It hurts. It rips you apart from the inside out; it takes your heart and smashes it on the ground; it takes the meaning out of life. It is bullying.
I've always found the term to be too vague. There are so many ways one person can break another. One can beat another. One can yell insults in the face of another. One can post crude things on Facebook, Twitter, or any social media, really. But it is all the same. It is all bullying, though I know the most about the horror of verbal bullying.
But I don’t believe it’s the bullying that hurts.
It’s not the words they say or the things they do.
It’s not how they make you feel.
It’s how the others do absolutely nothing.
It’s how when a girl calls you ugly in school, and your friends dismiss it and just say to not care. How they don’t realize that what you want, what you crave, what you absolutely, one-hundred percent need to hear is that you are not what they say you are.
That inaction is what hurts the most.
Thirty percent of teenagers in the United States will become victims of bullying in high school. That’s just under one in every three students. Take yourself and your two best friends. One of your friends is bullied. That one of you is not the same. That one of you is hurt, broken, damaged, by bullying. Don’t let it happen to them. Don’t let them be like the 160,000 American children who skip school because they are afraid to be bullied. It may seem impossible to prevent this irreversible damage, but it really isn’t. There is always a way to change that inaction.
When you dismiss the effect that bullying can have on that friend of yours, what they hear is not that they should take the rude comments or maltreatment with a grain of salt; what they hear is that they don’t matter to you. Their feelings, all of a sudden, are worthless.
But what if you had let them talk about it? What if you reassured them that they were actually beautiful? Maybe they wouldn’t join the fourteen percent of high school students who consider suicide, or the seven percent that attempt it. Bullying causes 4,400 teen suicides each year. That is twelve children dying each day because of their peers. If twelve students committed suicide in my high school of 2,800 each day, my school would be wiped out in less than a year. In two days, my entire English class could be wiped out. In a month, every student in all of my classes would be gone.
That is why we need to care. If you assume that it won’t happen to you or anyone you know, you are wrong.
Because now you know me. And it’s happened to me.
“Ugly.”
“B****.”
“Whore.”
“Slut.”
“Freak.”
If it’s an insult, I’ve heard it. If it’s rude, I’ve heard it. If it’s a type of bullying, I’ve seen it.
It is real. It is alive. It is a disease taking over the lives of so many people just like you and me. And we can contain it. We can stop the spread.
So stop it. Stop that girl from calling someone else fat, ugly, stupid, or worse. Stop that boy from doing the same. You might not know the victim, but does it matter? If we, as a species, are helping those with terminal diseases, we should be gathering together to end this epidemic. We should be working collaboratively to end it.
We have all heard it by now: be an upstander, not a bystander. But they never tell you how. I can show you, though.
The next time your friend says someone called them something, be there. Be there and listen and help them. And remind them how beautiful, how strong, and how wonderful they are.
Be the one to end it. Join me, and we can end it the only way possible: together.