Parents tell us all those old sayings to make us feel better, you know the ones; 'sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me', 'what doesn't kill us makes us stronger'. The truth is though, neither of those phrases mean anything in the moment, they may seem like strong meaningful words that are completely truthful. Yes what doesnt kill us does make us stronger and words will never hurt me physically. However bullying does kill and words do hurt.
Most people have experienced some form of bullying, no matter how scarring it is for the person. Much of bullying is passed off as normal children behaviour or 'that's just what teenagers do', despite the fact it is often carried through after childhood and into the work place as adults. Perhaps it is a good thing, after all if every nasty act that takes place in schools was to be classified as bullying then there would be millions more cases than there already are and if suspension and expulsion were the solutions then there would be hardly any children left in schools at all. Plus there would have to be a bullying ranking system as to how bad the offense was in order to classify everything. The reason I am saying all of this is that I was bullied. Not badly, by any stretch of the imagination, but I was bullied and although I definitely did not see it then, I most certainly see it now.
It started when I was in Year 9, which is 8th Grade in the US, I had been going through a rough patch at home, which is fairly normal at some point for most people. It was all perfectly fine though, or as good as it could be, because I thought I had the best friends in the world to get through it. I was wrong. Unfortunately, my mum having an affair affected me more than I thought it had, I became introverted and depressed. My 'friends' noticed and instead of trying to talk to me about it they started talking about me behind my back and emailing each other about me whilst I was in the same room as them, bitching about me at sleepovers that I attended when they thought I was asleep. Then they just stopped talking to me, avoiding me at school, that was when I realised they were the only friends I had at school and I had to start all over again. I blamed myself for how they treated me, thinking that I had done something wrong, it wasn't until later that I realised had they been real friends they would have in the very least try to talk to me about it rather than just 'dropping' me like that. 'Dropping' was the term that they used for it after they started to do it regularly to my other old friends who gradually started to talk to me again and in most cases pretending like it had never happened. I was gracious, and polite to them, but I will never forget what any of them did to me, because it hurt for two long years until they realised what they had done.
Whilst I am aware that I was not physically or cyber bullied, they messed with my feelings and emotions. Even though I wasn't considering suicide or self harming, they did screw my life around and then thought it was fine and that they did not need to apologise and if they did have the slightest decency to apologise, they did it as nonchalantly as possible, as if it was paining them to say those two words - 'I'm sorry', one even chose to say, 'we can laugh about it now'. But I'm not laughing nor will I ever.
Now this experience don't misunderstand me, did make me stonger, I learnt a lot about people and actions and mostly about myself. But going back to where I started, bullying doesn't always make us stronger, even if it doesn't manage to kill us, because we are fragile, we all are. We cannot withstand everything saying that 'I'm fine' and hiding tears, we are people and bullying can affect us to the state of disintegration and it is time that the people who can do something about it started to recognise that.