A Bullying Story

With so much access to social media these days it’s hard to keep kids in check. Growing up, at one point in my life, there was someone who did try to bully me…Only I never realized it until recently.

To me she was just a kid who didn’t like me for one reason or another, and was just very intent on trying to get everyone else to exclude me. Luckily for me, I had a good group of friends, and she was the outsider among us.

I never thought about it as bullying until the memory of this person came to me a couple of weeks ago and I remembered her apparent dislike of me or whatever it was, and I started to wonder, why did she not like me?

She was a new student at my small school that year. She was in the grade ahead of me and the year before I had been in a split grade class, so I had made friends with a few of the kids who were now in her class. Her, being a new student and a bit of a tomboy, didn’t fit in, and I remember it took a long time before she actually became friends with anyone in her class. I remember it taking the majority of the year or even a couple years after until she had a solid group of friends.

So before that happened, she was stuck trying to be friends with my group of friends. She wasn’t particularly friendly or out-going either, which made this change of schools thing a lot more difficult for her I think, and she didn’t know how to make friends.

Thinking back I think she was jealous of me. I don’t say this to be full of myself or anything like that but I do think she was jealous that I was clearly good friends with this group of people she wanted to be friends with who she was having a very difficult time making to like her. And here I was already friends with them, being younger, not in their class, or really having any sort of business talking to them, other than from already being friends with them. In elementary school, you forget how divided things are by age sometimes and I guess this is why she felt like I should’ve been the one who didn’t belong instead of her, but I did.

So because of this, she would try to make situations to exclude me, she would try to get rid of me, constantly ask me why I was there, and ask the others why I was around as well. She would ask why I didn’t have friends my own age and to go get my own. Of course I already had friends my own age, but those were my best friends and who I chose to spend my time with.

With her always doing these small things to bother me or exclude me, I naturally had my own ways of getting to her. I called her by a nickname she did not like, and was not particularly nice since she wasn’t to me. Even though I wasn’t nice to her though, I wouldn’t say that I bullied her like she had tried to bully me, because it was my way of standing up for myself because I was typically a pretty shy, quiet, weird little child. Whatever I did was a result of how she treated me, and I never did anything drastic or mean in that sense either. I think, in lieu of revenge, I just did my best to be an annoyance to her because I didn’t have it in me to be mean enough to do anything more and secretly I was trying to make her my friend too.

The fact that she didn’t like be made me want to change that. I would’ve tried to be her friend anyway, but she just seemed to want me gone. Or so I would think but then every once in a while, we would have a nice conversation or something like that. I never understood why we couldn’t be friends. I couldn’t understand why she was against me. But I suppose now it was because she couldn’t figure out how to make friends, and I couldn’t understand her need for me to be gone.

I think to an extent, we’re all guilty of something some form of bullying to point because we have all been in a situation of sorts at some time or another. While it may not be malicious, or intended, it is what it is. I’m only just surprised how long it’s taken me to realize what my own situation was in elementary school. It wasn’t the only one, but it was one of the only ones that directly involved me that was a continual thing.

I consider myself very lucky now that even back then, my friends really were my friends and weren’t easily influenced by this new student. Growing up can be very hard without having to deal with bullies. With is even worse. I’m lucky that it wasn’t a worse situation or something that I took to heart. I might’ve been a different person and I don’t know if I would’ve been able to go through severe bullying at a young age like that, which is what some young people do go through. Every day. I’m very thankful that I got off easy in comparison.