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 20 2010, 00:32:40 UTC 7 years ago
There's a reason why 80% of my writing deals with adolescence. Some shit you just never. Get. Over.
I spent damn near every day of my childhood getting raped of my self-esteem, to the point when Jennings Michael Burch, author of "They Cage the Animals At Night" came to speak at my school, and talked about not passing the pain onto others and letting it end with you, my ninth grade English teacher begged me not to speak to her afterward, because she's been watching me throughout the whole speech and my face, the face of this fifteen-year-old boy who had finally been spoken for, brought her to the verge of tears.
My mother once asked me why I didn't just make things easier on myself, as if I could. Why I wasn't just more "mainstream", a word she foolishly believed to be any less offensive and dehumanizing than "normal." She asked why I always had to make my quirkiness or my intelligence or my sexuality an issue, and I told her simply, "I don't make any of those things an issue; that's just what they are."
Sometimes the bitterest loss to the bullies is being blamed by the people who are supposed to protect you for the crimes committed against you, for the things you're robbed of.
Someone has to speak for these kids against the bullies, and the assholes who say it's not so bad, that kids need to learn to stand up for themselves, ergo let the bullies run free and let Social Darwinism sort them out, and in place of the parents and teachers and older siblings whose pat answer to this daily torture is to just be someone other than who you are... to make things easier for them.
Someone has to speak for these kids, and if their parents won't, I will.
April 20 2010, 02:20:04 UTC 7 years ago
*incoherent admiration*