Do you honestly think that only people who have something "wrong" with their appearance can be subjected to bullying? Because that is so offensive I don't know where to begin.
The bullies will always find SOMETHING to work with. That's why they're bullies. Stop being so bloody ignorant, and try to look beyond the stereotypes for a change. Everyone can be a victim of bullying.
In my case, I was bullied as a teenager because I stood out. I was undiagnosed bipolar, and I had an incredibly short fuse. I was also bullied for my accomplishments. There were a few girls in my class who were jealous of me because I had my own pony and regularly competed in show jumping, winning prizes and all that. I grew up on a farm and my sister and I had our own stable. In addition to that, I was fairly intelligent, so I got good grades.
But my bipolar disorder, which I wouldn't be diagnosed with until I was 22 years old (four years ago), made me extremely explosive at times, and I struggled with impulse control. That's why they found it so hilarious to piss me off, and then it just got more and more organised and cruel as time passed. At first, being very unstable emotionally, I lashed out at them, and for periods of time I would attempt to ignore them, but when I did that all my rage would build up until it ended in a massive explosion. Eventually, though, all the cruel things they were saying on a daily basis started to get to me. I withdrew from everything. I shut down. And the bullies, which by the way was HALF of my class led by a few "cool kids", kept going, and because they were getting away with it they started being more and more open with what they were doing. The other half of my class mostly stayed silent.
The thing about bullying that most people don't understand is that bullying hardly ever starts with a bang. It builds, slowly, which tears down a young person's self-esteem brick by brick until they end up feeling worthless. And when a person feels worthless, they are very unlikely to ask for help because they have been made to feel like they don't even matter. Bullying can seriously mess with your head, and you can't fully understand it until you've experienced it. So when people start saying *beep* like, "She could have told someone!" or, "Why didn't she just ignore them!", it makes me so angry! A victim of bullying is being torn to pieces psychologically. At first I thought I could deal with the bullies myself, which I clearly couldn't. I wasn't about to admit to anyone that these people were upsetting me! When that didn't work, I tried to ignore them instead, thinking they'd eventually leave me alone. Instead, it just got more and more cruel, more and more systematic, until I ended up feeling like I wasn't even a person anymore. I was nothing, in the end. I just wanted to disappear. I had been told I didn't deserve to be alive so many times that I actually believed it to be true. So why would I ask for help when it had been made clear to me that I didn't even matter?
Emotional abuse isn't about logic. At no point does "logic" factor into the emotional reaction to being bullied. Just because one person claims to have come out on the other side of bullying "unaffected" or whatever, that doesn't mean the outcome will be the same for everyone else. No one gets to sit on their high horse and dictate what other people should think or feel, that's arrogant, self-absorbed behaviour. I was bullied, and it left me with many emotional scars. That is MY story of MY battle, and it's not about anyone else. We're all affected in different ways. When I graduated from secondary school (year 10), I experienced an episode of hypomania over the summer, but as soon as I started upper secondary, and was thrown into a whole new class with a bunch of strangers, I quickly spiralled into a series of horrible episodes of depression.
And if you're wondering why I didn't ask for help with my depression, the explanation for that is rather simple: I had been bipolar since I was a small child. I had no sense of "normalcy". I thought I was just a terrible person, especially after all the bullying I had gone through for nearly three years, and it didn't cross my mind that I could possibly suffer from a mental illness. I was 16, and I had never not been emotionally unstable. There was no logic involved in that, either.
So please, keep your ignorance to yourself.
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