Dear Bully

My daughter is sixteen now and many of those friends are still a part of her life. Those days—the ones where she had to steel herself to go to school in the morning and try not to cry until she arrived home—seem far away. She looks back on them with a mixture of surprise and horror. I think time and distance have softened the memory, but I still see her shudder when someone mentions a particularly brutal episode.

Yet for all its brutality, she learned something valuable. She learned that even those dark and terrible moments that are embedded in our psyche change and fade. That the world is not as small as it can seem. That there are people in it who will hurt you to ease their own pain, insecurity, and fear.

But if you look a little closer, there are people in it who are like you, too. People who will love and accept and cherish you as you are. Often, you will find them in the most unexpected places.

And when you get right down to it, that’s really what life is: one long opportunity to find “your” people. The ones who make your world a better place and the ones for whom you can make the world a little brighter as well.

Every day is another chance. Another opportunity to find them.

You just have to do your part. You just have to keep looking.

Insight

The Other Side

by Nancy Holder

Recently, I received a letter brimming with pain and remorse. It was from a bully. “I’m the queen bee you’ve written about,” she wrote. “I’m the one people save a seat for and hope I’ll sit down next to them in return. I’m the one with the cool clothes and I throw the good parties. People want to hang out with me. They do all kinds of things just to be seen with me. But I’m mean, and my friends are mean, and I don’t know how to stop.”

I told her that I know how that feels.

When I was in middle school, I was the kind of girl who was “good” popular—president of the Associated Student Body, editor of the paper, friend to all . . . or so they thought. But I gleefully filled out the pages of a slam book with dozens of names in it, and not all my comments were nice. Some were far from nice. Some were very, very mean. With some years between then and now, I’m stunned that I could have said such things. But at the time, we scribbled in that book in classes, passing it around when the teachers weren’t looking. We worked on it during lunch. Gross, zitty, BO. Some of my disses were classics of snark, or so I imagined: B-O-B = L-S-R. As if every mean thing I wrote were some soaring haiku of wit. SUL SUX.

At the end of the week that the slam book made its rounds, I got called to the principal’s office. I sat across from his gray metal desk in a sweat while he asked me if, in my position as the school president and the newspaper editor, I could put a stop to cruel, mean-spirited things like this. Maybe I could write an editorial. Or I could give a speech at the next pep rally. He was genuinely distressed and disappointed that “some people” could turn against their fellow students like wild animals and display such a lack of respect and regard for common decency. As he paged through the spiral-bound notebook, shaking his head, he talked about how some of these insults and digs might stick with the victims for the rest of their lives.

Since we had each created a symbol to represent our names, he didn’t know I had taken part. Was I ashamed that I wrote in the slam book? Yes, but that shame came much later. When I sat there in his office, I didn’t feel so much remorse as acute terror that I would be busted. I was more worried about getting in trouble than I was about inflicting lasting damage on anyone’s psyche.

The Dalai Lama said, “Be kind whenever possible. It is always possible.” And Plato said, “Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle.” But I know that when you’re scoring points for epic put-downs and clever repartee, it’s hard to remember to be kind. When you’re in the passenger seat and the driver, aka your best friend, rolls up the windows because that girl starts walking toward the car—that mousy chick with the bad skin, who’s maybe hoping just to say “Hi” to you because you’ve got everything and you’re so pretty, it’s so easy to forget. It’s much easier to remember that you have a reputation to preserve, and you sure don’t want to get stuck with this loser—be nice for two seconds, and she’ll be inviting you to the movies, just watch. Easiest of all to make a point of locking the windows and doors and shouting “Let’s get out of here!” instead of giving zit-chick a wave—a place in the sun, two seconds of your time.

My letter writer sounded just as sad and confused as anyone who’s ever been picked on. And just as powerless. The center of attention, the reigning queen of school, and she had a slam-book-style secret. She didn’t want the power to hurt.