During middle school I had been picked on to the point of nearly committing suicide.
While being picked on I always used to blame myself for the things others were doing to me. For years this hampered me and caused more people to pick on me.
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At the time it was difficult to discern that no matter how good I was at anything, these people were always going to have something to say. If I handed them a bar of gold they would have complained it was too heavy and that it was my fault.
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In middle school, the people who were picking on me constantly berated me and yelled at me. At first there were times where I stood up for myself but my self-esteem slowly deteriorated as the bullying only increased.
After a while, I began to believe that I deserved being bullied and I fed into it.
When people criticized my hair cut I thought that I had to change something about the way I did my hair in order to not be picked on. When people told me that I should kill myself, which happened every day, I went home thinking about whether that was a viable option. When people told me that I wasn’t good enough, I looked for ways to change who I was believing everything they were saying was correct. At the time it was difficult to discern that no matter how good I was at anything, these people were always going to have something to say. If I handed them a bar of gold they would have complained it was too heavy and that it was my fault.
What bullying reveals about the bully
In later years I realized that there’s no way to really satiate a bully and to satisfy their standards for the way I ought to be. Bullies are just looking for ways to vent their anger and the more I allowed them to pick on me the more they believed that I was deserving of the maltreatment they were directing towards me. Learning I shouldn’t have to live up to a bully’s standards and should not even begin to try helped me to begin breaking away from all the criticism I had received from the time I had been in middle school to the times after my two episodes of schizoaffective disorder.
Breaking away and alleviating the pain of bullying took time. I made an effort in my notebook to challenge old thoughts. One thought I challenged in a number of ways was the one where people constantly told me to kill myself.
Looking back I realized it was ridiculous for someone to say that I should kill myself for having said or made a social faux pas. It seems obvious that I should challenge these thoughts and that they were not true, but until I unearthed them from my unconscious mind, socializing had been incredibly difficult for me because of all the subconscious fears that kept arising for me in from my middle school trauma. Until I dug out all these fears I had tremendous social anxiety but I didn’t know the reasons for it while it was happening.
One thing that helped was unlearning this mantra that I had to kill myself for everything I had ever mistakenly done wrong in middle school. As I continued to address the things I had been picked on for I progressively alleviated the stress and anxiety I had been going through in social situations. I wrote in my journal, ”no one should have to kill themselves for saying the wrong thing.” This was the nature of the journal entries I made, challenging the behaviors and thought patterns I had unconsciously learned in middle school and also in later years.
Being bullied taught me to strive for character, rather than to fit in
Moving forward from these thoughts I learned that I could reshape my place in the social spectrum. I realized that I didn’t have to be on the bottom rung in social situations in order to get attention from others which was what I had been habituated to believe from bullies. I learned that I didn’t have to allow others to make fun of me and set myself up for being made fun of to fit in and to have friends. The thing I realized was that life is not a competition to be cooler than everyone or to be at the top of the social spectrum. It’s really just about treating everyone as well as I could. When I started to do this my self-esteem improved immensely.
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Good people always gravitate towards good character which was something I liked and was also something that almost everyone has.
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For years after my episodes I had been striving to do everything I could to fit in with everyone I met. I had the unconscious fear that not being liked could lead to people picking on me thus leading to wanting to kill myself which was the thought pattern I had learned in middle school. Trying to fit in with everyone was difficult and I didn’t have a true identity for myself which was problematic at times.
Eventually, I learned that I needed to speak my mind more and to be myself and allow others to be themselves. I was initially afraid that I wouldn’t have any friends for being the true me because in prior years I had been told that the true me wasn’t good enough.
After some reflection I realized that good people always gravitate towards good character which was something I liked and was also something that almost everyone has. They also gravitated towards treating others well.
Knowing this helped me to realize that the friends I had and the types of friends I was looking for tended to be individuals more so than followers. I learned that as long as I had good character and treated other people well there would always be people who wanted to be my friend. I knew that I did not want to be friends with just anyone, rather, I was looking for those who valued good character and treating others well. My friends in later years haven’t necessarily been the mainstream group I strove to fit in with in earlier years; they come from all different walks of life, have different personalities, have different cultures, and are many different nationalities. Character has and always will be the universal language that brings us together for laughs, drinks, and to help each other out.
Choosing friends who value character and strive to be good people every day has its dividends.
My current friends who might not be as “popular” as some of the folks I strove to hang out with in earlier years, have given me the most fulfilling friendships I have ever had in my life. Life is not a contest to be more popular than everyone and to fit in the most. It’s not a competition at all necessarily. It’s just about being with the people who make me the happiest and not worrying about what bullies have to say.
Until bullies resolve their own traumas, they’ll never be able to provide fulfilling friendships, they’ll always find reasons to treat people poorly, and making an effort to be friends with them will always be fruitless.
Photo by Clem Onojeghuo on Unsplash
The post How Character Helped Me to Overcome Being Bullied appeared first on The Good Men Project.