“Bullying is killing our kids. Being different is killing our kids and the kids who are bullying are dying inside. We have to save our kids whether they are bullied or they are bullying. They are all in pain.”
Cat Cora
“Out of suffering have
emerged the strongest souls; the most massive characters are seared
with scars.”
Kahlil Gibran
I must admit, I usually
enjoy writing these little essays. I find myself jotting down little notes from
time to time, and, over the course of a couple of weeks, they just kind of come
together into a collection of (mostly) integrated ideas. It’s a fun process and
something I usually look forward to.
Not this time though. No
this time I felt compelled to talk about something that has in many ways been a
huge issue in my life as a kid, then a teenager, and now as a child
psychologist. This issue is bullying.
I've been on all
sides of the bullying continuum. As a kid I was teased for my appearance,
mocked relentlessly and humiliated. Later, as a teenager, I dished out plenty
of the same. I teased just about anyone in my path, and this went on for a
while. Maybe this was a way of dealing with my own experiences. One thing I
know to be unequivocally true, is that this kind of stuff leaves scars. I've got
plenty of my own, and am sure I've created a few myself. As much as I
enjoy working with kids, I've often thought that it was my penance in
this life to try and guide kids through their own troubled times as a way of
making peace with my own past.
An image that will always
haunt me came from one of my first experiences as a counselor in my early days
as a psychology student. I had an assignment at a school at the end of the
summer and it was hot. Not just warm, but summer in Chicago hot. A skinny kid
came in wearing a baggy sweatshirt, and I made a sarcastic remark about him
being overdressed. He managed a little smile, sat down, and we talked for a
while. He talked to me about his parents, his neighborhood, and then finally
what it was like to be gay in an Irish-Catholic neighborhood. I was very
touched by his story, and told him to please come back again.
As he got up to leave, he
took a long look at me, and then slowly rolled up his sleeves. There were knife
marks across and all up and down his arms. Not little ones either, but long and
ugly scars from years of cutting himself.
“This is why I wear long
sleeve shirts in the summer” he said quietly.
It was a statement
that I've never forgotten.
I never saw this
particular kid again, as my assignment ended shortly afterwards, and he never
showed up for his next appointment. I've always wondered what
happened to him, and I find myself hoping that he somehow hung on. Still, his
scars ran deep, and there were a lot of them.
Unfortunately
those weren't the last scars that I've seen, but it was the
last time I ever made a sarcastic comment about a kid wearing long sleeves. It
reminded me of a lesson that I often forget. Words matter. Sometimes they
matter so much that they make vulnerable and scared children run knives across
their arms, sometimes fatally. It’s all a little terrifying actually. You want
to tell these kids that this stuff is not going to last forever. That one day
they will be out of High School and free from small minds and mean people.
But you really can’t promise that.
What you can do is listen
and try and understand. You can give them a place where they can talk about the
isolation and the confusion and the humiliation. And some of them will survive
and become the “massive characters” that Kahlil Gibran discusses in the above
quotation. Many of the world’s great success stories start in this very manner.
But some of them wont. Some of them will spend the rest of their lives thinking
that they aren't welcome in a world that has been so hard on them.
A life may depend on it.
