Bullies Never Prosper

Everyone encounters someone who tries to beat them down. It is something that nobody should ever have to experience. That feeling that you are not worthy of any kind of affection because you have no self-confidence left. The feeling when you don’t want to go to work, school or even home, because you are so scared of what could happen. The worst part is, that most people that you speak to, have had a problem with a bully at some point.

I had some issues when I was at school. Petty name calling and being made fun of. Being short and on the tubby side, I was an easy target. Most of the people who tried to pick on me weren’t people I wanted to be friends with, so I just ignored them. It seemed so much easier to do back when I was younger. As I became a teenager in High School, the words became more hurtful. I never figured out if it was really the words that changed, or just that they were chipping away at me, without me really knowing. 

Many stories you hear of bullying, give you the impresson that things get better once you leave school. It didn’t for me. By the end of High School I had lost a lot of my self-confidence and I became a lot quieter. I started hating myself because I was fat and couldn’t seem to do anything to lose it. Not that I had the energy to try. Besides, when people saw me out running or walking, some would shout names. Names that hurt me. Names that made me want to sit at home and gorge on food. And it made me hate myself more.

I wish that I could say that a lot has changed over the years. Most of the people that made me hate myself have been cut out of my life now. I say most because some people I can’t cut out. Some people are a part of my life, whether I want them to be or not. Where I get demeaned for the smallest thing, but am still expected to act as if I owe them something. And that is hard. How can you move past something when you don’t get the time and distance to heal? So I continue to suck it up. Unable to move past the belief that I have recovered all this abuse because I am a bad person. 

And that’s what bullying does. It skews everything that you thought you knew. And despite never doing anything wrong, you blame yourself because of the actions of others. And the funniest thing is that the bullies never see the damage they cause. They will never see the self-hatred that was started by their ‘petty taunts’. But that’s why those of us that have been bullied need to speak up. People need to support one another. 

Can I hate you, cause you’re not like me?

The brutal truth of why most people act the way they do, is because other people are different to them. Seems a little obscene, but it’s true. No matter how much people bother about being ‘themselves’, they will always try and pass judgement and be judge themselves. And everyone does it. It is something embedded into our psyche, to judge things, whether it be a positive or negative judgement is irrelevant. But people think that judgement starts and stops with things such as TV shows, music and books, but don’t acknowledge that they pick apart fashion and the people wearing the fashion a LOT more than they do anything else. It is a simple thing of like/dislike, where in nature, if a creature doesn’t like something, it will no longer associate itself with it. And that is a behaviour trait that people, as animals, still have to this very date.

This is not normally cause by any form of malicious intent, but by because someone is maybe wearing something that is not to your taste. It is what you do with these thoughts. Most of the time, people think their judgement, and that’s it. Nothing else is done. The trouble is, when people start voicing their judgement. Because we like to think negatively about something, mostly to try and make ourselves seem more superior, it’s part of human nature. But if you receive any negative judgement, it is hard to tell yourself that is ‘just opinion’. Sometimes, against better judgement you react, almost like you are being encouraged to. This reinforces the ‘judger’s’ behaviour because they can then see that they can evoke reaction off people. As if getting a reaction is what it’s all about.

This is a basis of what every person does in their life. You live your life on doing things you like that make you happy, and stay away from things you don’t like. It’s just that it has been taken to the point, that people seem to use likes and dislikes as weapons against each other.. There is no harm in deciding that you think someone looks silly in what they are wearing, but what does voicing it to the person in question really achieve. Does it turn your life into a success? No! Does it make the other person thank you for changing her life with your observation? No! You will offend the person, and nothing will change in your life whatsoever. So because there is no real reason for giving judgement on another person, why do it? And why make a spectacle of yourself whilst doing it?

I am rambling like this because I want to know what would make a person give verbal abuse to another person without being provoked? Why would you choose, as an adult man, to get a friend and threaten a girl who is on her own? That isn’t the kind of natural behaviour I can understand. Maybe it’s because I am stupid or maybe it’s because I would never ever want to make anyone feel like they made me feel. Why I lost a day of work because I was in shock that two men 6/7 years older than me (makes them 33/34) verbally abused me to the point I thought they were going to kill me. And that I was still shaking 6 hours later, and crying when anyone asked me what happened. I was terrified that people were going to tell me to ‘stand up for myself’, when I knew that having two adults scream in your face so badly the police were called, was not anything I really wanted to stand up to. Especially when no-one came up to try and help me. They could have punched me, and I could have done nothing. I don’t know who the guys were, and know nothing that apparently they were ‘off their faces’ on drugs.

I can honestly say, I have never been so scared in my life. And I can’t think of anything that can make sense of why they did it. But other than because I looked different to them, I just can’t understand it.

Labels

I guess I am going to go on a bit of a rant today.

Getting sick of all these labels that get thrown about. I didn’t use to notice it when I was younger, but I don’t know whether that’s because I didn’t get involved with ‘alternative culture’ untill I became a bit older, and more confident. I used be the geeky art student, who blended into the background,. and was ignored by the vast majority of people at my school. As I have got older, I have found that my confidence has risen dramatically.

I am now 25 (almost 26) and tattooed and pierced, and have  died my hair, so many colours. But I am more comfortable than I have ever been in my whole life. Ironic, then, that it is now that I get negative attention. Emo, goth, and other labels get thrown in my direction. It just feels that the when I attract attention its bad attention. Although most of the time, it’s just water off a  ducks back, but sometimes, it does get under my skin. And when it does, I totally beat myself up on why I’m getting viewed like that, when I feel I have done nothing wrong.

People like to bring others down, no matter what it is. they feel that the only way to make themselves look better is to attack other people. To attack someone because they look different is the lowest of the low, and just shows someones ignorance. No matter what colour, religion or style everyone is the same. The sooner people zccept that the better.

It would certainly make my day-to-day life easier.