I’m afraid they’ll be like that kid in middle school was, that I won’t be good enough and they’ll just make fun of me.  Why I pull away from new people when I feel like I’m getting too close to them – because I’m afraid they’ll be like that guy I was friends with at one point and change, that they’ll use what they know about me to hurt me somehow.  Why I want so badly for people to just like me – because if they like me, if they’re friends with me, maybe they won’t tease me in a mean way, maybe they won’t make fun of me the way other people did.  Why I always think that what I do isn’t good enough – because I’m afraid if it’s bad or wrong or messed up, then that’s just what people will think of me again.  Because even though none of those people are in my life anymore, even though I rose above them and even though I’m the one who cut them out of my life, even now, I can’t erase the words they said.  I can’t get rid of the way they acted.  I can’t get rid of the fact that they hated me for no reason.  I can’t change any of that.

But I can change things in my life.  I can be a good person, and I can not make fun of other people.  And I can not hold hate in my heart for people.  And I can try to not judge people before I know them.  And now that I’ve typed this all out, even though I’m almost positive that no one actually read this whole thing, now I hope that other people will change the way that they act.  I hope they’ll read other people’s stories too, that they’ll open their eyes to the real world and see what’s happening.  I can hope that maybe other people will think about what they’re going to say before they say it.  That they won’t make fun of people.  That they won’t hate people.  That’s what I can hope.  Because I don’t want bullying to kill anyone.