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All posts for the month May, 2014

Bullies

Published May 28, 2014 by Sandee

I thought of my past as encompassing the sundry experiences of youth, until fixating on headlines about bullying, about young people who go to therapy and take antidepressants, those who do self-destructive things and hurt other people because they had been bullied.

Nowadays, they have the bully-patrol in schools, and public service announcements about bullying.

It’s very scary. I’ve also read articles about adult bullies. I need to be on the lookout for bullies too?

“I didn’t know I was bullied. That was bullying that I experienced when I was in junior high school? Wow, I was bullied,” I said to my sister.

The media says that being bullied causes people to have syndromes.

People reading about these syndromes can measure themselves up against them, eventually determining that they have these syndromes and begin manifesting other behaviors outlined therein. I did.

Maybe I was just naive, albeit, one who had been called “Skeleton Head” and “Chester” because I didn’t have any titties – but I just thought getting fucked with was comeuppance for me because I said and did mean things to kids too.

But on days I’m digging through archives, feeling sorry for myself, I can focus on having been called “Chester”. Then I can watch Dr. Phil and learn even more about me.

The media influenced me to feel sorry for myself. It made a lot of money doing it. It defined me when previously I had no idea that I even had any syndrome.

I thought I was evolving into something new and different everyday. But now I’m in a cubby-hole, marked with an indelible stamp: “The One Who Was Bullied”.

At the end of this I realize it’s good to draw attention to bullying so that we think about it and grow eventually, as a culture.

But, could we tone it down a little, so that we can hear ourselves think?

 

 

Four Questions

Published May 21, 2014 by Sandee

Amy Reese from AmyReeseWrites.com asked me to participate in the “blog hop.”

I’m a party pooper when it comes to things like this but — how could you say no to Amy? So I had to answer four questions about my writing process. Here they are:

What am I working on?

I’m working on two stories, one about a woman who hides, the other is a story about a person who doesn’t exist. After that, I’ll reshape my novel and try to get an agent to represent it — yeah!

How does my work differ from others of its genre?

My work differs from other work in the same genre because I write through the lens of my special DNA — ha!

Why do I write what I do?

I write because I’m trying to reach out to other people’s spirits, to communicate. I’m saying, I feel this, see this, want this, hate this, etc. Can you relate? What do you feel, hate, etc.? Do you feel me?

How does my writing process work?

This is a cliche, but my process is like sculpting. I write very broadly first, and sometimes it doesn’t make sense, but I trust the process, and come back each day to shape it up until it takes form.