Ponderings About A Lifetime of Bullying...

Ponderings on The Playground

                My first book, The Playground, https://www.amazon.com/dp/B072823WZ9 is free this Easter weekend April 19-21, 2019.  Although it seems unbelievable, it’s been nearly two years since it was first published on Amazon.  Publishing it was a whim.  I had been trying for three months to get an agent, and I had just read that once an author accomplishes this, it takes another six months to find a publisher, and then another two years until the book is available for sale. 

                I’m an impatient person.  That was too long of a wait.  I uploaded the book to Amazon, hit publish, and went to bed wondering if I’d regret it.  I haven’t yet.

                The Playground was a baring of my soul.  Its purpose was to illustrate how the scars of childhood bullying translate to an adult.  We hear all these dire statistics-victims suffer from low achievement, depression, higher rates of drug use, suicide, yet no one had ever written about the aftermath.  No one ever said, “This is what a life scarred by childhood bullying looks like.”  Most bullying stories focused on the victimization itself, tacking on a made-for-TV happy ending.

                My book does not have a happy ending.  I could have manufactured one.  I’ve had good things happen in my life.  I could have ended with that and wrote, THE END.   But instead I chose to relate a deeper, more personal truth, the truth most people don’t want to hear.

                The truth is I’ve struggled with low self esteem and feelings of worthlessness all my life as a direct result of the bullying.  Only in the last couple of years, with the advent of my writing career, have I started to feel good about myself.  Those feelings had a very negative impact on my life.  It led me to stay in dead-end jobs long past the time when I should have left, to remain in abusive situations well beyond the time I should have fled and made me afraid to put myself out there.  It rendered me unable to set boundaries, to say no.  I was willing to do anything for anyone. 

                Discovering someone disliked me was devastating.   It reinforced my own personal script of worthlessness that had been written so many years ago.  I struggled with rejection.  Hearing no to most people was a minor setback; for me, hearing no could trigger an episode of depression where I struggled to find evidence that life was worth living.

                This came to a head in 2013, when three of my coworkers, one of whom I considered a close friend, went to HR to get me fired.  I was completely blindsided.  I didn’t see it coming, although in hindsight I recalled some strange looks being exchanged among the perpetrators.  I figured I was just being paranoid.

                That’s the worst-dismissing your own feelings of discomfort as paranoia, chalking it up to self-consciousness due to your abusive past, and having it turn out you weren’t being paranoid and it was worse than you thought.

                This was the catalyst: A coworker had asked me why I was always smiling like I was up to something.  I replied, “I am, I’m plotting everyone’s downfall.”  Everyone laughed and I promptly forgot the exchange.

                But three people went to HR and reported me, claiming that innocuous remark was a threat and they were afraid for their lives. They brought a laundry list of things I’d allegedly said (some of it was repeated back to me.  All of it had been said to the “close personal friend” and was twisted.  Much of it was stuff HE’D said, and I’d just been like, “yeah,” which turned into “Shannon thinks such and such.”)

                Within several hours, the whole thing unraveled.  This group had been plotting against me for MONTHS, trying to find a way to get me fired.  Including the “close personal friend” who sat next to me, talked to me nonstop through the partition all day, and was somebody I trusted.  People who sat with them at lunch came forward and revealed they’d been actively trying to recruit people to go up to HR with them and spent entire lunch periods talking endlessly about what a bitch I was and how I was finally going to “get it.”  It was crazy making stuff. 

                To this day, I have no clue what I did to any of these people to motivate that kind of obsession.  Two of the three are also writers, so I believe they were partially motivated by jealousy, which was ridiculous.  And yet that incited them to destroy me.  They actually SAID I needed to be “destroyed.”

                 Sometimes I get sad, thinking of what could have been.  We could have swapped ideas and edited each other’s work and cheered each other on.   I would have loved being their writing buddy, to have encouraged and inspired and motivated one another.  It could have been a wonderful friendship beneficial to all of us.  Instead, they chose to bully me.

                I’d ceased to be a human being.  They’d distorted me.  They had convinced themselves I was bad, evil, unworthy.  It was as if they’d projected onto me all their fears about themselves.  It was as if everything I feared about myself was true.

                The night after my meeting with HR was one of the darkest ones of my life.  I literally cried all night.  I contemplated suicide, wondering why I was such a horrible, worthless person that everyone hated me. I felt like my entire life I’d dealt with the same shitty situation repeatedly.  What is it about me?  I asked myself. Why does everyone hate me?

                I took heart from the fact that people stood up for me.  That my boss, supervisor, and even HR took my part.  I wiped my tears and forced myself to go to work the next morning, arriving early.

                My female enemy was sitting on the desk of my “close personal work friend” who’d just betrayed me.  They were unaware of the fact that their huge plot had been foiled…at this point they thought it was a success and I was about to be vanquished forever.  She kept looking over the partition at me and snickering, clearly gloating.  It was disgusting.

                One by one, they were called up to HR and the snickering and gloating ceased. 

                I didn’t speak to the “work buddy” for a month or so, but I’m a forgiving person, often to my own detriment.  I began talking to him again like it never happened.  I figured he was remorseful, although I never got anything approaching an apology from anyone.  The only time we came close to discussing the incident was when he mentioned being bullied in high school, and insisted he would never bully someone. (I found out later that he and his gal pal vehemently felt they hadn’t bullied me and I deserved their treatment).

                The Monday after my supposed friend’s last day of work, I came in to some delusional, distorted email stating that he forgave me for “going to corporate and saying we did things we never did.”  To this day, I don’t know what the hell that was about…he and his buddies went to corporate and made accusations, not me.  And when HR spoke to me, I didn’t know who my accusers were. I don’t know what that delusion was about, but I note that narcissists like to twist things to make themselves the victim.  I don’t know if he is one or not; I just know he’s in a whole lot of denial about what happened.  I guess he rewrote the narrative into a version he could live with.

                Looking back six years later, that incident was clearly manufactured drama by a group of people who were bored. Nothing more. What frightens me, though, is how I unwittingly became a target.  That helped me realize a truth:  People who have been bullied in the past are natural targets.  Maybe one day some psychiatrist will figure out why.  It’s almost like we give off some sort of scent, like a wounded animal. 

                Not only that, but people who were themselves bullied are at higher risks for becoming bullies themselves.  My coworker probably was telling the truth when he claimed to have been badly bullied in high school.  Yet he lacked the self-awareness to comprehend that he’d become the very thing he hated.

                Sue Thomas, a counselor at SUNY Potsdam when I was a college student, once told me having two people come together that were abused in the past rarely has a good outcome.  “Invariably, one always starts abusing the other,” she said.  “It’s a familiar dynamic that both people know well and are comfortable with.”

                Once you’ve been bullied, it doesn’t go away.  It leaves an invisible mark on you that predators can see, and there’s always another bully looking for prey.   You’re an unwilling cast member in a shitty play.  You’re left asking, why? what do I do to make these people target me, and although people might say it’s not about you, it’s about them, the common denominator in all these experiences is you, so you never stop wondering. 

                Out of all the childhood traumas and abuse, bullying is probably the easiest to eliminate.  Teaching your children to respect others and be nice to their peers is much easier than trying to undo the damage thirty years later, when that victim grows up to abuse others, or struggles with addiction, or depression.  In most cases, you cannot stop a fully formed adult from abusing a child, but you can stop children, whose minds have yet been fully molded, from abusing one another.  It’s important that we stop the abuse at its source.  Bullying prevention is worthwhile.  Childhood bullying is NOT inevitable.  It can be stopped.

                Childhood bullying isn’t a joke.  The scars it leaves are real and permanent.  It’s not a rite of passage, or something every kid goes through, it’s ABUSE.  At one time, being molested as a child was almost a universal experience, now it’s almost inconceivable that we once turned a blind eye to it.  Bullying needs to be dealt with the same way.  We can’t just shrug and say, “nothing much you can do about it,” “kids will be kids,” because there are things that can be done.  It can be stopped.  Like the song in the musical South Pacific, “You have to be carefully taught.”  If hate can be taught, so can empathy and kindness.  Teach your children to treat others with dignity and respect.  Teach them that everyone is a human being and has feelings, the same as them.    Teach them to love others.  Teach them there is hope.

                We’re living a dark world right now, but we can be the light.