?are bad people, and I'm going to forgive myself for being so unforgiving that I don't give mine the benefit of having been young and stupid (with emphasis on stupid) at the time.
I was no saint, but I don't think I should have had to be. When your whole class gangs up on you and you defend yourself, you shouldn't be punished. It seems like teachers throw all sense of justice and reasonableness to the wind within their first year of teaching, or possibly just every day before lunch hour. I really wished I could have been homeschooled. I still wish I had been. It would have saved me so much precious time and energy. So much trauma.
I have no sure-fire way of dealing with the trauma. My therapist says most people she meets who have been bullied have PTSD, so I think we should just go ahead and re-label it child abuse, so the school authorities can stop kidding themselves and the politicians will have no excuses to hide behind.
But I'm getting ahead of myself. Want to know a way to handle bullies? My mother inadvertently gave it to me when she said, "make like you don't care." I have always been an awful actress, so the obvious solution was to truly not care. It gets easier, you can say, when you have removed all emotion from a connection, and you look and there is no connection left. They left me alone. I had to repeat the process every fall. That only lasted for eighth and ninth grade, and made an instinctive if ultimately unnecessary comeback for high school.
As a result, I can no longer notice my former classmates. I know they are people, I intellectually consider them to be on the level of anything else that lives or breathes; but deep down I don't actually consider them human. Some of them, I am still able to think of as people, the ones that were nice to me when it cost them nothing and didn't actively participate in bullying. As for personhood, I no longer grant it to anyone who explicitly wishes me harm. I can't, the same way I can't talk while consciously maintaining eye contact. It's something my mind simply doesn't do, and I'm okay with that.
I was no saint, but I don't think I should have had to be. When your whole class gangs up on you and you defend yourself, you shouldn't be punished. It seems like teachers throw all sense of justice and reasonableness to the wind within their first year of teaching, or possibly just every day before lunch hour. I really wished I could have been homeschooled. I still wish I had been. It would have saved me so much precious time and energy. So much trauma.
I have no sure-fire way of dealing with the trauma. My therapist says most people she meets who have been bullied have PTSD, so I think we should just go ahead and re-label it child abuse, so the school authorities can stop kidding themselves and the politicians will have no excuses to hide behind.
But I'm getting ahead of myself. Want to know a way to handle bullies? My mother inadvertently gave it to me when she said, "make like you don't care." I have always been an awful actress, so the obvious solution was to truly not care. It gets easier, you can say, when you have removed all emotion from a connection, and you look and there is no connection left. They left me alone. I had to repeat the process every fall. That only lasted for eighth and ninth grade, and made an instinctive if ultimately unnecessary comeback for high school.
As a result, I can no longer notice my former classmates. I know they are people, I intellectually consider them to be on the level of anything else that lives or breathes; but deep down I don't actually consider them human. Some of them, I am still able to think of as people, the ones that were nice to me when it cost them nothing and didn't actively participate in bullying. As for personhood, I no longer grant it to anyone who explicitly wishes me harm. I can't, the same way I can't talk while consciously maintaining eye contact. It's something my mind simply doesn't do, and I'm okay with that.
