Sympathy for the Bully

Talk of bullying is everywhere lately. And that’s a good thing because anyone who has ever been bullied knows that it sucks. Sure, overcoming a little adversity here and there makes us stronger but being truly bullied stays with you long after you think you’ve moved past it.

Recently, one of my close friends came to me for advice on how to help her eight year old daughter deal with a situation where some girls were bullying her on the school bus. Nothing really horrible, just your typical mean girl stuff where they were putting her down within ear shot just to get a rise out of her. So my friend sent me an email asking for help and in the note to me while describing the bullying she said “I bet that never happened to you because I remember everyone always liked you!” which made me sort of chuckle because trust me, I am not someone who everyone always likes. I wish I was. Damn, I try hard to be. But I’m just not. Never have been.

And like everyone else out there, I have been bullied….and I have also been the bully. And neither feels very good.

My freshman year of high school was an absolute nightmare that I still can barely stand to think about in part because I was bullied and in part because I was so traumatized going to a new school that I barely spoke for an entire year. People have a hard time believing the second part of that statement because I’m someone who is considered outgoing but really I’m not. A true outgoing person can walk into a room where they know no one and make friends without even trying. I can do that, too, but I have to really try. I’m super friendly to overcompensate for the fact that I lack natural charisma and I’m secretly dying inside from fear of rejection. On the inside, people aren’t always who they portray themselves to be on the outside. I am perfect example of that.

Anyhow, the bulling happened on my school bus by three boys who I thought I was friends with but one day they just turned on me and started saying really awful things to me the whole ride.
One of the boys had lost his sister in a horrible accident the year before and had a younger brother with down syndrome so even while he was tormenting me I felt sorry for him because I figured he was acting out to deal with all the tragedy in his life. Empathy, even for bullies, has always been my greatest gift.

The second boy was like a bully out of a bad TV show or comic book. If you put five kids in a line up and said pick out the bully, you would definitely point to Andre. I don’t know why he hated me but he just did. And he’d hated me before we even met. During the bullying he would sometimes mention how over the previous summer he’d seen me in the mall with my friends and he hated me then. Now I am not the most confident person in the world but I am confident that my friends have always been adorable so hearing that from Andre made me realize he must hate the idea of people like me and by people like me I mean people with really cute friends who like to shop. That made me feel sorry for him, too, because being the big oaf bully is not a role anyone dreams of playing in life and sadly he was born to play to it so that must of kind of sucked.

The third boy was a complete tool. I was a little girl and I outweighed him by about 30 pounds and he had a face that was all pointy and sneaky looking – pretty much exactly like a weasel. I hated this kid the most because he seemed to derive so much pleasure from making me feel bad. And even though it was obvious why he needed to bully others, I felt no empathy for him because he was just a mean little troll.

Anyhow, that was blatant run of the mill bullying and it sucked. I’ve also suffered at the hands of much more sophisticated bullies. The kind that try to beat you down by making you feel less than them – mentally, physically, economically – whatever.

I was actually really close friends with a bully until about a year ago. I knew she was a bully because I watched her tear people down and I saw how much pleasure it gave her. I didn’t realize until we stopped being friends how much she actually tried to bully me and how many times she bullied others and I ignored it because we were friends. And that made me sad that I had ever been friends with her. It was as if I was a bully enabler.

As I mentioned before, I, too, have at times been the bully. I have never just looked at someone and decided to be mean to them. And I would never be mean to someone based on their race or religion or size or sexual preference on anything like that. But there have been people who have crossed me and I have been so mad that I have bullied them in my own way. I’m excellent at freezing people out. I once had such a big problem with an internal vendor I worked with that I told that person’s supervisors that if they wanted my business they had to agree that this person would have zero contact with me, in fact he would not even be allowed to make eye contact if we passed in the halls. And they agreed to it - which made me really happy in a smug, dickweed kind of way. That is until I realized that being such a bitch was also being kind of a bully and that’s not who I want to be. It’s not who anyone should want to be.

A bully isn’t always the kid who steals everybody’s lunch money. Bullies come in all shapes and sizes. Mac had a kid bully him in preschool when he was four and that child looked like a tiny angel. Not like someone who was going to try to stick a fork in your kid’s eye.

The thing is – and I’m not trying to make excuses here for bullies because what they do is wrong and I’m still mad at that weasel faced kid from my bus – but when people bully it’s not because there is anything wrong with you (the victim), it’s because there is something wrong with them (the bullies). They feel insecure about something and in order to make themselves feel better they put other people down.

I’ve mentioned before that I had a friend who dated a guy who fancied himself a super smart film student and when I didn’t like the movie Fight Club, he told me it was probably just “over my head”. In a super lame way, he was trying to bully me because he had recently been dumped by my friend and his career was going nowhere and so implying I was dim was supposed to make him feel smarter. I wonder if it did? Probably not. And that probably sucks. Because when you’re mean to someone, you know it. Mean isn’t something that happens by accident. And when you go home and think about what an ass you were and realize that trying to hurt someone else didn’t change the fact that you look like a weasel or your boyfriend doesn’t want to marry you or you didn’t walk out of film school and immediately become Martin Scorsese, that has gotta feel really bad. And no amount of bullying is ever going to make you feel any better. But you know what might? Being nice. Choose good. It always works out better for everyone.