Wow, I absolutely love it when people ask to write for my blog. I love reading others’ thoughts and opinions and reading their stories. It can inspire me, and move me in ways that nothing else can. Today we have a very special lady, Megan! She is a sweet little thing and she wanted to share her heartbreak and her own personal testimony about BULLYING.

I was so excited when Megan told me her topic because Bullying, and doing everything we can to prevent it and stop it, is something I am very passionate about.

Please read her story.

 

From the time  we were little boys and girls, our parents  tell us stories about how we could work hard enough to get what we want.

Work hard to get an education, to make friends,  to get the job that we want, and to fall in love; but one issue stood out that some parents failed to notice.

Bullies.

Anyone can be bullied for various reasons such as [race, gender, sexuality, family issues, religion, disability, or just because they seem happier than others.]

My name is Megan, and I have been bullied.

And I wanted to share with you what I have gone through throughout my life and what bullying was like for me. This is my story

 

    I grew up in a small town with my parents, owning multiple animals, and having an enormous family on both my mother’s and father’s side.

I had no worries, no issues, because I had just a normal, happy, carefree family.

I started attending a small school with my friends and extensively played with barbies and dolls during my spare time, like all young girls seems to do.

All it took was one night to change everything.

When the police arrived at my house, they took me into another room with my mother.

Last thing I remember seeing was my father being put into a police car, and that image and experience changed my entire life.

A couple days later, a man shows up at my door, explaining he had decided to call my family since my mother wasn’t properly taking care of me.

I went to live with my grandparents, since that was where my father was residing for the time being.

I started to get letters from my mother through the school every week about how she would fix things and get me back.

My classmates saw the letters and looked at me strangely.

I was alone with my father.

I became an outcast at age 7.

 

    It wasn’t until I was in second grade that I moved to a different school with new people.

During recess, I would play alone in the wood chips and [stay alone].

At lunch, I sat alone and ate thinking about wanting to go home to my father and just never leave.

The other kids picked on me due to not having a mother and being alone. It certainly didn’t help that I had horrible bangs and short hair, along with tiny glasses, making my face look chubby.

But, even with others saying rude things to me or ignoring me, I would go home to my father and believe I was normal.

 

    There are many types of bullying: physical, verbal, covert, and cyber bullying.

At that age, I was dealing with covert bullying**, and I have since dealt with that all throughout my life.

**Covert bullying is often harder to recognise and can be carried out behind the bullied person’s back. It is designed to harm someone’s social reputation and/or cause humiliation. Covert bullying includes:

• lying and spreading rumours
• negative facial or physical gestures, menacing or contemptuous looks
• playing nasty jokes to embarrass and humiliate
• mimicking unkindly
• encouraging others to socially exclude someone
• damaging someone’s social reputation or social acceptance.

My mother would continuously send me letters that were  getting more and more rude, especially when it came to things said about my father. There were times where he did not allow me to read what my mother wrote due to the content.

 

I found myself in four worlds that I went in and out of to get away from things.

I had a world with my mother, a world full of disappointment and confusion.

A world at school where I was bullied.

A world with my father, where I felt safe and secure.

And a world where I was free to be myself.

As I grew up though, I found that the world I was able to be free in was slipping through my fingers without me having a firm enough grasp.

 

Years passed until I found myself with a steady group of regular friends, made up mostly of girls.

I never understood boys and how they acted.

But, like most girls my age, it wasn’t that long until I ended up getting my first boyfriend and found in the relationship a feeling of power within myself.

It was the first time where I was able to make decisions and live how I wanted to.

He made me feel safe and secure, but as he became my world of safety, my father was leaving, and had begun to insist on me writing back to my mother after she sent me letter after letter, page after page; enough to make a book.

Things seemed better with the world. I felt like I was making friends, and the bullying may just stop once and for all.

But then…

It came out

 I was in the middle of 7th grade, and I finally came out and posted my secret I had been hiding for two years onto my social media information on Facebook.

I was bisexual.

The next few days were difficult.

  My friends started to look at me differently as no one talked to me. And I began to feel a similar situation happening as before.

That isolation.

I felt like I needed to be free of the illusion people created of me and thus was the reason I came out. I wanted to be 100% myself a not feel like I had to portray some facade for the world so that they would be more comfortable.

But I paid a price

My “friends” were dropping like flies all around me as they learned I was not straight and wanted nothing to do with me.

My boyfriend for 3 months dumped me.

People began lying to my face about things they said about me, even though I would hear things that they said when my back was turned.

I had no friends left about a week after I came out.

[The most significant moment I felt my isolation was when I was in the locker room changing for gym and I realized that I was the only one there, because the others had all moved away from me to change.]

 

This was a difficult time for me, and brought back small flashbacks about what happened to me when I was only 5 years old with my mother and father.

 I then found myself , out of desperation to in included, becoming friends with those who felt bad for me.

I began to bully others.

People bullied me, and in return I bullied them in hopes to bring someone to my level.

All I needed was a smile and a good appearance to get into someone else’s life and destroy it as others had done to me previously.

  I saw cliques in my school and stayed away from the popular crowd and looked for one of my own.

Kids in my grade started saying rude things to me, such as “you have no friends”, “you still looking for friends in your fat?”, and worse of all “go kill yourself”.

 

Any new people who came into our grade soon became my friend and I joined a group of nerds. They were your typical group of friends who played video games and watched anime (Japanese animation) and I soon became close to them.

Every weekend, I would spend time with them and learn their stories about their family, friends, and life. Learning about their hard times, I became soft and kind.

I began listening to others and seeing things clearly, or I thought I did.

 

Three years after I made those friends, I began having issues once again.

A friend of mine started spreading rumors based on previous information. She created an even worse world than before.

I gave up.

I gave into the issues and was dumped for the second time.

Two weeks after I was dumped, I found out that he started dating the same girl who told him false knowledge about our relationship.

 

I was alone once again, the same feeling welcomed me with open arms

 The feeling of someone ruining your life is the worse feeling you can possibly imagine.

To have someone so close to you rip your smile off your face and cut the strings attached to your friends in a millisecond.

I finally knew what I had done to others.

 

In the past years, I had not responded to my mother based on the issues that stirred up with her.

On mother’s day, we planned on having pizza together.

When I arrived to her apartment, she had stated that I was the problem she’s always had.

That I was the ONLY issue in her life.

The one to have her quit her job and leave her friends behind to take care of me, her daughter.

After that one fight, she stated that she wished I was never born and that she didn’t want me in her life anymore.

I have not seen her since last year on mother’s day. Though she continues writing to me, I never responded to her.

I found that my grades were more important and my life needed to be fixed.

Time and time again, she wrote to me accusing my father of never allowing me to never write her back.

 

As we fast forward to the present, I have still not had any communication with my mother.

In days, I still have some people say rude things to my face or use me for their personal benefit.

The only difference is, that I learned so much.

I learned what it’s like to feel alone, to feel loved, to be bullied, to be the bully and everything in between.

I learned the true situation that changed everything. It was late at night and I wasn’t able to sleep. Being a 5 year old child, I wandered into my parent’s room hoping they would allow me to stay up longer and my mother turned down my request.

As a normal kid, I slipped down stairs and asked my father the same thing, and little did he know that my mother was coming down minutes later to find me awake. The situation spiraled out of control as my mother become furious.

She argued with my father and ended up calling 9-1-1, but he quickly hung up the phone my mother was using as it was a heated discussion.

 

I originally wanted to write about bullies and their effects, but now, I think it’s something more. It’s more personal that everyone should know and learn from and something that I feel like I needed to tell.

It’s not the grades we achieve or the discussion on what we’re going to eat the next day, but the friends we make, the heartbreaks, and the time we learn about ourselves and others.

Bullies show up and can cause a drop in grades, physical issues as you can starve yourself and start cutting, and even depression.

They come in different forms, either as an adult or a child; there is always a possibility someone is bullied as more than half of children have said they have been bullied.

 

Life creates twists and turns for us showing us more doors with different outcomes, whether we begin to bully someone else or being the victim to become a teenager and become pregnant to family issues. We all have our stories and have issues in our lives.

I have had thoughts of suicide, thoughts of ending it all; the pain, the loneliness, the resentment.

We all wonder what would happen if things went differently.

What would happen if my parents were still together?

What if my friend was still alive?

What if I was different?

We all have stories that no one knows about.

 

What is your story?…

 

 

Wow Megan, what an amazing story and thank so much for your kind words and insight!

 

Hope you enjoyed Megan’s story fellow Bloggers! More to come!

 

And please if you or anyone you know needs help with bullying please seek it!

http://www.ncab.org.au/help/