personal narrative essay about bullying

Bullying: A Personal Story

The psychological consequences of bullying..

Posted May 11, 2012

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I recently went to see the new documentary Bully and came out feeling that the movie needs to be seen by as many people as possible – particularly preteens, teens, parents (even of very young children), teachers, and school administrators. In this entry, I will discuss the aspects of the movie that most concerned me, both as a parent and as a human being; one who was horribly bullied throughout almost all of her school years, even, sometimes, by otherwise well-meaning friends. Throughout the course of this entry, I will reveal rather personal things – mostly to help reach out to others who went through similar experiences, but also as a method of exorcising my own demons.

Three of the stories central to the film deal with what would seem to be extreme reactions to bullying . Tyler Long committed suicide after years of persistent bullying. We aren’t talking about a shove or being tripped in the hallway – his peers literally called him worthless and told him to hang himself. So one day, at the tender age of 17, Tyler heeded their advice and hung himself in his bedroom closet. 11-year-old Ty Smalley also committed suicide because he was being consistently tortured in school. We also see 14-year-old Ja’Meya Jackson who is awaiting a hearing after she brandished a gun on her school bus against a group of kids who were also relentlessly bullying her (the charges were subsequently dropped, but the judge orders her hospitalized for a period of time). Ja’Meya was not a troublemaker; in the movie, her mother proudly displays her various sports trophies and medals, and describes her as a good student. But one day she snapped, and her reaction could have had severe consequences for the many children involved. All these cases hit close to home. I was each of these kids. While the outcome was very different in my case, it doesn’t erase the fact that, when I was 17, I both tried to commit suicide and almost severely hurt a classmate due to the constant physical, mental, and emotional abuse I endured in school (and at home).

I was always overweight, quiet, studious, and wore glasses. In 2nd grade a boy stabbed me in my thigh with a sharp pencil; I still have the little blue dot as an enduring souvenir. I was teased, pushed, threatened, beaten. In the 8th grade a girl grabbed me around my neck and banged my head against the wall while I left the classroom to go to the bathroom. In high school I was teased on a daily basis because I did not conform to traditional gender stereotypes: I had no interest in doing “girlie” things and was branded a lesbian as a consequence. I remember lying in bed one night contemplating if my peers were right – what if I were gay? I didn’t think I was, since I had always liked boys, but maybe they were seeing something I did not. The idea terrified me – had I been gay I would have been undoubtedly ostracized amongst my family. I would have most certainly been treated like another teenager in the movie, Shelby, whose family was shunned after she came out as a lesbian and who experienced cruel bullying from other students and teachers as a result. Years later, what concerns me is not the possibility that I were gay, but that I was so scared at the thought of being gay. I cannot imagine the pain that gay teenagers experience every day of their lives; adolescence is hard enough without having to worry that the very core of your being will be so derided and hated by others. The experience was painful, but it has forever opened my heart, and honed my compassion, toward homosexual youths and adults.

One day, during my senior year of high school, a boy who had been bullying me for the past two years started verbally abusing me for the umpteenth time that week. I was having a particularly bad day, and remember quietly warning him that he should walk away and leave me alone. He taunted me in response. I snapped. I took the heavy wooden chair I was sitting on and threw it at him; the chair missed him by inches and ended up in pieces against the classroom wall. I then chased him and almost choked him until a few of my friends grabbed me and held me back. All I can remember is how badly I wanted to hurt him; I didn’t want to just trip him or give him a scratch or a bruise – I wanted to hurt him badly enough that I may have caused permanent damage. I could have ended up in vast amounts of legal trouble. I had never before been as irrational, and never since. I am forever grateful to my friends for preventing me from hurting him. I am not a violent person, and never once got in any trouble my entire academic career . But every human being has her breaking point. Ja’Meya had hers; I had mine.

Sometime that year I tried, obviously unsuccessfully, to commit suicide. Years of bullying at school and physical, mental, and emotional abuse at home led me to this very dark, despairing, place. I just wanted to sleep. I wanted to have one day when I didn’t feel any pain; one day when I didn’t feel like a worthless human being. I understand what Tyler and Ty felt, the anguish that led them to take their lives. I wish their suicide attempt had mimicked my own (i.e., that they had been unsuccessful), and now, as a mother, I cannot imagine the pain their parents are suffering. Like many of these children, my parents did not know I was being bullied and neither did most of my teachers. Of the ones that did notice, they turned a blind eye. In fact, some of them participated. I remember one teacher who told me, upon learning that I had been admitted to college, that the university in question must had lowered their standards.

When a parent hits, chokes, and verbally torments a child, we (rightly) call it abuse. When a kid does it to another kid, we dismiss it as a “normal” part of childhood . Victims of bullying are often told to “man-up” or to develop a thick skin, as if it is their fault for daring to be effected by years of demeaning treatment. It is a similar phenomenon to how we talk to our girls about rape – we spend too much time telling them how not to get raped, rather than teaching our sons not to rape. Similarly, instead of teaching our children the requisite compassion and care that may lead to a decrease in bullying, we deride the victims for taking it too personally, for not standing up for themselves, or for being weak. I think this treatment can be partially attributed to a lack of knowledge about the nature of bullying in this day and age, and a lack of understanding of its deep-seated effects. The psychological and emotional repercussions do not end when school does; the scars run deep and can carry into the child’s adult life. This is far truer now than it was when I was a kid, since social networking has made it so a child has little respite from bulling. At one point in the movie, 12-year-old Alex tells his mother that his primary coping mechanism for dealing with being bullied is to rid himself of emotion altogether, and that his impulse is to become a bully himself.

What is imperative for adults to understand, parents and teachers alike, is that what is going on is not just random and sporadic teasing. Kids are dangerously threatening each other; in the film, one boy tells Alex that he’s going to cut his face off, and another tells him that he’s going to break his Adam’s apple. Shelby was so alienated in her community that students wouldn’t even sit next to her at school. And her teachers, the very people who were supposed to care for her while in school, were condemning her to hell in front of the other students due to her sexual orientation . Bullying in America has become a microcosm for the hate, prejudices, violence, and fears that permeate so much of the adult world. We hate homosexuals, Muslims, Jews, Caucasians, Blacks, and Hispanics because they represent “the Other,” the outcast, the people we want exiled from our communities. What utterly puzzles me is that whenever this behavior takes place in the “real world,” it is generally reviled (as it well should be). When it happens in schools it is dismissed. Yet children, given their age, mental development, and emotional vulnerability, are the ones most at risk for long-term psychological maladjustment as a result of such treatment. In other words, we are essentially ignoring, and in general refusing to allay, some of the most detrimental abuse possible. The fact that the perpetrators are children themselves does not ease the problem, or render it less serious. On the contrary, the fact that people so young can be capable of such cruelty reveals another side to the bullying issue not often addressed: what is the mental and emotional state of a child who beats, threatens, and emotionally tortures another? Bullying claims, at the very least, two victims: primarily, the child being bullied, but also the character of the bully himself. The philosopher Aristotle wrote in his Nicomachean Ethics that one way to cultivate character traits is to repeatedly perform actions that manifest those traits. If one wants to become an honest person, one must consistently tell the truth; if one wants to be a compassionate person, one must consistently act in a compassionate manner. The same, of course, goes for vices. Bullies, therefore, consistently act in ways that humiliate, frighten, and hurt others. The character traits that are likely to arise from repeatedly acting in this way are nothing short of concerning.

Is bullying an inevitable consequence of going to school and growing up? I suppose that some amount of teasing is to be expected. Even the adult world is full of bullies; there will always be people who are drunk on their own power and take advantage of the weaker and most vulnerable. But I do believe that a lot of bullying can be curbed – and doing so requires a joint effort on behalf of parents and school employees alike. Parents are their children’s first, and most important, moral educators. It is our job to teach them compassion, selflessness, integrity, and to instill in them the importance of helping, rather than exploiting, the vulnerable. School employees must understand that what is going on in between their walls is nothing short of child-on-child abuse; just as teachers have a moral (and in some cases legal) responsibility to report child abuse to the proper authorities, there should exist a similar responsibility here. We cannot monitor every child’s actions, but we can implement some severe consequence for the students who do get caught bullying, and we can help schools become a safe place for the victims, rather than a place of incessant dread.

My suicide attempt failed. I grew up. Went to college. Went to grad school. Got married. Had a wonderful, beautiful, child. I am a respected member of my university community. I was lucky. Tyler and Ty could have done great things. We could all do great things if we really want to. It is too late for them, but it isn’t too late for our children. We can help save victims from their bullies – and in doing so save bullies from themselves.

Bertha Alvarez Manninen is an assistant professor of philosophy in the Division of Humanities, Arts and Cultural Studies at Arizona State University.

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Home / Essay Samples / Social Issues / Bullying / Surviving a Bullying Experience: My Story

Surviving a Bullying Experience: My Story

• Category: History , Social Issues , Life
• Topic: British History , Bullying , Personal Experience

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