Allow me to introduce myself. I'm a friend of Carbonyl. I didn't know her in elementary school, and only met her in her last two years of high school. She told me about this thread. I have read her posts and several of yours, and I thought I'd share my own experiences as well.
I grew up in a small farming community in upstate New York. My graduating class had 37 students in it. Of those 37, about half at one time or another actively bullied me. And that's not counting the bullies who moved away or left the class for other reasons (more on that in a moment).
I'm not going to trumpet my own horn when I say that I'm intelligent. I don't have a genius level IQ like Carbonyl has, at least not when I was tested, but I consistently scored at the top of my class, and I graduated as co-valedictorian. I had the highest academic average in the high school for three years, excepting senior year, when the other co-valedictorian got an average three hundredths of a point higher than mine, partially because she took heavier weighted classes than I did (our school essentially bumped up averages for students in "more challenging" classes; she could afford to take "college" classes, I couldn't).
The point to this description is that my intelligence and my inability to hide it-actually, my inability to stop my mind from dominating my personality- made me an incredibly big target. From the first year I attended, I was not left alone. Switching schools in second grade didn't help- in fact, at the private Catholic school I attended for that one grade things were worse. I remember physically fighting back in second, seventh, eighth, and ninth/tenth grades. I remember trying to fight back verbally. Twice I was suspended. The other times I wasn't caught. None of my fights lasted very long, and they were very infrequent, and this was because I was more terrified of my parents and the school system to do much fighting.
Let me elaborate:
My parents are control freaks. They knew I was smart and they were obsessed with getting me through school with as spotless a record as possible. It didn't matter what got me in trouble at school-whatever I faced at home was infinitely worse. My parents made it very clear that I had to be an angel or my disciplinary record could cripple me later on. More importantly, the nights following an incident at school were hellishly miserable. In retrospect, I'm happy that I kept from incurring my parents' wrath as much as I did, because I learned post high school what would happen if I dared cause more than the very rare bit of trouble for them.
Also important was the fact that since this was a small school, the community was very tight knit. Everyone knew each other, and new faces were pretty rare. Some families had been going to the school for generations, and a couple of the students in my class were children of teachers or staff at the school. My family was one of the few that wasn't "from around here." Needless to say, nepotism reigned. Academically, it was troubling because for a while we had a superintendent whose daughter was in my class. Another girl was the daughter of the treasurer. One of the boys was the son of a School Board member. In seventh grade a faculty member told my father that in no uncertain terms would I ever be valedictorian. This was because they were grooming the superintendent's and treasurer's daughters to take valedictorian and salutatorian. Things got better in this department when that supe left and a new one came in who changed many of the policies at the school, made them more transparent, etc. But academics was still a war zone. By senior year I knew teachers who were clearly entrenched on my side, clearly entrenched in hers, and a few who were in between. I personally only cared about the title because I wanted to please my parents, but it annoyed the hell out of me that there was active fighting going on to prevent me from gaining what I knew I had earned-just because I wasn't the pretty, popular, snobby girl whose mom handled the school's paychecks.
What was the point of all that? To demonstrate that the school was corrupt to its core. If reports I've heard from underclassmen I'd befriended are accurate, it's gotten even worse since I left.
Now, to the meat of my story:
Starting off, I had two main enemies. They'll be known as J and J here. J and J were best friends, both athletic, popular kids who everyone seemed to like. And they hated the FUCK out of me. Nothing I ever said made a difference; none of the (minimal) intervention by school officials helped. They never stopped. Never. Physical confrontations were rare, but I was a sensitive kid and they knew it. And boy, did they use it to their advantage.
Know what eventually stopped them? They didn't grow up, I didn't beat them up. They were riding a 4 wheeler without a helmet when they got smacked into by a minivan. Both of them almost died. It was a couple of years before I saw them again. One of them fared okay eventually; he still walked with a limp, and was still an asshole when I saw him. The other was permanently brain damaged, with his limbs twisted in odd ways. I still can't say I'm sorry it happened to them. As much hell as they put me through, from the first grade through the sixth, I just can't give a fuck. Especially since they didn't learn from karma.
It ended up that the rest of the class decided they'd make up for the absence of their two idols. The demographics were different, but the treatment was the same. The popular, more intelligent kids dumped on me as much as the borderline retards who were only in school because the law mandated they needed to be. The latter were the ones who would get physical from time to time. I remember one kid, Z, a known troublemaker who liked me sometimes and hated my guts at other times. One of the latter times, I can't remember why, he stood up and knocked me across the face so hard that my glasses flew across the room. Oh, the glasses. I couldn't get the glasses fucked up because they cost my parents 300 bucks. Whenever a fight reached my face, it ended, I backed off, because I knew what hell I'd catch for costing my parents 300 bucks. This happened another time, when another on again, off again bully decided that punching me repeatedly in the shoulder on the bus ride home was funny. I finally snapped, got on top of him and wailed on him back until he got his fist up and punched me in the glasses. I jumped off, rebent my glasses back in place, and took whatever else he said/did the rest of the ride home. I couldn't get those glasses broken.
I wasn't the only one who was bullied in that school, though I was the one most targeted. Don't say it's because I'm weak. If my parents hadn't cared so much about what I did at school, I would've been in a fight every week. I have a hot temper and a fighter's instinct. I find it very difficult NOT to stand up to people who are creating problems. The fact that I WAS so easily riled, coupled with my "weirdness" and the short leash I was on with my parents made me the perfect target. My tormenters could see the effect they had on me, and they could get away consequence free. I began to daydream about a time that I'd come back after school was over and have my cold revenge on the jerks, Count of Monte Cristo style. I wanted to ruin their lives for ruining mine.
In addition to my main tormenters, I had some second stringers, kids who were nice to me one on one, but who would laugh at or join in the bullshit when others started it. One kid in particular was incredibly good at this. He was hideous, fat, not really intelligent, and nerdy, but because he joined in on making fun of me, he was left alone- and he took full advantage of this fact.
I even had teachers join in on the fun. After I made a stupid move and ended up in a creek on a field trip, my sixth grade teacher made my folly into an in class demonstration, knowing beforehand that I had been crying as a result of the incident and its aftermath. The incident remained something the bullies would bring up the rest of the time I was in school with them.
New classmates were generally no help either. They were few and far between, and the other kids generally got to talk to them first, and would convince them that I was a dork, not to be friends with. It happened many times. Fortunately, sometimes they would see through the bullshit and be okay with me.
Fortunately, I had a few friends who kind of formed a posse around me eventually. We were the leper colony of the class, the unwanted, the unpopular rejects. Among the guys, I was kind of the unofficial leader because I was the most outspoken and the mutual friend of the group. I was the guy that the other guys knew, and I made sure to introduce my friends to each other. There weren't many of us, but we kept each others' spirits up through middle and high school.
Other help came when three of my very nerdy friends grew into very cool teenagers. They formed a rock band, did sports, all sorts of things. And they liked me, and I liked them. And unlike other kids, they didn't shy away from being friendly to me in front of the assholes. I ended up gaining more social acceptance that way as we all grew older.
I also learned how to harden myself, how to ignore the shit flying at me, and not let others see how much they pissed me off. I began to get better at comebacks as I learned more about the people I was dealing with. My wit became sharper, and I eventually learned how to blend in some without also trying to fit in. I also shed some of the neurosis programmed into me by my parents and loosened up. My classmates also eventually matured and learned that I wasn't the horrible slimy thing they must've thought I was.
But this was all way, way down the road. I'm talking about the last couple of years of high school here. Beforehand? None of this "fight back" bullshit would have helped. I was a very bright, very earnest kid who wanted to love everyone and get along. I had no desire to hurt anyone else who wasn't already hurting me, and even then, I had a hard time even thinking about inflicting pain. To this day I can't even kill a spider. I'm more likely to put it on a piece of paper and shoo it outside than anything. Or just leave it alone.
All of you people who are calling these kids "weak," you're measuring strength by the ability to withstand or inflict pain. This is a horrible standard to hold our children to. The pain SHOULDN'T HAPPEN IN THE FIRST PLACE. And NO child who's learning how to survive should be expected to have to withstand others trying to beat him or her down. You might be right to say that some of those who commit suicide may have issues unrelated to the bullying itself, but that doesn't mean that the bullying isn't a factor. You're blaming the victim in the worst way, the same way a rape victim is blamed for being in the wrong place or dressing the wrong way.
All of our experiences are different, but what we need to start doing is teaching all of our children from the moment they can understand us that inflicting pain or hardship on others is WRONG. That self defense is the only reason to raise your wit or fists against another person. That to accept others and treat them with the respect we wish for ourselves is the only way to get along peacefully in this world.
If you want bullying to end, you need to cut it off at the source by doing this, and also by leading by example. Don't bully your children. Nurture them, show them love. Don't spank them. Don't scream at them. Reward them for good behavior, teach them that being a good person has better consequences than being a bad person.
Bullies aren't cartoon villains. They're extremely damaged themselves or responding to societal pressure. Their actions do not happen in a vacuum. And they can be stopped.
I survived, but I was lucky. And it would be the height of ignorance to tell people that the way I survived was the right way.
You shouldn't even have to develop methods to survive bullying. Never.
And once I'm through school and teaching classes of my own, I will crusade against any bullying I see. The fighter instinct never died in me. And I'll use it to help those not filled with as much spirit and rage as I was to survive. They have every right to live peacefully as the bullies who would see them driven off.
