Some people who are unhappy with who they are, have the propensity to project their negativity and self-loathing onto other people. Healthy, happy people don’t go around tearing down other people.
In my sophomore year of high school, I began to branch out and become friends with other people then my regular group of friends. Some of the girls that I was friends with at the time were becoming classic mean girls, and I hated that. They started picking on other people and played pranks, and many times it was incredibly cruel.
I was never a mean girl or bully, and I didn’t like who these girls were becoming. I would try stop some of their shenanigans and stick up for their targets, but it never really worked. The more I stood up for the people they were bullying, the more divided I became with them.
Given how things were going, it was natural that we would grow apart, and I began to make friends with other people and felt happier. I even changed some of my classes around, which created some distance between them and I. And let’s just say that these girls, didn’t care for it at all. I soon became their target and was constantly bullied and picked on for the most mundane things.
I literally dreaded going to school every day. And I didn’t want to tell my family that my “best friends” were making every day at school a living hell for me. Looking back at this situation, I know what caused the whole issue.
The ringleader of the mean girl clique, who I will call S, had feelings for me beyond friendship. I had suspected that she was into girls, but back then it wasn’t talked about as openly as it is now. And I wasn’t into that, but I didn’t care if my friends were gay – I only cared about the kind of person they were. And at first S seemed cool. But when I became friends with another girl who I will call A, S accused me of being in a romantic relationship with her and from that point on, I became her and the rest of my “friends” target. I remember at the time, finding that accusation so crazy, because it simply wasn’t true and she knew I was straight.
She became so obsessed with getting a reaction out of me, I literally had to change my phone number multiple times because she wouldn’t leave me alone. She would call my new friends, saying she was someone else, looking for my number. This was all before social media and whatsapp. I cringe to think would have happened to me if social media had been around like it is now back then.
She would spread all these rumors about me and tell people who I was becoming friends with that I was talking about them behind their back. It was awful. Most of my new friends saw through it all, but some didn’t. Some didn’t want to become S’s target and stopped talking to me altogether. And S seemed to delight in it. Â
After ignoring her for awhile, the bullying stopped. And I don’t know why it did because I never thought it was going to end. Maybe teachers intervened, I don’t know.
But one day when my junior year started, S came up to me at my locker. I immediately felt like it was all going to start back up again and was on guard, but she was actually….nice to me. She said she hoped that we could be friends again. I kind of brushed her off and was like, yeah, we should get coffee sometime.
We were never friends again, though. I couldn’t trust her and she was still a mean girl. She and her “crew” (as she called it, who were also my former group of friends) were always bullying other kids. They were always going after other people, dragging them down and tearing them up because it made them feel better. And I just wasn’t that kind of person and didn’t want to be around people like that.
Years removed from the situation; I think S had a lot of issues going on at home than we ever knew. She was also dealing with her own feelings about her sexuality in a very conservative town, and I know that had to have been really hard for her. Junior and senior year she started experimenting with drugs, which wasn’t my scene, either. We just went down different paths and were different people.
It can be so hard when you are being bullied to believe that how people treat you has less to do with you and more to do with them. How do you not personalize what is happening to you? How does it not feel like it will never end?
I feel like today, there are more resources and ways to handle situations like these. But there also more ways for bullies to get at their victims, too. I do feel like it is less tolerated than it used to be, but I also think it is happening more often than it has before, too.
I do have empathy for S, but what she did was completely unacceptable. I wish I had handled it better and faster, but I really didn’t know what to do.
But as humans, I feel like when we see someone being bullied, we need to take a stand and tell the bully to stop. There is strength in numbers and the more people the bully has standing up to them, the more likely they will back down.
Remember, the bully is someone who is extremely unhappy with themselves. They feel better focusing on perceived flaws in others because it distracts them from having to face themselves.
