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, 01:15:37 UTC 7 years ago
The culmination was in 8th grade when I got beaten to a pulp by three bullies, and suspended from school for "fighting" (the bullies were not suspended), and further punished by my parents. The teacher who directed the school play had to intervene and explain to my mother that punishing me by pulling me out of the play would harm the other kids who needed me in the play. Out of respect for the rest of the cast, not for me, my parents allowed me to continue in the play.
That was the most horrible part: My own parents taking the side of the bullies over me. I had no safe place to turn. Not home, not school, not anywhere. The last few weeks of 8th grade, I pretty much hid as much as possible, blew off class, blew off assignments, put a shell over myself and didn’t come out, was rude to teachers. I was on a path that could have led me to suicide or murder and prison, or just dropping out and becoming discarded human litter. I know more knew why they didn’t try and make me repeat 8th grade than I knew why they had first put me in that special needs class all those years earlier. But I just moved on.
And also, there were times when I, desperate to win approval from somebody, sought out someone less popular than myself, and teased or bullied them, trying to be part of the gang that dished it out, so I wouldn’t have to be the one who took it. And that’s something I’m terribly ashamed of. Maybe there’s a bullying forum somewhere, where someone I picked on is going on about something I said or did to him that left a huge scar.
High school, the bullies ended up in different classes from mine, and I was left alone. For two years, other than plays, I pretty much did my schoolwork quietly and didn’t talk to people and looked forward to the arts camp in the summer when I wasn’t alienated.
Starting Junior year, the incoming Freshmen had never seen me except for admiring me in plays, and they thought it was great that an upperclassman would talk to them, and so I had friends. Joining the choir with them, and a couple of other clubs, had a lot to do with it.
One year when I was home from college, I read that one of the three bullies had shot and killed himself.
A couple of years later, one of the others—the biggest of them—shot and killed his father, who apparently had molested him all his life. There was a question whether he was mentally fit to stand trial for it. I never learned how the case came up.
The third one is still around. He’s on FaceBook, and is friends with some of my other friends from back then. Works in a service station or something. I shuddered a bit the first time I saw his name, but haven’t talked to the mutual friends about him. It’s just not something I feel like talking about with people who knew us then. Part of me maybe wonders if they might take his side today, or say, “Oh, that’s right—you were that retarded kid”, and unfriend me. (And thank you, Seanan, for talking about that absent library card: It kinda made me realize that I’m not pathetic for having these thoughts of mine).
April 22 2010, 02:05:59 UTC 7 years ago
And one hopes they're adults now. One hopes we all are.