Bullies

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?