"Bullied" geeky kid

I ran across this article: Six lessons I learned from being bullied as a geeky kid. (NB: Some harsh language)

While I don't necessarily claim any more to have been TRULY bullied (what I experienced does not seem to have been as bad as what I hear about today in cases of bullying; I think I was more neglected by my peers except when they happened to light on me as someone they could make cry easily), still, there are some things I agree with (and some I disagree with) in the article.

And the author left out what I think, personally, was the biggest most important lesson for me. But I'll put that at the end.

Here are the six things the author listed, with my comments:

1. Ignore Insults and Keep Going

I'm still not so good at this one. I mean, I can keep going, but an insult - or these days, it's more likely an attack on my competence from someone who really doesn't have the right to question it - breaks my stride. And I do tend to obsess about awful things that people say. Having a higher-up accuse me of not knowing my job threw me into a funk for a week, even though a colleague sat me down and said, "You KNOW this person. You KNOW that that is how they operate. You KNOW that what they are saying is so untrue it's laughable." 

2. Everybody Is Probably Laughing at You, But It's Not Really A Big Deal

Actually, what adulthood has taught me? Everyone is probably NOT laughing at you; they are probably laughing about something stupid a friend of theirs did, or a cat video they saw on the internet, or something said on a late-night comedy show. "What do most people think of you?" "They don't."

That doesn't mean that when I'm feeling insecure or anxious, I don't look at the people giggling over something in class and wonder if I have a button open somewhere, or if I said something that seemed innocent to me but has taken on a Whole New Meaning thanks to Urban Dictionary.

(A story: a colleague, years ago, asked me, "Do you know of any other meaning of the term 'shot his wad'?" I said no - I knew it as a shooting term, from the days when you had to use packing in the barrel of the gun. Or perhaps as a gambling term, where the 'wad' in question was cash. Well, it turns out the "new" meaning of the phrase has to do with ejaculation. The really funny thing? The colleague was using it in the context of reproductive allocation in annual plants, where they channel all their resources into flowering and making seed, and therefore, do not live past seed maturation....)

But most of the time, no, people are not really laughing at you. And if they are, that's really pretty insensitive of them.

3. There Is Nothing More Important than Friendship

Yeah, yeah, yeah. My Little Ponies and all. I just don't have that many in-person friends, at least not friends I feel comfortable calling up and asking to come over and "spot" me when I go up on the ladder (see previous post). I admit I do miss having a few close in-person friends, ideally close to my own age and with similar interests. But I'm at that stage of life where MOST people my age are very involved with raising children and I can understand that. So I have my rare get-togethers with Ravelry friends, or I do stuff like eat lunch after church with some of the retired ladies. 

4. Fantasies Are More Powerful Than Pain

I would argue that retreating into a fantasy world is not always necessarily healthy, but that's where my head was a LOT of the time in junior high school. I made up elaborate stories, I had ongoing worlds with characters that I could visit.

I've gotten less good at this as time has worn on. However, some of my other hobbies, like knitting, quilting, and reading, play that role now. I find when I'm really extra-special upset or worried, a good, concentration-requiring novel helps me forget what I'm  worrying about for a while. And there have been times when I felt especially wounded by the world where going into my sewing room (which, being at the back of the house, also feels psychologically like more of a sanctum - I am the only one who ever goes there, it can't be seen from the street - so if someone drives past my house in the evening and I have the other lights off and just the one in my sewing room on, they don't know I'm home. It feels like a place I can hide. And also, when I am sewing, I am competent. I know what I'm doing. I trust my materials and I can make good things.

5. Always Distrust Popularity   

No quibbles here. I'm immediately suspicious of the person who seems "too" popular. Though that's more from my later experience; the one person I knew that I would attribute sociopathic tendencies to was someone who was very popular and very good at "working a room." The whole "Be a rockstar!" thing gets my hackles up very easily. Why do we need to be rockstars? The world doesn't need more rockstars; it needs more decent human beings.

And I will admit some bafflement when something I happen to like becomes popular - because so much of the stuff I've cared about down through the years was nixed as decidedly "uncool" by the popular kids at school.

6. Give Up On Revenge 

I don't know that I ever had traditional revenge fantasies as a kid. I certainly never daydreamed about my enemies being hurt physically, and especially not my doing it. My fantasies were more along the lines of something happening and them realizing how WRONG they had been to shun me, and that they either stopped teasing me or even, outright, courted my friendship (though, given #5 above, I might have reacted badly to that - and I did have an instance, once, of someone pretending to be my friend for a while so they could get me to confide stuff to them they could later use against me). Or that I'd do something really "great" (Like winning the spelling bee, though now, I realize that wouldn't have cut any ice with the kids who teased me) and gain respect that way.

One thing I learned as an adult: the only person whose behavior you control is your own. And you can rise above all the mire that small-minded people generate by being a moral and good person, by being kind to people, by sticking by your own values and being true to yourself.


And I'd add a #7:

7. Being bullied taught me to be a more compassionate person

There's nothing like being on the wrong end of teasing to teach you how much it hurts. (And yet, I didn't always live that as a kid: I remember picking on a kid even lower in the pecking order than I was, and to this day, that's one of the things I regret most, that I didn't reach out to her and be her friend).

But as an adult, one thing   I have learned is that even some difficult people tend to open up and/or calm down if you show them a little compassion. Not all of them, but some. And I've learned that in the long run, being honest but kind with people gets you farther than being abrasive can. And it feels like an easier path in the world, to try to look at people with something like understanding than it is to look at them as obstacles or something that makes you angry. And of course, I strongly believe in the call to "love our neighbors as ourselves," even though those neighbors sometimes make themselves blasted hard to love.