I have seen letters like this before, where the writer thanks the person who bullied them for doing what they did in some ironic way of critiquing the system on its flawed and passive attitude towards bullying, but I can promise you that this will not be that. Furthermore, in writing this to you I will do absolutely nothing to spare your feelings, because you never gave a damn about mine. I want you to know that I cannot fathom thanking you (even satirically) for what you did to me. Even the idea of somehow praising you or allowing you to think that you taught me something worthwhile makes my stomach turn in on itself and bile rise in my throat, because, to put it quite simply, you did nothing of the sort. Your bullying did not make me stronger. It did not make me confident in who I am or proud of what I wanted to be. It made me hate everything about myself and I will not sugar coat the pain that you put me through. I will not excuse your actions because I turned out okay. I will not allow you to believe that you were justified in the way you treated me because in your eyes, I was strong enough to take it.

Not when there are so many others out there who didn’t get to write a letter like this one, because people like you took that away from them.

I will not say that because of your bullying is a reflection of who I am today, because it is not. I am much more than what you ever thought of me, what you thought I would be and I don’t want you to think that you ever helped in making me this way. Even more importantly, by thanking you I feel as if I would be giving you the opportunity to move on, to feel as if this letter is some misguided attempt at closure, and permission for you to allow yourself to forget about me. I want you to remember how you treated me, and I want you to feel ashamed. You don’t deserve to forget me, not when every part of my being still remembers you. I will not forget the days that I woke up hyperventilating at the mere idea of what I would face, as the cold hands of anxiety wrapped around my esophagus until even my breaths turned into stilted gasps and the expansion and collapse of my lungs seemed like a Herculean task. I will not forget the days that my tongue turned in on itself, leaving me to speak with only broken syllables and shattered sentences, until I eventually gave up talking all together and surrounded myself with the suffocating shroud of silence. I will not forget the double edged sword that numbness acted as when I allowed it to creep across my being in hopes of protecting myself from what you did, only to leave me a hollow shell of who I was. I will not allow you to forget what you tried to make me.

Ultimately, I will remind you over and over and over again exactly all the ways in which you failed.

In writing this I don’t want you to feel sorry for me, and I don’t want you to think that I should feel sorry for you. I loathe when people excuse bullying because of the environment someone is brought up in. They refer to it as a cycle, the abused becoming the abuser, and by calling it that you are essentially stating that it is inevitable, that it is acceptable. In a world where 1 in 7 children are either bullies or victims of bullies*, and over 70 percent of students cite bullying as being a problem at their school*, one cannot allow themselves to become complacent. One cannot sit idly by and hide behind the flimsy of excuses of “that’s just the way things have always been” or other bulls**t statistics and graphs that correlate with the cycle. I know this because I am not a statistic, and the only thing that I feel sorry for is that you allowed yourself to become one. You’re hatred for the world and you’re hatred of yourself made you this way. You allowed someone else to harden your heart. You allowed someone else to take away your worth. You allowed someone else to belittle and neglect you. But I did not allow you to do that to me. I refused to be the person that you tried to make me be: the person that you allowed yourself to become. I refused to allow your hatred to poison who I am and the relationships I have made. Unlike you, I treat others with kindness and respect; I am open-minded to new ideas and to opportunities. I build others up instead of tearing them down, and above all I am more loyal, more compassionate and more loving.

I am stronger than you have ever been and I will not allow a single person to attribute how you treated me as to why I turned out this way.

It took me an incredibly long time to write this, longer than I am proud of, but I did it. It took me years to accept myself for who I am, and everyday I still strive to better myself and achieve things greater than you ever could have imagined for me. I don’t want you to think that your opinions shaped me; I don’t want you to see me as something you can be proud of. I want you to see me as the person that you could have been, the person that you should have been, and I want you to finally see the person that you are.

Even now I try to see the logic behind what you did to me and why you did, but I don’t think that I will ever truly want to understand. What I do understand is that the words that you hurled at me in contempt and misguided hatred will never define me the way they define you. And I want you to ask yourself if that hatred is what you want to be defined by. Because in a world full of statistics and facts justifying who you are and what you did, I can promise you that it is much more fulfilling to be an outlier.

*statistics found at http://www.makebeatsnotbeatdowns.org/facts_new.htm...