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On Bullying
Oct. 20th, 2010 09:50 pmI was a bullied child.
In elementary school, boys held me down on the playground and pulled my skirt over my head, laughing and yelling for others to come see my panties. I started wearing shorts under my skirts after that. One afternoon on the way home from school, a boy dislocated my elbow. I don't really remember why any more, just the pain of it and mom's insistence to chase the bus down and get the boy's name before she would take me to the doctor. In middle school, another boy knocked my feet out from under me on the fall dress-up day. My head hit a crack in the floor when I fell, giving me a concussion and sparking off the series of blackouts that eventually led to me (briefly) dying.
By the time I started high school, in a new town, I expected to be bullied. I expected to be the outsider, the social pariah, the whipping child. It didn't surprise me when, going through the halls on crutches, people would follow behind me and kick the underside of my injured foot. I tried to laugh with everyone else when I was nominated for homecoming court just so folks could see me get shot down. When I was punched in the face by a classmate, ending up with a black eye that cost me the most lucrative opportunity of my modeling career, I accepted it as just what happened to me. It wasn't until I got to college that I learned there was more to life than being emotionally and physically abused.
The day of the Columbine shooting, I sympathized with the shooters. I know the helplessness and frustration those boys felt in their daily lives as the school outcasts. I've never approved of their means of dealing with it, but I understood the source of their anger.
Now, I can only be thankful that bullying is in the public eye. I remember going to my parents and to school administrators asking for help, and being told that I needed to toughen up. It was all just part of life. No child should ever be told that they need to accept being despised and reviled. As much as I grieve for the young lives lost to bullying, I pray that their loss will someday lead to bullying and administrative blind eyes being a thing of the past.
Our children deserve better.
In elementary school, boys held me down on the playground and pulled my skirt over my head, laughing and yelling for others to come see my panties. I started wearing shorts under my skirts after that. One afternoon on the way home from school, a boy dislocated my elbow. I don't really remember why any more, just the pain of it and mom's insistence to chase the bus down and get the boy's name before she would take me to the doctor. In middle school, another boy knocked my feet out from under me on the fall dress-up day. My head hit a crack in the floor when I fell, giving me a concussion and sparking off the series of blackouts that eventually led to me (briefly) dying.
By the time I started high school, in a new town, I expected to be bullied. I expected to be the outsider, the social pariah, the whipping child. It didn't surprise me when, going through the halls on crutches, people would follow behind me and kick the underside of my injured foot. I tried to laugh with everyone else when I was nominated for homecoming court just so folks could see me get shot down. When I was punched in the face by a classmate, ending up with a black eye that cost me the most lucrative opportunity of my modeling career, I accepted it as just what happened to me. It wasn't until I got to college that I learned there was more to life than being emotionally and physically abused.
The day of the Columbine shooting, I sympathized with the shooters. I know the helplessness and frustration those boys felt in their daily lives as the school outcasts. I've never approved of their means of dealing with it, but I understood the source of their anger.
Now, I can only be thankful that bullying is in the public eye. I remember going to my parents and to school administrators asking for help, and being told that I needed to toughen up. It was all just part of life. No child should ever be told that they need to accept being despised and reviled. As much as I grieve for the young lives lost to bullying, I pray that their loss will someday lead to bullying and administrative blind eyes being a thing of the past.
Our children deserve better.
