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Something that needs to be said.
This person has pledged that for each comment she gets to this post, up to 500, she will donate a dollar to a few organizations dedicated to helping GLBTQ youth. A few others have joined in and said that if she reaches this goal, they'll donate money of their own. The count is currently at $650 that could be donated to helping, and more comments and donations keep pouring in.
This is amazing. Even if all I can do is comment myself and help to spread the word a little, I'll do it. It took me 30 seconds to write a comment. It was possibly the most worthwhile 30 seconds I'll spend today.
The rash of teen suicides lately has disturbed me profoundly. The bullying these people endured, for no reason other than they they had an attraction to the same sex (sometimes even just potentially had an attraction to the same sex) is absolutely disgusting. There aen't many people I will wish ill upon, but the people who perpetrate this kind of utter bullshit should be punished, and punished severely.
This is a sore spot with me. I pretty much spent my life being bullied in one form or another. Not just because of my sexual orientation, though accusations of such did play a part in my torment.
You wouldn't know it to look at me now, but I wasn't always so shy. I was a pretty normal kid when I was in England. I even managed to stay pretty normal through the first little bit of living in Canada, or at least I stayed off enough radars to avoid being bullied. The first time I went to school in Canada, there was a boy in my class who was in a wheelchair, who had to be reminded sometimes to swallow so that he didn't drool. He was a nice boy, if a little hard to understand because of his speech impediment. But I suspect that his very presence stopped me from being teased then. When there's a drooling wheelchair-bound kid around, a little girl with a funny accent draws much less attention.
I don't recall people making fun of him much, but to be fair, I was 5 years old at the time and probably missed it if he was teased. It certainly wouldn't surprise me if he went through hell in later years, though.
But when I got to elementary school, that was where it started going downhill for me. Now there was no one in the class to take attention off me. I was the freak with the funny way of talking. Though I wasn't very introverted then, certainly not as much as I am now, I quickly became so when it became obvious that whenever I opened my mouth to say something, people would laugh at me and mock me. I had a British accent, used funny words ("rubber" instead of "eraser", for example, which caused no few snickers out of my teacher due to rubber being a slang term for condom), and was a target for mockery. I recall a time when my parents had given me popcorn to eat at recess. People kept coming over and asking me for some, even people who made fun of me frequently. I gave some out at first, but eventually got tired of it and snapped, "I'm not a popcorn seller, you know!"
Those 7 words were repeated back to me, in a fake British accent, over the next few years. Sometimes by people who hadn't even heard me say it, but who had heard other people say it to me.
It had started.
One day, when it was raining and we had to have recess inside, we all went to another classroom. I sat on one of the desk, which was, weirdly, the thing to do at the time. A group of boys took it upon themselves to start pinching my butt. A lot. The teacher who was supposed to be supervising us was at her desk, doing paperwork and not paying any mind to us at all. Eventually I did the only thing I could do. I got up, and stood in a corner with my back to the wall for the last ten minutes of recess, and made sure to always be at the back of the line whenever we had to line up to go somewhere.
It didn't help that I had skipped a grade, and so was also singled out for being smart and younger than everyone else in my class. Just another thing to make me different.
I had only one friend for the first few years, and she wasn't even in my class. Then she moved away. I met another friend, only one, and until she moved away a year later, we were inseperable.
So much so that in the fourth grade, it was bordering on trendy for people to accuse us of having our hands down each others' pants.
Bear in mind that at that age, I didn't even know they were really referring to something sexual. All I understood was that they were making fun of me, and by association, her. Constantly. Laughing when I denied their accusations. Laughing when I silently walked away, my head down and my face red.
I was at school one day, walking past an expanse of brick wall, when all of a sudden I felt a hand on the side of my head, and then the other side of my head smashed into the wall. I never saw who did it.
I don't know who threw the basketball at me in gym class, either. It hit the back of my head and I fell to my knees in pain, and had to sit the rest of the class out.
I do remember the two little boys who were sent by their friend to beat me up. I remember the girl down the street threatening to beat me up too. I remember having rocks thrown at my head. I remember people hiding being things to jump out and scare me or push me around.
I remember having a falling out with a friend, and her mother screaming at me down the street, telling me that I was a rotten little bitch and that she hoped I'd never have another friend again for as long as I lived. It wasn't just bratty kids tormenting me here. This was bullshit from someone who long ago should have reached the point of knowing better than to say that to a 10 year old.
All this was in elementary school. Five years of my life. Five years spent learning to fear everybody, to not talk, and if I had to talk, to talk in an accent that I forced myself to learn so as not to present yet another difference to the world.
Junior high. Apathy starts to set in, because all I had before was my intelligence, and now all of a sudden I'm in classes with people who are just as smart as me, sometimes smarter. The only thing I could sling to was now no longer quite so special. I started to stop caring.
That was bad enough. But I still had students threatening to beat me up, pull my hair, put whoopie cushions on my chair, make fun of me for being fat, ugly, for having glasses, for not wearing trendy name-brand clothes, for being different. The only friends I could get were other outcasts, some of whom turned on me in the end anyway, joining the others in their mockery. I still feared walking down the street. I cringed every time I saw a kid running toward me, no matter who they were or whether or not their knew me or I them. Not knowing someone hadn't stopped a kid from trying to run into me on his bike, intentionally. Knowing someone hadn't stopped them from stealing from me.
High school. My first year of high school, I decided to go to an all girl's school, naively believing that girls would be less likely to bully me than boys, or at least cut down on the amount of people bullying me. It may have, only the girls who were there made up for it by stepping up their efforts. I just about cried when I learned that the worst offender from junior high was going to the same school. She was the one who threatened me, pushed me into lockers, sneered at me as she passed me.
It was another girl who stealthily stole my locker lock and watched, laughing, with a group of girls as I tried desperately to find it. I couldn't very well leave my locker unlocked, but I had to get to class. She eventually gave it back, laughing the whole time, acting like she was doing me a favour by returning what she stole.
This was another girl who used to be my friend.
In the auditorium, two girls sitting behind me decided it would be fun to pull my hair. I asked them to stop, thinking that maybe my long hair was getting caught by their knees on the back of the chair or something. They laughed, and pulled harder, and hurled insults at me behind my back but in a volume I could certainly hear. I eventually left the auditorium in tears, my head hurting, the girls still laughing.
This, I want to add, was the first time a stranger saw me upset and offered to sit with me until I felt better. I was 13. Everyone else turned a blind eye, or at best offered sympathetic glances but no real help. This one girl, a bit older than me, tried to actually offer comfort.
Teachers knew I was being bullied. It wasn't as though they didn't see it, and sometimes acknowledged it, but never did anything about it. My parents gave me the old speech about how bullies were just insecure and afraid, and told me to stand up for myself but never told me how, and disapproved of me whenever I tried.
There's a quote from Buffy that I find particularly apt here, when it comes to the excuse that bullies are insecure. People say that so that the victim will hopefully feel pity for their tormentors, and show them kindness that will eventually (supposedly) turn their bullying into friendship. "You know, I'm really tired of everyone being so insecure." Whether or not bullies are insecure does not change what their victims have to endure.
In my 13th year of life, I tried to kill myself. The bullying I'd been made to silently endure since I was 5 years old played no small part in that. Depression and a crappy family were the other factors, it's true, but I might have been able to better endure some of that if every time I left my apartment building I didn't feel like I had to fear for my safety, my wellbeing. I should be able to feel safe at school as well as at home, and while I may have felt safe at home, I certainly didn't feel happy. I felt unsafe and unhappy at school. The only escape I had was when I went to sleep. It's no wonder that an eternal sleep felt pretty damn appealing at that point.
Some people may be reading this and wondering why I'm bothering to say it. After all, the recent rash of suicides due to bullying were all related to sexuality. My story doesn't have that stuff in it.
Well, for one thing, bullying is bullying. GLBTQ teens are not the only ones who need help here. And someone may fall into the GLBTQ spectrum and be bullied for reasons other than their sexuality or gender identity. I want to make that statement, for one thing. I don't want people to forget that it's not just GLBTQ people who are made to go through hell for one reason or another during the years that are supposed to be pretty awesome and full of fun memories.
But if you want to bring that stuff in, okay. I already mentioned being accused of feeling up my only friend. You know, when I was 8. How about when I was supposed to start developing sexually, I did it differently. I didn't feel like a girl. I played with Barbies and much as with sports equipment. I had someone accuse me of being a boy once because I had a soccer ball and tennis rackets instead of My Little Ponies. I found some males attractive, but not the way a lot of other girls seemed to. I couldn't get myself interested in makeup and clothes and all that stuff, no matter how hard I tried. I struggled for a while with a crush on a female friend, one which was never reciprocated and I'm fairly sure she used against me once or twice to get something she wanted.
I came to the conclusion that I must be bisexual, since I liked males as much as females, though I hated having to clarify that word with, "I don't like both so much as I just don't care if someone's male or female if I like them; I'm more interested in the person than what's in their pants." Either way, I came out to my parents, and my father tried to be supportive. In his way. And his way was by making jokes at my expense, by trying as often as possible to have the syllable "bi" in his sentences, with that special emphasis that made it clear he was teasing me. I'd like to say that I don't think my mother really cared, but to this day she expresses surprise whenever she's around to hear my father point out a pretty girl and me agreeing with him.
I tried explaining to friends that I wanted a relationship, but didn't want all the crap and responsibilities that came with it. They assumed I wanted a fuckbuddy. I didn't have the words to tell them that the idea was abhorrent to me, that sex was one of the "responsibilities" that I didn't want to have to deal with.
I didn't learn about the terms "agendered" and "asexual" until I became an adult. All I knew when I was a teen was that I was different in ways that I couldn't even properly express. I wasn't interested in being a girl, and when I'd found out about transexuality, I knew I wasn't interested in being a boy either. Aside from a few crushes (spread equally over males and females), I didn't experience much attraction to anybody, and from everything I've learned since, didn't really develop that sort of mental sexuality in the same way that most people do. The reason I lost my virginity wasn't because I particularly wanted to. It was because some people in my small social circle kept talking about sex a lot, and I wanted to stop feeling like I was on the outside so much. Peer pressure, essentially, but not the overt and obvious kind. This was peer pressure done so subtly that most people wouldn't even know it, but it was there nevertheless.
So I had all that, during the time I tried to kill myself, and afterward. That uncertainty, that inability to express myself, and coupled with depression, it made my life hell even when people had stopped making fun of me because I somehow, miraculously, ending up with a circle of friends instead of just having one at a time. I stopped being so vulnerable in one sense, but then was made vulnerable in a different way, because I had no experience with protecting myself from the pressures of friends, of trying to explain myself to them, or trying to relate to them.
How did that affect me? Well, I can safely say that I'm not sure. High school was hell for me, but in different ways sometimes. But the biggest reason I'm not sure is that I have a blank spot in my mind during my high school years. Most of the 11th grade, and some of the 12th grade, can't be accessed by me. It's like trying to watch TV with a black cloth over the screen. I can tell there are images beyond, but I can't see anything clearly enough to make sense of them, and they may as well not be there at all. For all I know, I had the best year ever. But I may also have gone through a kind of hell that my mind doesn't even want me thinking about again. I can't be sure one way or the other, but let's just say I wouldn't put money on the first choice.
Why do bullies get away with stuff like this? Because nobody stops them. People counsel the victims to be more understanding and more sympathetic. Teachers have lost the authority to punish students half the time now, even when it's obvious that they're doing something terrible. Because people who are bullied a lot tend to stop crying out when they learn that nobody's going to come and help them.
Then, of course, there's the fact that some adults don't turn a blind eye to bullying, but go and watch it as a form of entertainment. Rei told me about an incident he saw uptown when he was in high school, where two students were beating the crap out of each other, and sure enough, other students had gathered in a circle to watch. But adults were in that circle too, watching in fascination or cheering on the fighters. Not trying to break up the fight. Not trying to get help. Standing and watching. Encouraging.
Disgusting.
I hate bullying. I hate bullies. People can come up with as many excuses for the bullies as they like, say that they're scared or insecure or lonely or that they were probably bullied themselves once. But that does not erase what they do to people. That doesn't mend wounds or heal scars. It doesn't stop anything. It just convinces the victim that even the adults who are supposed to help them care more about the bullies than the bullied.
Then there's the fact that often things get overlooked in children what would be reported to the police in adults. Physical abuse, mostly, but also harassment of various kinds. There's a wonderful line from Mercedes Lackey's Burning Brightly that expresses this sentiment very clearly. I can't remember the exact quote, so I'll paraphrase a little but it's something like, "I mean torture, not pushing around. We'd call it torture in adults, and I see no reason to call it any less in children."
Because let's face it: if an adult was walking home and two slightly younger adults came around the corner and threatened to beat them, that's cause to get the police involved. If heavy or sharp objects were thrown at an adult by an adult, that could be reported to the police and the perpetrator would get quite well punished for it. Sexual harassment is cause to get the police involved at any point, but it often gets overlooked in younger people unless an adult is involved. Anything else is just "kids being kids," even if the end effect is the same.
That's why I want to speak out, not just against the bullying of GLBTQ youth, but against bullying in general. Nobody deserves it. Too many people overlook it. It causes as many scars as a knife does, only most of the scars caused by bullying are the kind that nobody looks at because they're psychological, emotional. I survived being bullied. Barely. If I'd cut deeper or taken more pills on that first suicide attempt, I wouldn't have survived bullying. Many people would have contributed to that death, none of them once thinking that it would go so far because to them, it's all fun and games.
My pain, somebody else's pain, was a game. It was fun. It was funny.
It's not a game. And just because I'm still alive doesn't mean I came out intact on the other side. The habits these people got me into have yet to be broken down. I don't know if they ever will be. Some things are so deeply ingrained that they're completely a part of me now, like my crippling social anxiety and my frequent inability to speak to strangers unless I exert a lot of willpower and suffer for it later.
Their games have ended. My life has not. And even if I still suffer for it, even if the memories still hurt, I've found the strength to speak out for those who can't. Not just the people who tragically took their lives because they saw no other end to their pain, but those who are so used to silence, so used to nobody paying attention unless it's to hurt them. For them, I speak. For them, I stand up. And for them, I listen when somebody else may not, because I know all too well what it's like to have my please for help fall on deaf ears.
This is amazing. Even if all I can do is comment myself and help to spread the word a little, I'll do it. It took me 30 seconds to write a comment. It was possibly the most worthwhile 30 seconds I'll spend today.
The rash of teen suicides lately has disturbed me profoundly. The bullying these people endured, for no reason other than they they had an attraction to the same sex (sometimes even just potentially had an attraction to the same sex) is absolutely disgusting. There aen't many people I will wish ill upon, but the people who perpetrate this kind of utter bullshit should be punished, and punished severely.
This is a sore spot with me. I pretty much spent my life being bullied in one form or another. Not just because of my sexual orientation, though accusations of such did play a part in my torment.
You wouldn't know it to look at me now, but I wasn't always so shy. I was a pretty normal kid when I was in England. I even managed to stay pretty normal through the first little bit of living in Canada, or at least I stayed off enough radars to avoid being bullied. The first time I went to school in Canada, there was a boy in my class who was in a wheelchair, who had to be reminded sometimes to swallow so that he didn't drool. He was a nice boy, if a little hard to understand because of his speech impediment. But I suspect that his very presence stopped me from being teased then. When there's a drooling wheelchair-bound kid around, a little girl with a funny accent draws much less attention.
I don't recall people making fun of him much, but to be fair, I was 5 years old at the time and probably missed it if he was teased. It certainly wouldn't surprise me if he went through hell in later years, though.
But when I got to elementary school, that was where it started going downhill for me. Now there was no one in the class to take attention off me. I was the freak with the funny way of talking. Though I wasn't very introverted then, certainly not as much as I am now, I quickly became so when it became obvious that whenever I opened my mouth to say something, people would laugh at me and mock me. I had a British accent, used funny words ("rubber" instead of "eraser", for example, which caused no few snickers out of my teacher due to rubber being a slang term for condom), and was a target for mockery. I recall a time when my parents had given me popcorn to eat at recess. People kept coming over and asking me for some, even people who made fun of me frequently. I gave some out at first, but eventually got tired of it and snapped, "I'm not a popcorn seller, you know!"
Those 7 words were repeated back to me, in a fake British accent, over the next few years. Sometimes by people who hadn't even heard me say it, but who had heard other people say it to me.
It had started.
One day, when it was raining and we had to have recess inside, we all went to another classroom. I sat on one of the desk, which was, weirdly, the thing to do at the time. A group of boys took it upon themselves to start pinching my butt. A lot. The teacher who was supposed to be supervising us was at her desk, doing paperwork and not paying any mind to us at all. Eventually I did the only thing I could do. I got up, and stood in a corner with my back to the wall for the last ten minutes of recess, and made sure to always be at the back of the line whenever we had to line up to go somewhere.
It didn't help that I had skipped a grade, and so was also singled out for being smart and younger than everyone else in my class. Just another thing to make me different.
I had only one friend for the first few years, and she wasn't even in my class. Then she moved away. I met another friend, only one, and until she moved away a year later, we were inseperable.
So much so that in the fourth grade, it was bordering on trendy for people to accuse us of having our hands down each others' pants.
Bear in mind that at that age, I didn't even know they were really referring to something sexual. All I understood was that they were making fun of me, and by association, her. Constantly. Laughing when I denied their accusations. Laughing when I silently walked away, my head down and my face red.
I was at school one day, walking past an expanse of brick wall, when all of a sudden I felt a hand on the side of my head, and then the other side of my head smashed into the wall. I never saw who did it.
I don't know who threw the basketball at me in gym class, either. It hit the back of my head and I fell to my knees in pain, and had to sit the rest of the class out.
I do remember the two little boys who were sent by their friend to beat me up. I remember the girl down the street threatening to beat me up too. I remember having rocks thrown at my head. I remember people hiding being things to jump out and scare me or push me around.
I remember having a falling out with a friend, and her mother screaming at me down the street, telling me that I was a rotten little bitch and that she hoped I'd never have another friend again for as long as I lived. It wasn't just bratty kids tormenting me here. This was bullshit from someone who long ago should have reached the point of knowing better than to say that to a 10 year old.
All this was in elementary school. Five years of my life. Five years spent learning to fear everybody, to not talk, and if I had to talk, to talk in an accent that I forced myself to learn so as not to present yet another difference to the world.
Junior high. Apathy starts to set in, because all I had before was my intelligence, and now all of a sudden I'm in classes with people who are just as smart as me, sometimes smarter. The only thing I could sling to was now no longer quite so special. I started to stop caring.
That was bad enough. But I still had students threatening to beat me up, pull my hair, put whoopie cushions on my chair, make fun of me for being fat, ugly, for having glasses, for not wearing trendy name-brand clothes, for being different. The only friends I could get were other outcasts, some of whom turned on me in the end anyway, joining the others in their mockery. I still feared walking down the street. I cringed every time I saw a kid running toward me, no matter who they were or whether or not their knew me or I them. Not knowing someone hadn't stopped a kid from trying to run into me on his bike, intentionally. Knowing someone hadn't stopped them from stealing from me.
High school. My first year of high school, I decided to go to an all girl's school, naively believing that girls would be less likely to bully me than boys, or at least cut down on the amount of people bullying me. It may have, only the girls who were there made up for it by stepping up their efforts. I just about cried when I learned that the worst offender from junior high was going to the same school. She was the one who threatened me, pushed me into lockers, sneered at me as she passed me.
It was another girl who stealthily stole my locker lock and watched, laughing, with a group of girls as I tried desperately to find it. I couldn't very well leave my locker unlocked, but I had to get to class. She eventually gave it back, laughing the whole time, acting like she was doing me a favour by returning what she stole.
This was another girl who used to be my friend.
In the auditorium, two girls sitting behind me decided it would be fun to pull my hair. I asked them to stop, thinking that maybe my long hair was getting caught by their knees on the back of the chair or something. They laughed, and pulled harder, and hurled insults at me behind my back but in a volume I could certainly hear. I eventually left the auditorium in tears, my head hurting, the girls still laughing.
This, I want to add, was the first time a stranger saw me upset and offered to sit with me until I felt better. I was 13. Everyone else turned a blind eye, or at best offered sympathetic glances but no real help. This one girl, a bit older than me, tried to actually offer comfort.
Teachers knew I was being bullied. It wasn't as though they didn't see it, and sometimes acknowledged it, but never did anything about it. My parents gave me the old speech about how bullies were just insecure and afraid, and told me to stand up for myself but never told me how, and disapproved of me whenever I tried.
There's a quote from Buffy that I find particularly apt here, when it comes to the excuse that bullies are insecure. People say that so that the victim will hopefully feel pity for their tormentors, and show them kindness that will eventually (supposedly) turn their bullying into friendship. "You know, I'm really tired of everyone being so insecure." Whether or not bullies are insecure does not change what their victims have to endure.
In my 13th year of life, I tried to kill myself. The bullying I'd been made to silently endure since I was 5 years old played no small part in that. Depression and a crappy family were the other factors, it's true, but I might have been able to better endure some of that if every time I left my apartment building I didn't feel like I had to fear for my safety, my wellbeing. I should be able to feel safe at school as well as at home, and while I may have felt safe at home, I certainly didn't feel happy. I felt unsafe and unhappy at school. The only escape I had was when I went to sleep. It's no wonder that an eternal sleep felt pretty damn appealing at that point.
Some people may be reading this and wondering why I'm bothering to say it. After all, the recent rash of suicides due to bullying were all related to sexuality. My story doesn't have that stuff in it.
Well, for one thing, bullying is bullying. GLBTQ teens are not the only ones who need help here. And someone may fall into the GLBTQ spectrum and be bullied for reasons other than their sexuality or gender identity. I want to make that statement, for one thing. I don't want people to forget that it's not just GLBTQ people who are made to go through hell for one reason or another during the years that are supposed to be pretty awesome and full of fun memories.
But if you want to bring that stuff in, okay. I already mentioned being accused of feeling up my only friend. You know, when I was 8. How about when I was supposed to start developing sexually, I did it differently. I didn't feel like a girl. I played with Barbies and much as with sports equipment. I had someone accuse me of being a boy once because I had a soccer ball and tennis rackets instead of My Little Ponies. I found some males attractive, but not the way a lot of other girls seemed to. I couldn't get myself interested in makeup and clothes and all that stuff, no matter how hard I tried. I struggled for a while with a crush on a female friend, one which was never reciprocated and I'm fairly sure she used against me once or twice to get something she wanted.
I came to the conclusion that I must be bisexual, since I liked males as much as females, though I hated having to clarify that word with, "I don't like both so much as I just don't care if someone's male or female if I like them; I'm more interested in the person than what's in their pants." Either way, I came out to my parents, and my father tried to be supportive. In his way. And his way was by making jokes at my expense, by trying as often as possible to have the syllable "bi" in his sentences, with that special emphasis that made it clear he was teasing me. I'd like to say that I don't think my mother really cared, but to this day she expresses surprise whenever she's around to hear my father point out a pretty girl and me agreeing with him.
I tried explaining to friends that I wanted a relationship, but didn't want all the crap and responsibilities that came with it. They assumed I wanted a fuckbuddy. I didn't have the words to tell them that the idea was abhorrent to me, that sex was one of the "responsibilities" that I didn't want to have to deal with.
I didn't learn about the terms "agendered" and "asexual" until I became an adult. All I knew when I was a teen was that I was different in ways that I couldn't even properly express. I wasn't interested in being a girl, and when I'd found out about transexuality, I knew I wasn't interested in being a boy either. Aside from a few crushes (spread equally over males and females), I didn't experience much attraction to anybody, and from everything I've learned since, didn't really develop that sort of mental sexuality in the same way that most people do. The reason I lost my virginity wasn't because I particularly wanted to. It was because some people in my small social circle kept talking about sex a lot, and I wanted to stop feeling like I was on the outside so much. Peer pressure, essentially, but not the overt and obvious kind. This was peer pressure done so subtly that most people wouldn't even know it, but it was there nevertheless.
So I had all that, during the time I tried to kill myself, and afterward. That uncertainty, that inability to express myself, and coupled with depression, it made my life hell even when people had stopped making fun of me because I somehow, miraculously, ending up with a circle of friends instead of just having one at a time. I stopped being so vulnerable in one sense, but then was made vulnerable in a different way, because I had no experience with protecting myself from the pressures of friends, of trying to explain myself to them, or trying to relate to them.
How did that affect me? Well, I can safely say that I'm not sure. High school was hell for me, but in different ways sometimes. But the biggest reason I'm not sure is that I have a blank spot in my mind during my high school years. Most of the 11th grade, and some of the 12th grade, can't be accessed by me. It's like trying to watch TV with a black cloth over the screen. I can tell there are images beyond, but I can't see anything clearly enough to make sense of them, and they may as well not be there at all. For all I know, I had the best year ever. But I may also have gone through a kind of hell that my mind doesn't even want me thinking about again. I can't be sure one way or the other, but let's just say I wouldn't put money on the first choice.
Why do bullies get away with stuff like this? Because nobody stops them. People counsel the victims to be more understanding and more sympathetic. Teachers have lost the authority to punish students half the time now, even when it's obvious that they're doing something terrible. Because people who are bullied a lot tend to stop crying out when they learn that nobody's going to come and help them.
Then, of course, there's the fact that some adults don't turn a blind eye to bullying, but go and watch it as a form of entertainment. Rei told me about an incident he saw uptown when he was in high school, where two students were beating the crap out of each other, and sure enough, other students had gathered in a circle to watch. But adults were in that circle too, watching in fascination or cheering on the fighters. Not trying to break up the fight. Not trying to get help. Standing and watching. Encouraging.
Disgusting.
I hate bullying. I hate bullies. People can come up with as many excuses for the bullies as they like, say that they're scared or insecure or lonely or that they were probably bullied themselves once. But that does not erase what they do to people. That doesn't mend wounds or heal scars. It doesn't stop anything. It just convinces the victim that even the adults who are supposed to help them care more about the bullies than the bullied.
Then there's the fact that often things get overlooked in children what would be reported to the police in adults. Physical abuse, mostly, but also harassment of various kinds. There's a wonderful line from Mercedes Lackey's Burning Brightly that expresses this sentiment very clearly. I can't remember the exact quote, so I'll paraphrase a little but it's something like, "I mean torture, not pushing around. We'd call it torture in adults, and I see no reason to call it any less in children."
Because let's face it: if an adult was walking home and two slightly younger adults came around the corner and threatened to beat them, that's cause to get the police involved. If heavy or sharp objects were thrown at an adult by an adult, that could be reported to the police and the perpetrator would get quite well punished for it. Sexual harassment is cause to get the police involved at any point, but it often gets overlooked in younger people unless an adult is involved. Anything else is just "kids being kids," even if the end effect is the same.
That's why I want to speak out, not just against the bullying of GLBTQ youth, but against bullying in general. Nobody deserves it. Too many people overlook it. It causes as many scars as a knife does, only most of the scars caused by bullying are the kind that nobody looks at because they're psychological, emotional. I survived being bullied. Barely. If I'd cut deeper or taken more pills on that first suicide attempt, I wouldn't have survived bullying. Many people would have contributed to that death, none of them once thinking that it would go so far because to them, it's all fun and games.
My pain, somebody else's pain, was a game. It was fun. It was funny.
It's not a game. And just because I'm still alive doesn't mean I came out intact on the other side. The habits these people got me into have yet to be broken down. I don't know if they ever will be. Some things are so deeply ingrained that they're completely a part of me now, like my crippling social anxiety and my frequent inability to speak to strangers unless I exert a lot of willpower and suffer for it later.
Their games have ended. My life has not. And even if I still suffer for it, even if the memories still hurt, I've found the strength to speak out for those who can't. Not just the people who tragically took their lives because they saw no other end to their pain, but those who are so used to silence, so used to nobody paying attention unless it's to hurt them. For them, I speak. For them, I stand up. And for them, I listen when somebody else may not, because I know all too well what it's like to have my please for help fall on deaf ears.
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