What Can You Learn From YOUR Flaws?

The “I was bullied” part of my story…

I was bullied and excluded in elementary school. All because I was fat. The playground was the worst. “You’re not good at playing 4-Squares because you’re fat… You can’t play with us… You’re not good enough to play.”

It made me feel so bad about myself.

I dreaded hearing that we could pick our own partners. No one would want to be my partner. I ended up being the person the teacher would take by the hand and awkwardly say, “Okay, Emily Anne’s going to join your group.” The people I was being forced to join wouldn’t like it.

It made me feel so un-included.

The people in my class thought that Britney Spears was so lame. I wanted to say, “No, I like Britney Spears,” but liking what I genuinely liked made me “uncool.”

It made me feel so unacceptable.

I didn’t tell my parents because I was embarrassed that I was being bullied and picked on for being fat. I didn’t want them to know that I was flawed and felt terrible about myself. So I isolated myself. I didn’t talk about it until after it all ended.

It ended because I switched schools. That’s how bad it got. In the new school I was able to make friends. Things were a lot better. I was no longer labeled “uncool.”

But then…

The “I was The Bully” part of my story…

I started being the mean one. I remember a girl wanted to walk with my friend and me. I started laughing at her and got my friend to run away from her with me.

That memory stays with me. It makes me cringe to admit it. But I tell that part of the story because that’s where I learned so much about bullying. On the day I ran away from that girl, I felt really, really terrible when I was on the school bus going home. It hurt me that I had done that to another person.

The “I see two sides to this coin” part of my story…

Of the observations I’ve made from both sides of the bullying experience, top among them is that neither side feels good. I also observed that they’re both cycles.

There’s the cycle that perpetuates bullying…

• People express hatred toward others because that’s how they’re feeling about themselves. “Hurt people, hurt people” is really true. I thought that putting other people down would make me feel better. It didn’t. It made me feel so much worse.

And there’s the cycle that ends it…

• People who feel good about themselves want others to feel the same. Once I had friends who didn’t judge me for who I was, I started to feel really good about myself. Once I started to feel really good about myself, I wanted other people to feel that way, too.

The “I have something helpful to say” part of my story…

I literally had a light bulb moment where a positive way to address something negative came to me: the way to end bullying is to “raise teen-esteem”!

So I started WeStopHate.org. I did by making videos from my bedroom inviting all my YouTube friends to share their favorite confidence tips and tricks. Over a million WeStopHate video views later, it seemed like a great idea to create a book that would make that valuable teen wisdom even more sharable.

FLAWD: How To Stop Hating On Yourself, Others and the Things that Make You Who You Are is lessons from teens to the world and it’s described as “an energetic guide to celebrating your flaws as the doorway to something more.”

Do you know where “the flaws doorway” can take you? Straight to self-acceptance. Self-acceptance isn’t the insurmountable task of seeing everything about yourself as “positive”; it’s the much more doable task of learning how to be kind to yourself.

The “I get it now!” part of my story…

Learning how to be kind to yourself. That’s it. And that’s my story now!

Emily-Anne Rigal’s story as told by Jeanne Demers. Rigal and Demers are co-authors of FLAWD: How To Stop Hating On Yourself, Others and the Things that Make You Who You Are (A Perigee Book, Penguin Random House).

Available for purchase from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and your local independent.