The Struggle to Be Known

What puzzled me most about being bullied was that it kept happening … year after year.

From the first-grade right through high school, every single year there was a new bully that knocked the wind out of my sails. “What’s wrong with me,” I’d ask myself. “Why do they keep seeking me out?” It all led to an unhealthy level of introspection and made my life miserable.

My plan was to disappear.

If I could make myself invisible, the bullies wouldn’t see me. So, I became increasingly introverted. I tried to move around the perimeter of any situation to avoid drawing attention to myself. I never volunteered for anything. I never answered a question in class, regardless of whether or not I knew the answer. I never sat near the back of the class, that’s where the bullies sat, and never sat near the front, that’s where the smart people sat. I always tried to sit on the outside edge of the class about mid-way between the front and back, always on the side away from the main flow of traffic. My every move was choreographed in great detail to give the illusion of invisibility.

Of course, the plan didn’t work. The more I tried to avoid being noticed, the more the bullies focused on me – much like a pack of wolves zeroing in on a wounded animal. And I was definitely “emotionally” wounded from the years of bullying.

My grades were not the best, probably because my self-confidence had been damaged. I also likely had a combination of learning disabilities which were undiagnosed at the time. Sometimes I was placed in remedial classes. This was not good, because that was where the worst of the bullies thrived. One particular day, in one of these classes, I was singled out by the teacher to stand and read aloud an entire chapter from a novel we were studying. As I stood before the class, with my breathing out of sync from the anxiety, I tried to read as dry as possible, not drawing attention to myself. But once again, as I struggled to not draw attention to my reading, the opposite occurred.

As I took my seat following the reading, the entire classroom was eerily silent. “Now class, I want you to take notice of how Glenn read today. That’s how we read with emotion and feeling!” the teacher said. “We’re all going to learn from this and start putting some emotion into our reading.”

As you can imagine, this didn’t sit well with some.

Over the next few months, I think I endured some of the most horrifying bullying of my life. This particular teacher would often leave the classroom and disappear for 30 minutes at a time. It happened several times a week. When she was out of the room, the class would run wild. One lanky blond boy, who always smelled of cigarettes, decided he would make me his project. His plan? Punish me for having received the teacher’s praise.

Probably a half-dozen times he dragged me to the front of the classroom and held me from behind, by my upper arms. As he bad-mouthed me to the class, his hold would evolve into a choke hold with one arm as he rubbed his hand across my face.

As some of the kids urged him on (and I wriggled, squirmed and fought to no avail) he would slip his hand down his pants and fondle himself and return that same hand back to my face for a full, circular wipe. “How does the little classroom reader like this?” He would say. “Read some of this with some feeling,” he said as he took another swipe around my face and tried to stick his fingers in my mouth.

Only a teenage boy could be that mean.

I would have preferred he knock out a couple of my teeth rather than this humiliation. I could not imagine a more degrading thing that could happen to a boy, especially since it happened in front of the entire classroom. Every student in that class, probably 30-plus kids, sat there and said nothing, except to laugh. Not one person spoke a word in support. I also suspected this teacher knew what was going on but never acted upon it.

I don’t know why I didn’t report this kid to the principal or tell my parents, except that I always felt like everything would be better if I could just handle these situations on my own. If I reported him, I would have to relive the incident over and over. Tell it to my parents. Tell it to the principle. Tell it to the teacher. So … I remained silent. Like so many who are suffering abuse. Even though it meant that I just had to “take” whatever was dished out.

No kid deserves to be treated this way. Especially at the age when you are trying to develop your fledgling self-image, and trying to deal with the hormones that are beginning to flood your system.

This was probably the low point for me. I couldn’t imagine anything that could make me feel any worse. I couldn’t imagine my life would ever be any better. I blamed myself for every abuse. I told myself, “If I had only taken a different hallway, sat in a different place, talked in a different way, had different interests.”

But the definitive truth, that I never dared to believe, was: It was not my fault!

REASON FOR HOPE:  Things never stay the same and change always brings the potential for a brighter tomorrow!

I have a great life today. I’m surround by friends and family and constantly involved in creative meaningful work, both at my job and personally and I have an on-going relationship with the divine creator of all!

I DID survive the bullies.

So, why tell these stories, when many would say they are ancient history. My primary reason has been a selfish one. As I’ve said before, for whatever reason, I’ve felt an increasing need to record these incidents. Whenever I write, I find I’m able to process things in a different way. There is a completion that never occurs unless I put it in writing.

But as I’ve heard from so many people with similar stories, I’ve also started to hope that I might stir up a “tiny revolution” in each of us to be more vigilant and watchful for bullies. If only one of my classmates had called this bully out, I think this story would have a completely different ending.

Copyright March 2019