Everyone has been bullied for one thing or the other. No one enjoys being bullied, but it’s a part of growing up. I will never forget when a girl told me she was bullied for being too pretty, and, while at the time I thought she was full of it, as I got older I realized that people are really bullied for being too attractive. I digress - the point of this week’s article is to talk about the aftermath of being bullied, or one person’s aftermath anyway. I was bullied for a range of things, from having high body odor that was mostly out of my control (at the time), to being a loner and hanging out with a weird group of kids at the school, etc.
The lifelong effects of being bullied depends on the individual person. For me, I get very anxious when I hear loud noises, or am with a group of people who are laughing and I don’t know what they’re laughing at. I developed a habit of harboring things because I was always told to be the bigger person and not retaliate. Unfortunately for me, most of my bullies were smaller than me, so I was literally the bigger person. If I tried to defend myself, it looked like I was picking on someone smaller than me and that made me look like the bully. There was one incident where this really small girl was pushing me to my limit and I got in her face, backing her into a corner, and she was screaming for her life (her and her friends’ words, not mine). It really didn’t look good because she was probably a third my size at the time.
These are things I constantly think about, and they’re the biggest reason why I choose to not socialize much anymore. I’ve developed a lack of trust in other people; not to say I’m not civilized with others but I will go out of my way to avoid social situations because I don’t want to get caught up and things get bad for me.
This isn’t healthy. The aftermath of bullying is usually not healthy. A lot of people will say you’ll develop thicker skin, when, for the most part, you learn to build a wall. This wall keeps you from fostering healthy social relationships because you don’t know if the people you’re talking to are going to flip the script on you.
The best advice I can offer to anyone going through bullying is get help, and, when I say help, I mean real help. Not just listening to people telling you to let it go, to brush it off. No, go do something about what’s happening to you. More importantly, stand up for yourself. I’m not saying start a fight, but stand your ground against any kind of attack from physical to verbal. If you spend your time brushing things off, it damages your chances of being a healthy adult, and I’m speaking from personal experience.
