A good friend of mine just told me a story about how her daughter is being bullied by a group of girls, and mainly one leader who is feeding misinformation and slander against her to the rest (Sound familiar? No no no let's not get political here). I know how strong her parents are, so I'm not worried that she's being taught various ways to deal with it. Her mom and I clashed for years getting a theater company off the ground, arguing for hours about artistic integrity and every single nut and bolt behind productions. You name it - scheduling, artwork, casting, programs - we argued about it until the fight was eventually spent and we realized that we were always fighting for the same things. I forget the actual moment we figured it out, but her presence lifted me to do some incredible things before I left it altogether. Her husband was also a great sounding board and practical thinker; I can see why they're such a good match and why they're amazing parents.
I don't know who really has it worse, the kids who are bullied today or the kids who were bullied back when I was in school. While the kids are overwhelmed with social media and now have to learn from home, I distinctly remember the dread I dealt with going to school every day. Were they going to make fun of how I walked? My looks? Were they going to steal something from me when I wasn't looking again? At recess or P.E., was a ball going to be thrown at me or worse, during football, soccer, or other games, was I going to be blindsided by a ball, an elbow, or a trip? It was easier to make me flinch before the years my father put me in pop warner football.
Playing for the Burbank Vikings only raised my pain tolerance, removing the flinch, but it didn't prevent me from being a target. It got me in the habit of counting my bruises in the bathtub after a game, and not being afraid of hitting people back. I think I may have thrown some Waterboy rage at a few people I tackled, even at a young age, but that just changed the nature of how I dealt with the bullies at my catholic grade school, where the nuns tried to scare us into behaving because God was watching us. He sure wasn't watching when I was being cornered by the group of bullies or when I started trading punches to the face. The very last fight I got into with them was eighth grade, when after school, one of the guys kept following me and pushing me into reacting, until I stopped, set my feet, and brought a punch from what felt like the southern atmosphere up to his mouth, raking the inside of his lips against his braces. He held his mouth and stood there, shocked, and I walked away. Not ten minutes later, his little brother rode up to me on his mongoose bike and said he heard I got a busted up mouth. I turned around, smiled, and said "Not me, but you might want to check up on your brother, though." He raced off, and I was never bothered again.
When it came to graduation from that school, I stopped caring because I never felt supported by them, nor did I feel safe. I had two best friends, a first kiss with a girl I was infatuated with in 3rd grade, another puppy love for the rest of my time there, and that's all I wanted. I distracted my parents from graduation and skipped it. I remember that we were working in the backyard, waist deep in a project where we had work gloves and tools everywhere, and my dad asked me when the ceremony was. I told him it was about two hours ago. He felt terrible, and called my mom outside, but I told them it was really okay. I didn't need to see anyone again, especially the guys who would love to take one last swipe at me.
Imagine 6 years of people telling you that you're ugly, you do stupid things, that your existence was just a stain in their eyes. It was relentless, and I went into high school believing it. I had few close friendships in high school, and there was a lot of distraction, but my development was marinated in the soup of judgement. It was in college when I started to understand the long term effects it had on me, first attending classes with the younger brother of one of the original bullies, then surviving an abusive relationship where I just could not figure out which way was up. When the relationship ended I was finally broken, and it took roughly 2-3 years to even glance at the pieces and begin to put things together.
Studying acting became my master class in human behavior, especially considering it was the Meisner technique, which didn't provide for people faking their way through scenes. I studied directing, watched them as real people navigating scenes, and immersed myself in that world intensely for a little over a decade. It was truly the only place where I felt alive, where truth mattered, where anything could happen and once the show was over, the slate was erased and you could start again another day. You could relive life, complete with a soundtrack and a whole room of people watching you, living with you, and then you had one last time to do it and make it count. What a gift! Hundreds of performances, maybe thousands, and it never got old for me. It changed how I saw people in real life, and on one hand, it built a vocation for watching out for people who were similarly marginalized, mostly artists. On the other hand, it also put me in the place of recognizing some abusive people I'd cross paths with, who didn't worry about the collateral damage around them, or the people they hurt.
It dawned on me; Some people grow up but don't grow out of the habit of bending other people to their will. Other people learn how to bully over time. So little is done to check off that behavior on a base social level, because people are often either good at reading it immediately and then walking away, or they, like me at so many points in my life, just assume they're right and adjust our own behavior accordingly. Sometimes we even fill in the blanks: They're totally right to act this way. I am not good enough to be treated well by them. Of course they reward other people with compliments while at the same time love to point out all of my flaws. They know me. They see me. Who cares if my heart is in the right place?
Sometimes I wonder how I dealt with it for so long. Maybe I didn't know I could walk away. Maybe I needed to react but realized that every single reaction was prelabeled and already denied the oxygen needed to spark. In some cases, I just blocked and hid from the people online, and that became the easy fix if I knew they were hostile. Others, I held onto for want of the good moments as long as I could, and then, when I just couldn't take it any more, I left definitively and changed as a result. Sometimes I just couldn't walk away, since we were bound by a workplace. Each time. I used that energy, that push away, to invest in myself and become a better person, and when I figured out how, I used the energy to invest in people around me.
If I'm being completely honest, I'm not happy about things I feel like I've missed out on, but I absolutely would not trade who I am now if given the chance to go back, do it all over again, and maybe be just like everyone else. If anything, I have had to lean harder into my sense of self to compensate for the price tag stuck on my skin. I've had to trust my likes and dislikes, my presence in the moment, my expressiveness, and learn to keep myself company. I've learned to visit envy but not make it a companion, and to exercise a daily count of my blessings and qualities. I've allowed myself to believe that the things I do will leave behind a marked difference in the world without so much self awareness, in that those things were never about me. I've had to pick up the torch of love my parents had for me and take it with me wherever I go.
The bullies from grade school are all scattered or dead, the ones from adulthood still honing their craft, I'm assuming. If the future holds something different for me, I am still out here in the middle of nowhere, roots deep in the soil and ready for it.
I think my friend's daughter is going to be fine. She's brilliant, sensitive, resilient, and has a lot of support. My friend was pregnant with her when we worked on my musical together. If all of those hours of me playing guitar to her connected us in any way, I hope it gives her some strength and clarity.
I think we're both going to be okay.
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