Dear Bully

Over time those kids would become at least casual friends. It turned out I was fast for a short distance, and other kids would want to race me. I knew a lot of jokes. Most important, I was a red-blooded, straight, white, Christian, able-bodied and able-minded male. While I was different, I was still “one of them.” I occupied a space of marginal acceptability, like a small wolf from a different pack, but eventually I made my way into the hierarchy. There were lesser wolves than me, and there was prey.

Only one kid did have an especially intense hatred for me. That came in middle school. He put mean notes in my coat, calling me a racist name. I wasn’t black, but I had curly hair, and that was all he needed. I expect he would have rather had a real minority to harass, but our class didn’t have any that year. He challenged me to fights after school. He finally forced me to, and I won, thanks to guile and a patch of ice. I got him backed helplessly against the ledge of a window well, scooped up his legs, and threatened to let go. He cried and begged other kids to help. None of them did. I helped him back to safety, supposing my mercy would give way to a robust new friendship. It didn’t, and no wonder. I’d humiliated him, not just because he lost, but because not one kid would team up against a weakling to help him. Now he’s the sort of guy who goes to political rallies with misspelled signs.

I’m not ashamed of having been bullied. A few hardships made me. I’m more liberal-minded because of them and more inclined to side with the underdog.

My shame is having ever joined in the abuse. I realized once there was a kid who, though taller than me, could be rabbit punched and tweaked without fighting back. Another time I made a racist joke in the locker room and, during the same spell, told an anti-Semitic joke on the bus, loud enough for the sole Jewish kid to hear. There was the time I joined in a round of teasing of a friend when we discovered he suffered from a weird, mostly harmless but embarrassing medical problem. And the time I abandoned a new friend because nobody else liked her. There were a dozen times that I faked a smile while my not-quite-friends savaged an overweight girl, and a hundred times I tuned out their derision for the kid everyone suspected was gay. I felt powerless to make a difference, anyway, and would rather be on the side that was winning. I think about all those incidents all the time. They’re the ones that bother me to look back on—those times that I showed my meanness and cowardice. They also made me who I am today. If I hadn’t been small or smart or the new kid—or even if I’d been only two of those three—I might have had a thousand such moments, and they’d have made me into a different man. I’d be less thoughtful, less inclined to side with victims. I might not be as literate. I’d be the one taking misspelled signs to political rallies.

Everything you do as a kid adds up to who you are as an adult. Your experiences and decisions are a column of red and black numbers. If you want to be the grown-up you can be proud of, take the hard times in good humor. Make the hard times of others softer. Pull the bully back from the ledge.

Informed Consent

by Lara Zeises

September 13, 1990

I don’t want this. I don’t want people picking on me & I don’t want to be fat . . . I just want to be me.

Here’s one of my earliest memories: I was standing in my grandparents’ bedroom, in front of the full-length mirror that hung on their closet door, looking at my naked body. I was supposed to be trying on clothes they’d gotten me, but instead I was pinching my stomach and crying. I thought, Why do I have to be so fat?

I was four years old.

The worst part? I wasn’t even fat (yet). Chunky, maybe. Chubby at best.

That didn’t make a lick of difference to Tony*, the classmate from kindergarten who insisted on teasing me. Every. Single. Day. I wasn’t Tony’s only target; he was pretty much an equal-opportunity offender. Nor was he the only school-yard bully I’d have to deal with between kindergarten and my high school graduation. But to this day, I remember his face with crystal precision. And to this day, I still want to slap the shit-eating grin off his smug little mug.

It’s no secret that fat kids attract some of the worst bullies. Probably because hating on fatties is one of the last socially acceptable forms of prejudice. Even today, when more than 50 percent of Americans are classified as obese, it’s still considered basically okay to make fun of a kid who shops in the plus-size department. Fat people are fat because they eat too much. Fat people are fat because they don’t get enough exercise. Fat people are fat because . . . well, does it even matter? Fat is bad, thin is good, and if you’re the former instead of the latter, then it’s probably your own fault.