What’s Goin On

Like many people, I watched the video of the middle school boy talking about being bullied and cutting himself through a series of cards, and like many people, I recognized that kid was me.

Until about the middle year of high school, school was mostly a living hell.  I dreaded going into school most mornings.  I liked school itself, as in the learning about new things and such, although I was pretty lazy when it came to the work end of things.  Teachers knew I was bright and were enthusiastic about my intelligence, although they were exasperated with my work ethic.  I’d much rather be chasing squirrels or reading books than demonstrating long division (while showing my work, naturally) a hundred times over.  I know it.  They know I know it.  What was with all the pointless bullshit?  I want to watch Indiana Jones!

In grade 5, I, with 7 other kids moved into a grade 5/6 split class, based on our teacher’s recommendations of kids who could handle a more advanced workload.  There were 3 other boys and 4 girls.

It was really good at first.  The teacher was interesting and engaging and taught a lot of stuff that wasn’t in the books.  We had whole afternoons where we discussed pertinent issues of the day:  pollution, the ozone layer, the Cold War, AIDS.  He was a serious amateur astronomer, a Sherlock Holmes buff, and a huge, gushing Trekkie.  He never once talked down to us.  He gave us hard issues to think about and expected us to form reasoned opinions about those issues, and he further expected us to defend those opinions from criticism.  For homework, he got us to watch the evening news or read the world issues section of the newspaper.

He sounds like a stellar teacher.  And he was.

Except he was a bully.  And he turned a blind eye to the rampant bullying that went on in his classroom.

If I were in school today, I would have been diagnosed with ADD and given some kind of corrective course of action.  Back in 1985, I don’t ever recall hearing about ADD.  There were kids who did their work and there were kids who ‘goofed off’.  And that teacher declared me a goof-off… and worse, a goof-off with real academic talent.

I’m not saying I had ADD.  All I can tell you is that what was being taught fascinated me.  I understood it almost immediately, but just couldn’t struggle through the tedious homework.  After a few minutes my mind would wander and I’d want to get into something else.  Trust me, this has followed me my entire life and I HATE it.  It’s not a question of discipline.  There are other things (like woodworking or painting) that I can do for hours until I’ve realized that I haven’t eaten.  Some things I've had a hard time focusing on.

Anyway, all of my friends were left in the other grade 5 class and the other three boys who moved with me and formed a little clique and then proceeded to make my life a living hell.  The teasing was non-stop.  Literally from opening class to end of day, I don’t ever remember the teasing subsiding.  Relief by hanging out with my old friends from the other grade 5 class wasn’t an option because word had gotten around that us ‘advanced’ kids were ‘too good’ for the regular grade 5 kids so in the space of a month, all of my old friends stopped talking to me and broke off into little groups of their own and didn’t mingle with us.  The grade 6 kids had their own clique and didn’t want to associate with someone younger than them.  The girls in our little class considered me way too radioactive to even be seen with, lest they be targets themselves. 

I was well and truly alone.

My only salvation lay in the teacher, but because I sometimes shirked the work he assigned me, he decided the best course of action was to bully and humiliate me at every opportunity.  When my work was less than stellar, he held it up for the class to laugh at.  He name-called.  He brow-beat me.  And when I plucked up the courage to talk about being bullied on a near-constant basis (which he must’ve observed in his capacity as a teacher in his classroom), he ignored me. 

My parents weren’t an option.  When my father drank, he could be a bigger bully than all of them combined.  My mother tended to side with authority figures and avoided conflict at all costs.  She tended to blame me for any bullying and teasing I suffered and advised me to ignore it or to not bring it upon myself.

When my grades in grade 5 dropped, the teacher’s solution was to put even more pressure on me.  Which in turn led to more bullying and more pressure from my parents.  School seemed hopeless.  Home seemed hopeless.  Everything seemed so utterly hopeless.

Everyone deals with being in this situation differently.  Some thrive on it to prove themselves.  Others turn inward.  Others bury themselves in personas in a desperate attempt to become someone else.

I decided the best course of action to deal with the constant pressure, teasing and bullying was to make myself as invisible as possible.  To fly so low under the radar that it wouldn’t be worth it to pick on me.  I got bullied, I’d take it, eyes forward and head down.  I got called an idiot by the teacher at school, I’d take it, eyes forward and head down.  My dad would go off on a drunken tangent that I couldn’t cut a 2x4 straight, I’d take it, eyes forward and head down.  Pretty soon that was how I was living my whole life.  And you wished you didn’t have to be so invisible.  You wish you could just be what everybody else wanted you to be.  You must be doing something wrong.

Thus the seeds of self-hatred are sown.

I’m not overly familiar with the psychology of cutting and self-harm, but I started hitting myself around that time.  I’m not exactly sure why I did it, but the prevailing feeling seemed to be punishing myself and relieving the pressure of living with the constant torment.  If I punished myself, I reasoned that I would be appeasing karma.

Yes.  I did make it through grade 5.  Yes it got better.

Temporarily.

Then in middle school it got worse… much, much worse.

In grade 7, I was already horribly awkward from puberty.  I dressed in my brother’s hand-me-downs.  Not that bad, except my brother was 7 years older than me, and thus all my clothes were 7 years out-of-date, which is immediately middle school death.  Whatever clothes weren’t my brother’s came from the thrift store bought by my mom whose concept of the world was permanently stuck in 1970.  Couple that with extreme nerdiness (how many 12 year olds have extensive Buster Keaton collections?) and I quickly became a target all over again.

This time it was a group of five girls.  For whatever reason, I was in their sights almost immediately, and it did not let up for three years until I entered high school.  I don’t know what it was, I don’t know why it was, but it was.  Every class.  Every lunch hour.  Almost every day.  They teased.  And teased.  And teased.  And teased.  And teased.  And when they didn’t tease, they got their boyfriends to bully me.  And when they didn’t bully me, others did, because they didn’t want to become targets .  As an interesting aside, the alpha female in that little group ended up marrying one of my first cousins.  This all happened over 20 years ago, and whenever we see each other (which isn’t often, but still), it is still really awkward between us.  She cannot look me in the face.

All the same old social rules applied.  While I had a couple of friends through middle school (and even briefly a girlfriend in grade 9, one who literally lived on the other side of the city), I was considered too radioactive to talk to.  Even the friends I made before the transition to middle school abandoned me in a hurry.  I cannot say that I blame them.  I retreated.  Made myself smaller.  More invisible.  I didn’t speak in class anymore.  I wouldn’t speak in class anymore.  I would take the zero, if I had to.  I look back in bemusement that not one teacher I had in three years (and by my estimation I had about two dozen in total) said anything to anyone about what was going on.  And most of them must have known how much I was being harassed. 

I continued hitting and hating myself and first entertained suicide as a way out.  Because when you feel trapped, you look for ways out.  Until recently, I blocked most of middle school right out, but the scars remain to this day.  There are still twinges of emotional pain that exist, and deeper gut-wrenching pain when I see kids like in that video.

To tell that kid in the video that it gets better is kind of like telling someone dying of thirst in the desert not to worry, that they will drink water in a couple of days.  It’s probably true, but it does nothing to immediately relieve the problem.

Never once in all the years growing up where I was bullied or teased did any adult stand up for me.  No one person in a position of authority put an end to what was going on in front of their own eyes.  Any one of them could have, but for one reason or another they did not.  Some of them lacked the courage.  Some of them didn’t know how.  Some of them thought bullying was just a rite of passage.  Some of them were bullies themselves, and believed that it was the best way to mold young adults.  And some of them did not want to admit that ‘that problem’ existed in their institution.

25 years ago, we didn’t understand the bullying problem as well as we did today.  Most of what was prescribed was for the bullied to fight back against the bully, to not make yourself a victim.  The bully will pick on easier targets.  Or simply to ignore the abuse, in the righteous knowledge that karma will pay them (and you) back.

Yes and no.  I was pretty fair with my fists.  I even took up boxing for a couple of years in my teens, and while I did dispatch or earn the outright respect of one or two of the kids, most of the school thought I was psychotic and violent on top of being weird and socially retarded.  In my personal experience, beating up the bully is temporarily satisfying, but doesn’t amount to much else in the long run.  People won’t flock to you like they do in the movies.  And I was lucky to be able to handle myself in a fight.  A lot of bullied kids can’t.  Or what about the girls who were teasing me?  Was I supposed to kick the shit out of them?  I may have wanted to, but stuck to traditional convention.  I don’t think it would have increased my standing either.

That kid in the video asks some hard questions out of all of us:  the bullies, the bullied, those peers who stand by and (especially) the adults in the world that are supposed to maintain order.  I don't have the answers.  I wish I did.

This kid could have been me.  Or could have been you.