sadI do not have a library card because I grew up poor—very, very, After-School Special poor, cockroaches in my bedroom and scavenging from trashcans poor—and I was badly bullied by the kids in my school, leading, eventually, to a group of girls stealing and destroying my library books. I couldn't pay the fines. I couldn't even tell anyone what had happened, because when the scruffy little poor girl complained about the sweet, well-groomed rich kids who had each others' backs, well...I had been down that road. The only people who would believe me were my mother and my teachers, and all I could do by telling them was upset them. I couldn't change anything.
I'm not that girl anymore. But the idea of getting a library card terrifies me, because some small, irrational part of me is convinced, incurably, that if I were to get a library card, those girls from school would show up, and slap my books out of my hands, and leave me standing alone on the sidewalk, sobbing over the loss of one of the things I loved most in the world: the ability to walk into a library with my head up, feeling like the books were free for anybody who wanted to read them.
The library books weren't the worst thing that happened to me during my school career. I was weird, I was geeky, I had frizzy hair and glasses and didn't really "get" a lot of the unspoken rules of the playground. I blew grade curves and didn't let people cheat off me on tests. I was basically invented to be the school punching-bag. But the library books were one of the things I never got over, because the library books taught me, once and for all, that sometimes the bullies win. Sometimes, you can't fight back, you can't stand up for yourself like the adults tell you to, and the bullies. Just. Win.
Phoebe Prince lost, too. But she's never going to be a grown-up, secure from bullies, writing a post like this one. Because she lost to the bullies so hard and so overwhelmingly that she killed herself.
Megan Kelly Hall is organizing YA authors against bullying, in memory of Phoebe Prince. Please. Go and read what she has to say. Consider what the current culture of bullying is doing to us, to our children, to our nieces and nephews, to the children of our friends. Even bullying that you survive can scar you forever, and Phoebe isn't the first to take her own life over this sort of thing. It's gotten so much worse than it was when I was in school, and I cried myself to sleep for years over the bullying.
This needs to stop. We need to stop it.
Please.
April 19 2010, 21:29:15 UTC 7 years ago Edited: April 19 2010, 21:34:10 UTC
And I admit a part of me curled up and shuddered, imagining how much harder my childhood would have been if I'd lost the library privileges I had, since books were my earliest escape.
And my scars?
At 31 I still freak out after most social situations where I've talked to people that are more 'normal' seeming than me, because I'm terrified that I said things that will be used against me, or that any niceness and politeness shown is a fraudulent kind that will result in a big practical joke wherein I'm told as punchline how awful I am- like all the giggling phone calls I got in my youth where so-and-so HONESTLY wanted me to meet them somewhere because they secretly liked me and were sorry.
And public lavatories can freak me out with the graffiti because I fear I'll find things written about me. Even in places I'm just passing through, where no one actually knows me.
April 19 2010, 21:54:06 UTC 7 years ago
It's so easy to say "you are not alone," because we certainly aren't alone in our experiences...but those words come with a bitter, bitter irony, because in the moment in which it happens, we are, each of us, UTTERLY alone.
April 19 2010, 22:13:44 UTC 7 years ago
(They tried talking me out of taking my GED, saying that the magical summer between Middle and High would stop bullying. But walking to the GED testing room, I was recognized, pointed to and insulted by former classmates. *While the counselor type was explaining to me how High School would be totally awesome and teach me important social skills*
"Oddly" the counselor seemed to magically not hear what was being said or see the pointing fingers. Gee.)
April 20 2010, 03:37:37 UTC 7 years ago
It may be because we were alone then, that we seek out and find one another now. And hold on to one another for comfort.
Seems to me, the community/tribe/whoever we are as a group--we find one another. Like the genetic code, we share an unspoken blueprint.