Remembering High School Bullies and How Terrifically Cruel People Can Be…
When we think of the word “bully,” the image that comes to mind is the Big Bad Kid who kicks ass and takes names behind the bike racks after school. So begins Nina’s recent, prolific post on reuniting with high school bullies. I’d been reading about cyber bullies for quite a while, and have seen (and experienced first-hand) how cruel people can be when they hide behind their blogs or anonymity, but I never expected that Nina’s words would open old wounds.
I was bullied for the great portion of my childhood (for being the “white” girl in a predominately black/Hispanic section of Brooklyn - and yes, Brooklyn wasn’t always so annoyingly hipster and white) into adolescence (for being perceived as “mixed” in a Long Island high school surrounded by spoiled rich kids, for my being too smart, too uncool, too unfashionable, to “city”, and too unwilling to give blow jobs on demand). Mike B, who drove an IROC, would routinely make choice comments about my kinky hair to the point where I became so obsessed with chemical treatments that my hair nearly fell out. Patty, who, after high school, dated a man who used her as a human punching bag, called me “white nigger”. There were whispers, alienations of friendship, several locker changes, and many, many lunches taken alone. I wept often, fantasized about their long, painful deaths, and ate Otis Spunkmeyer cookies at an alarming rate. I would do and say anything to acquire a friend, and it took me until this year to admit to many that I never attended my high school prom.
We all know that teenagers can be petty, fickle & cruel, but it doesn’t make the wounds they inflict any more palatable. And when I received the saccharine invitation to my ten-year high school reunion via classmates.com, I nearly had a panic attack. Did they really think I’d reunite with such terrible people? People who were mean just because they could be? When I had done nothing but desire their friendship but couldn’t make sense of their politics and exhaustive rules? Why couldn’t they accept a girl who moved from Brooklyn, desperate to fit in? Who could make them laugh if they had bothered to listen.
Only now am I confident about my appearance and identity, so I have to say that I’m not sure I’d be so forgiving to a former bully trying to “friend” me on a social networking site without acknowledging the history and apologizing for it. But hey, maybe I’m still in an unforgiving place. Maybe this will change as I have more years of the confident Felicia tucked securely under my proverbial belt.
And I have to say. Although I look dreadful in this picture (I was a high school senior accepting an award from the National Language Honor Society), I’m pretty darn proud of this award. This was one of the last times (until this year) I really, really smiled.
Have any of you spoken to former high school bullies? Been the victim of cyber-bullying as an adult (thank GOD the internet wasn’t around when I was a teenager)? Made peace with a bully? Have bullied someone and regretted it?
August 20th, 2008 at 2:14 am
Wow, this entry resonates. I imagine it can’t have been easy to go back and write about it, so kudos. I am FASCINATED by bullying–particularly the way girls are aggressive with each other and the way they bully each other and how supposed authorities responds (or often don’t respond) to it. I was bullied through my school days, and, like you, think I’m maybe still in an unforgiving place about it. I think you nailed it when you said: We all know that teenagers can be petty, fickle & cruel, but it doesn’t make the wounds they inflict any more palatable.
August 20th, 2008 at 8:23 am
I have always stood up to bullies and it makes them back down. I still have a bully living diagnally across from me in this ghetto housing project. She’s in her thirties and thinks she can blast her music so loud my apartment shakes and my heart hurts and my breathing stops. After four years I told her to shut the “f” up and she almost broke my door down. I called the cops. Then she threatened me again and I laughed in her face. She hasn’t played her music loud since and she hasn’t threatened me since.
I also have had interviewer bullies all my life who, once I figure I’m not getting the job, I put them in their place and their mouths go into this big O.
I don;t take any crap from bullies, especially the women kind.
August 20th, 2008 at 8:56 am
When I was going through my divorce…some of my ex husbands (or husband at the time)’s friends left “nameless” comments about me being a whore and how I was an awful mother. these comments killed me inside…they embarrassed me….they made me absolutely sick to my stomach. I felt they were cowards to not leave their names and let me respond back….
IT’s too bad….that things like this happen…..but I guess it does. Thank you for sharing.
August 20th, 2008 at 9:13 am
I moved to a new town and gained a new family (5 step brothers & 3 step sisters) when I was 12 - in addition to the 2 brothers I already had. Coming from a Catholic school and being let loose in a “huge” public middle school, wearing a different outfit every day and having a locker was terrifying. There were 2 boys, Tom D. and Paul S. that harrassed and tormented me daily - for no reason - I didn’t know them or have any classes with them, I was a shy, artsy bookworm type. I got over it and years later Tom’s sister married my brother and we became friends. And I think I heard Paul has some strange disease (oh well, sucks to be you!) I guess what they say is true - The best revenge is living well.
August 20th, 2008 at 9:32 am
Amy-That’s just plain horrible. I’m so sorry you had to endure comments from cowards. You’re an amazing woman & mother!!!
Tracie-I couldn’t agree with you more.
Courtney-Nina’s post really hit home from me, and I definitely find it fascinating how girls are infinitely crueler to one another than boys.
August 20th, 2008 at 9:53 am
In middle school I was both a bully and a person who was bullied. I was fat, I was smart, and because I sat in the same seat as my best friend on the bus people always called us gay. I was endlessly taunted from what seems like the first day of school on and it resulted in me going from a kid who loved school and always had perfect attendance to a kid who ditched as much as he could and who’s grades bottomed out. Because I felt so bad all the time I ended up lashing out against a kid who was smaller than me. I wasn’t the only one who bullied him, but that’s not an excuse. Several of us tormented him relentlessly, then after his first year of middle school his family moved away. Over the next year I came to understand why I had bullied him and it helped me understand why people bullied me. I still regret that he moved before I understood what I was doing because I never got a chance to apologize to him for taking part in making his first year of middle school a living hell. Sadly I never learned his name so I can’t even seek him out to let him know how terrible I still feel about it.
August 20th, 2008 at 10:53 am
I was bullied in fourth and fifth grade, and I think it so terrified me (being a very little “white” girl in the Bronx didn’t help) that I developed a coping strategy of being nice to everyone.I had some bullying in JHS but enough friends to not care. Then in HS, I don’t remember any bullies anywhere.Maybe it was because I went to an art school, where almost everyone would have been bullied elsewhere. Maybe I just don’t remember.
I have said to other people that I would rather my kids be bullied than be the bullies. Obviously, I don’t want them to do either, but if I had the choice, I would hate if they were bullies.
August 20th, 2008 at 11:55 am
Wow. Your words “People who were mean just because they could be? When I had done nothing but desire their friendship but couldn’t make sense of their politics and exhaustive rules?” really, really hit home. I was bullied for years in just the same way. So badly I considered suicide my only way out. And I’m terrified of it happening to my children.
Girls are the worst and as women, they aren’t much better. I’m having “bullying” problems from women at my children’s school now. *sigh* When will it end?
August 20th, 2008 at 12:02 pm
In elementary school Kenny LaFond, who was a year or two older, called me Fairy Lips constantly. He did it in this faux-friendly tone:”Hey fairy lips, how’s your day going?” “What’s for lunch fairy lips?”
I remember the first week of high school he yelled across the hall to me: “Welcome to high school fairy lips”– this was at least two years after elementary school.
It tore me up inside. I used to dream of ways I could slip rat poison into his school lunch when he wasn’t looking. I do think that it drove me more into myself, but also led to my writing. I would write elaborate fantasy lives for myself– away from the teasing and bullying.
In Feb. of this year 14 year-old Brandon McInnerNee stormed into the computer lab and E.O. Green Junior High in Oxnard, CA. Armed with a small caliber handgun, he shot 15 year-old Lawrence King in the head in front of a room full of students.
Why did he do it? One source, another student at the school stated, “Lawrence was too gay.”
Lawrence King, or Larry, as his friends called him, was killed because of his sexual orientation and gender expression. Because the shooter had heard that Larry might have had a crush on him.
They say that schools today are working harder to protect kids from bullying, but obviously they weren’t working hard enough at Lawrence King’s school.
August 20th, 2008 at 6:11 pm
Yes, to all the above! Totally bullied in high school, went to my 10-year reunion and my oppressor apologized, said he’d really liked me in high school, but was too immature at the time to behave differently. Helped a tiny bit. At the 20-year reunion he’d been married, divorced, remarried, and his son had just been diagnosed with similar issues to my son. I finally felt compassion for him. He said not a day goes by that he hasn’t regretted how he treated me in high school…
And as for the cyber bullying, I’ve had some of that, too. Bullies are cowards - again, knowing that only helps a tiny bit, and not much at all at the time of their attacks! Hiding behind “anon.” is just plain wrong. If they aren’t brave enough to reveal themselves, then their “point” is meaningless to me, and probably didn’t have much to do with me in the first place.
August 20th, 2008 at 8:38 pm
I was a Navy brat and moved twice a year, so i was constantly the new kid (I went to 20 different schools) and was targeted quite a bit. Then of course there was the usual middle school mean girl nastiness, followed by high school misery. What concerns me most now, though, is that my 8-year-old son is bullied, physically. He’s been in the ER twice because of one boy, and a second boy taunts him relentlessly. I am far more terrified for him than I ever was for myself.
August 21st, 2008 at 5:08 am
resonates with me as well. i was bullied from the fourth grade) when i got breasts) through the tenth grade (when i finally convinced my parents to send me away to school).
that “mean girls” movie? not even close to the meanness i lived through.
i stood up to a bully once in high school, and she backed down. but it was exhausting and terrifying and took so much energy i nearly dropped afterwards.
i also have a bully on my coop board who i’m absolutely incapable of dealing with. its gotten so that at some meetings i’ve gone for the jugular and been really hostile; i assure you this has made it worse.
i’ve seen some of the bullies many years later, and with a few we’ve had a good reconciliation. the others, that pain runs far too deep. there’s this whole “notion” by those now grown-up bullies that we should just “get over” it. my counter is very simple: if you spent xx years being tortured for 8 hours a day, would that be easy to get over? because if your parents did it, it would be child abuse.
August 21st, 2008 at 8:00 am
Rob- I do find it profoundly disturbing that we’re in a age where these retaliations against bullies are becoming increasingly commonplace. This never happened when we were kids–so I’m always wondering why/how our world has changed where this-mass murder- has become a viable option. Is it our tech obsessed/instant access culture? Is it the media? Parents? The ease in which kids are heavily medicated at earlier ages? The ease in which kids can acquire deadly weapons (lax gun laws) or create them (DIY bombs found via the web)? I don’t even know the answer to this very complex issue, however, your point is a serious one.
Cheers, f.
August 21st, 2008 at 9:37 am
Felicia, I too was so struck by Nina’s post that I had to write about it as well. I haven’t been contacted much by bullies from my life on the internet, thank god, but at least ive been able to “watch” them via myspace and realize that my life turned out better than theirs, which is always a comfort to me. while it was wholy unpleasent i do think that the teasing/bullying made me a stronger person and kept me focused on getting the fuck out of the town i grew up in. cheers!
August 21st, 2008 at 10:12 am
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Remembering High School Bullies and How Terrifically Cruel People …2008-08-21 09:12:26That image that comes t […]
August 21st, 2008 at 12:04 pm
Felicia, I went to junior high school not too far from where you went to high school, although I was just this side of the Queens, Nassau County border. I also was there some years before you. But the strange relationship between bullying and color you describe sounded familiar to my recollection of the area.
It was the early 70s, and the city had instituted some sort of bussing program. Queens had a peculiar form of segregation before then with small neighborhoods being hyper-segregated: Hollis for Blacks, Astoria for Greeks, Middle Village for Germans, and so on. I was bussed from an African American neighborhood to a White neighborhood, which strangely was very nearby – just a few miles closer to “Long Island” and therefore much “Whiter.”
The bullying we “bussing kids” received was more collective than the individual bullying most have described here on your blog. A giant, block letter, handball-court-wall-sized graffiti message that included the “N word” greeted us on day one, and when our parents complained, the principal had the custodian paint white paint so precisely over the black letters, that you could still clearly read the message, but the principal could justifiably claim that she had indeed had it painted over.
Once per academic year, the ruffians celebrated “beat up ni**er” day, and we had to run like hell to our bus stops to avoid the gauntlet. Even some of the teachers got into the act, although some other teachers were among the finest people I’ve ever met. A Black assistant principal really saved my academic career by recognizing that a White science teacher was bullying me in class and miraculously he managed to have the guy fired. At graduation, I had the highest average in the school, and during the graduation ceremony, while the valedictorian and salutatorian gave their speeches, my White English teacher, whom I adored, left her seat, came over to me, knelt next to my seat, and whispered to me, “You realize the only reason you are not up there is because you are black? I just wanted you to know that.” I’ll never forget her for that, although it was a strange and confusing message for a tween to hear.
After that, I went to one of the city’s specialized schools, Bronx Science, and on arrival it felt as though I had been transported onto the Starship Enterprise — it was so diverse and peaceful — and of course most of us would have been, or had been, bullied at other schools.
Even there, however, I remember two students being universally bullied — the first openly gay student I’d ever known, and a heavyset, incredibly test-smart kid who so lacked social graces that I now think he was probably autistic.
At any rate, your recollections and those of others who have posted here bring back memories of how cruel kids can be, but my experiences in junior high school also showed me that adults are not much better.