It's been about 13 years and I can still hear her words echoing "you're so gross, that's why no one wants to sit with you, you're turning the whole seat green because you're disgusting" across an empty school bus seat. I remember trying to press myself as close as I could to the window and hoped I would somehow just dissolve through the glass and outside away from everyone as they laughed with her. The bully and the bullied kid are well known archetypes in every form of entertainment we can get: books, TV and movies. We know the ending — the bully gets what they deserve and the bullied triumphs. Unfortunately, they don't show you how the bullied becomes the Adult that Was Bullied. It doesn't go away because for us, the credits don't always roll at the end.
1. You do not know yourself.
When you've been told that you're worthless and no one likes you, you spend much of your growing time trying to be different, trying to conform to multiple crowds. Trying to fit in because you're so afraid of being seen as "different" for the smallest reason is, at this point, pure instinct. So as an adult, you don't really know who you are. I mean, sure, you know on some level. You don't know completely though, there is always some doubt; which parts of you were created to please someone else and which parts are actually, fully, unapologetically you.
2. Pleasing people is in your blood.
Again, you want everything you do to make someone else happy, to make them like you. Even the way you look, how you do your makeup and hair, is done to make sure someone else likes it--not you. Even beyond that, past appearances. Keeping up with extra circulars, the type of job you get, the friends you keep. It's like standing on the edge of a cliff with the fear of someone not liking you or the way you do things as the rocks at the bottom.
3. Shoot first, ask questions later.
The kids who were bullied either become the kids with the thickest skin or the meanest hearts and can often become bullies themselves. Sometimes it's both. We've heard such awful things about ourselves that when we stop being afraid of other people, we start hating them.
4. We forgive way too easily.
This goes along with wanting to be relentlessly, unquestionably liked. Sometimes you actually have a right to be angry with a friend or loved one who did you wrong, but cannot or will not admit they hurt you. Rather than holding them accountable for their actions, we let it go. Sometimes that's the right thing to do but others, we need to speak up. There's always that fear lurking in the back of our minds; you have to stay quiet because God forbid someone not like you for speaking your feelings.
5. And yet, "get over it" is hard.
To this day, if I saw someone who called me stupid or ugly or fat in elementary school, I would be a raging bitch to them and I wouldn't be sorry. I know it's wrong, and I'm working on forgiveness, but that need for revenge, for fairness, is just too great. Often times we're looking for closure from these people we'll never get.
6. We need validation like we need water.
Constant validation, all the time in anything we do. Again, this blurs the line in needing to please people. When we do things that are for ourselves we need to hear that it's actually OK that we're doing these things.
7. We have so, so much love to give.
We joke about bullying being an over tired after school special. And we do it to others. It's easy to go with the crowd and to believe in the crowd. It's easy to hate the crowd. But it's even easier to believe the crowd still has good people in it; to believe the crowd contains the type of people who want to love you back and who require nothing of you for them to want to be around it. It requires no energy to just be nice to people. It's harder to hate.
