Recently, I’ve started volunteering at my local middle school and I’ve gotten to witness kids being bullied again firsthand. As someone who was bullied myself in middle school, I remembering wondering at the time whether there was something wrong with me – something that made the other kids act like I was lower than dirt.
Now that I’m witnessing bullying again as an adult, I’ve realized that the kids that are being bullied are actually kind, smart, and lovable. If anything, they’re just shy or awkward in the way that kids still getting used to themselves are. It’s not that there’s anything wrong with them at all – they just get picked on.
Conversely, when I look at the bullies now as an adult, I can clearly see how much they crave being on the “inside” of a group – and how that leads them to push kids over to the “outside.” Last time I was teaching math to a group of five kids, I saw the three prettiest girls just straight up ignore the other two students during the group activity – completely acting like they didn’t even exist.
It made me mad, but from an adult perspective, I also genuinely felt sorry for the three bullies, because I could clearly see how insecure they were as well. I know that’s something everyone tells you when you’re a kid – that people just bully others because they’re insecure. But it wasn’t until I actually went back and saw the behavior from the outside that I could see how it was 100% true.
I’m volunteering at a school where 96% of the students are low-income and I know a lot of them deal with very difficult challenges at home. So I can’t even bring myself to fully harden my heart to the bullies, because honestly, they also look really sad and vulnerable.
Middle school is just a heartbreaking time. I really hope that my shyer students who get bullied don’t end up holding onto that pain for as long as I did. I try super hard to build up their self-esteem and say encouraging things to them where I can, but I know that it’s different when it comes from an adults vs. your peers.
At the same time, I hope that everyone out there who was bullied as a kid can really learn to let it go. If you need help with that, try volunteering at your local middle school. I feel like a lot of social anxiety disorders stem from that period, which is why I’m posting this here (because I know a lot of members of this subreddit have felt socially rejected since they were kids.)
The thing is, I think that the bullying sets people up to believe there’s something fundamentally wrong with them – causing low self-esteem – which ironically ends up being what dampens the ability to connect with others later on in adulthood.
I’ve done a lot of therapy around some of those painful childhood experiences, but honestly, I don’t think anything has helped me as much as actually seeing how sad and pointless all of that looks now in-person.
​
1 comment
Great observations.