Posts tagged High School

I was bullied in school, and often. I was the fat artsy fartsy kid in an all-boys-school full of jocks whose favorite word was ‘faggot.’  Guess what though, even though I was called a faggot and had my mother insulted on a day-to-day basis, I was never bullied as bad as I’ve been bullied by life since I graduated high school.

Bullies are dicks, but dealing with them is part of growing up. I manned up, I had a dad who taught me to throw a punch and get into the fights. Some of those left me looking worse than others, but they were necessary to bring the mocking down to a manageable level (i.e. getting pranked once a week instead of being constantly harassed). As I got older and got into watching Arrested Development my tongue got sharper and punches were less and less necessary due to the abundance of snide remarks; I started saving them exclusively for ‘yo momma’ jokes. Still, getting-into-fight skills were not wasted, as I approached those kids younger than me who were getting bullied and gave them my advice; and just about a year ago I was taking punches à la Brad Pitt in The Tree of Life from my little brother who had just entered high school and was getting bullied himself.

Being bullied is a low self-esteem issue all around… The bully is insecure about him or herself and feels like taking everyone else down will make him feel better; the bullied are those who don’t value themselves enough to think they can do something about it. You can tell them they are special all you want in counseling, but trust me, nothing will proof to a kid that they can take on their own problems than giving that bully a black eye, or better yet, slamming them into the ground. Counselors should be more worried about the bully than the bullied… I got to know some of the kids who bullied me later, and I found out most of them got bullied at home (be it physically or verbally) by an abusive parent. Looking most of them up on facebook today, I see that most are doing way worse than those of us who were bullied; as I hinted at before, the need to bully has to come from underlying insecurities that most definitely have other psychological and behavioral consequences.

Bullying goes beyond the school hallways, it makes its way into politics, business, even the arts; and trust me, those kids who managed to overcome their high school bullies will have gained the self-esteem and wisdom to do it again when it counts.

Stop telling kids that it’s ok to be who they are and that others are ignorant… I would much prefer “be who you want to be and make those who get in your way respect it.” Because let’s be honest, many times you can be a dick and not notice it; and if someone else is pointing that out and you are stuck on the ‘this is who I am’ mindset, you may confuse an actual valid point as bullying. On the other hand, if you know what you think is right, and you’re getting stones thrown at you for following that, then give that sumbitch a big old shiner to show off.

I’m not promoting violence at schools à la columbine… I’m promoting self defense and personal growth. Every human being has a natural amount of anger and violence coursing through their veins, and learning to deal with that in a healthy way should be part of your early teens as much as dealing with sexuality and other teen issues. Throwing a punch every now and then will empty the pot of boiling anger water that pushes kids who don’t to go on murdering rampages à la V-Tech once they can’t take it anymore.

This comes in the spirit of supporting this movie which is coming out soon.

• The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde
• Snow Country by Yasunari Kawabata
• The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami
• Kokoro by Natsume Soseki
• The Silent Cry by Kenzaburo Oe
• Teach Us To Outgrow Our Madness by Kenzaburo Oe
• Changeling by Kenzaburo Oe
• Ficciones by Jorge Luis Borges
• The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri
• Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
• The Brothers Karmazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
• Notes From The Underground by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
• Ulysses by James Joyce
• A Portrait of The Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce
• The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka +
• A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
• David Copperfield by Charles Dickens
• Rayuela by Julio Cortázar +
• Lord of The Flies by William Golding
• The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger +
• Hamlet +
• Macbeth +

Many of these I’ve come to own in the years that have passed since tenth grade, but I’m glad to find the list and remember some that I’d forgotten about.