I’m a person in my early 20. If I try to tell you how my High school was, it was bittersweet. I must thank my high school bully for adding the bitter flavor, we must have all the flavors in life, right? But, I swear, I was not that grateful while going through it. If you want to understand how uncomfortable I felt when he was around, I practiced left hooks and sidekicks after each day of school, just to face him in my nightmares.
Time passed, we graduated from high school and parted ways in our own direction. Then it was college where people are more mature. There’s no place for bullying as there are anti-ragging posters everywhere to protect junior year students from being bullied. SIGH!. I was feeling much safer, having a lot of fun, where I got to hang out with people like me. Nerds. But as in every community, there are certain people who are considered outcasts, but this time it’s not me. I have found my flock.
How did I become a bully?
For a project, one of the students who was considered an outcast joined our team. As we are nerds, we know how to proceed with the project by ourselves but we decided to concoct a drama pretending that we didn’t know anything and he should lead us. We deceived him to believe that he, really, is someone we had so much faith in, that he should complete the project for our team. He really fell for it. We started making conference calls with the boy with all our other friends hiding in the background. We round up and ask him stupid non-existent questions, about the project, which he really stumbles to answer, we flattened him for all his top-notch answers for all the bogus questions that we have made up. We were muting and laughing hard when the other was asking dumb questions to him. We even recorded the call and did all the crazy stuff with it.
All those days, my mum was watching me, one day at the end of a call, when I was moving out of my room laughing and wiping off my tears, she gently asked “Can you tell me the Joke?” I casually told her how we are having fun with the boy. The next moment she was looking at me with a look of great disgust and disappointment. I asked her “What? Why are you looking at me like that?” She asked “Boy, do you know what you’re doing?” and moved out of the room.
What I found from Self-Contemplation
Confused by what she said, I sat down and questioned myself “What’s wrong with the call, we were just having fun.” Suddenly it raised on me from nowhere “Am I being a Bully?” Terrorized by the thought, I was rationalizing my evildoing in all possible ways, “We were just having fun”, “It was his fault, he could have accepted that he didn’t know the answer”, “He is the one fooling us, he was concocting answers” But the truth I finally arrived at was, I was using his weakness, his weakness of trying hard to fit in, his innocence, his faith on me, to my advantage. I stood in front of the mirror and exactly looked at myself like how my mother did, full of disgust. What blew me away was, I was not aware that I was bullying, if it wasn’t my mother I don’t know where it would’ve ended up.
Then I started reflecting on my bitter memories with my high school bully.
I’m a big fan of Alec Benjamin and I have heard all his songs as most of his songs reflect my life. Especially, Boy In The Bubble which is a song based on bullying, I have heard the song hundreds of times but only after this incident, I listened to it with an open mind, an open ear to say. An epiphany occurred to me on the verses
Well, there’s no excuse for the things he did
But there’s a lot at home that he’s dealing with
Because his dad’s been drunk since he was a kid
He was actually being a jerk, it might be because he had a single mother, he himself might have been finding it hard to fit into the new neighborhood he had newly moved to. But I’m not sure he ever felt guilty for having “fun” with us or not bullying anyone now.
The worse a person, the less he feels it — Seneca
But the thing is, I was feeling sorry for him, which I thought I never ever would in my lifetime. I was feeling so because I realized he may have done all those wrong things without knowing what he was actually doing which I think is the worst thing that could happen to someone. What if there’s no one to correct you, direct you on the right path? All the fun he thought he had was a devil in disguise which made him be shunned by most of the students.
So the thing that I’ve learned from my experience of being a victim to bullying and also a bully himself is, most people don’t know they are bullies or they have something dark going on in their life which makes them act so. For example,
In Sex Education Adam bullies his classmates because he is being mistreated by his father Micheal Groff, who was bullied in his childhood by his elder brother Peter Groff, who did all that to prevent himself from being bullied by his father.
See it’s like a chain, a deep chain. But the first step in breaking the chain is to realize that you are, you are hurting others. But don’t beat yourself up about it, please don’t. Be self-compassionate toward yourself, pat yourself on the back that you are on the way to becoming a better person. Then try to form a good relationship with the people you used to hurt, even tell them you are sorry for all the things you’ve done, Come on man! Set aside your tall ego for a minute.
If you think someone that you’re close with, is lost in this muddy rut. As their well-wisher, it’s your responsibility to speak with them regarding that, all you have to do is to make them conscious of what they’re doing. If they aren’t listening then at least don’t accompany them in the act of bullying but if they do change you have made your friend’s life more humane and someone’s life much easier.
