I've got a confession to make. I've done something spiteful.
I'm normally not a spiteful person (or at least I try very hard not to be), so this is a bit out of character. When you read what I've done, you'll probably laugh or shrug your shoulders because it's not really a major thing to have done in the grand scheme of things to do, but I felt I should confess my "sin" (if you were to call it that) because it is bothering me that I did it. I feel I can and should do better.
So here goes...
I marked something as "offensive" on Facebook that wasn't truly offensive just to get it off my page.
What was it? Well, it was a page for a memorial golf outing for a high school classmate who died five years ago. I know damn well that the page for this young woman, A--, had nothing offensive on it, even though I'd never visited it. I know it contained messages of support and fond memories from A--'s friends and family and information about participating in the event. A standard in memoriam page. There are tons of these on Facebook, and they never bother me. Sometimes I even think they're sweet and touching.
So what was my problem with this particular memorial page?
It was the person who was being memorialized.
See, A-- wasn't this nice, caring, wonderful person that pages like her own make the deceased out to be.
A-- was a bully.
Specifically, A-- was a major bully.
And not just to me. She had a whole range of people she tormented and gossiped about and ostracized and humiliated, but she particularly liked to focus on me.
A-- bullied me relentlessly from the first day I met her in first grade until we graduated from high school. For first through sixth grades, I had every class of the day with her, so I couldn't escape her. Ever. Once we entered seventh grade, she was in fewer of my classes, and that's when she branched out to harassing others. But I was still a major focus for her.
A-- called me horrible insults to my face and even worse things behind my back. If she couldn't think of something actual to insult me about, she made something up. She always spread these things around to as many people as she could. She didn't stop at the confines of the school grounds, either. She spread rumors, insults, and lies about me and my family in the community, too. I'm from a small area, so this wasn't that hard to do, especially since her family are fairly wealthy and prominent business owners in the town where I reside.
She also kept a lot of people from being my friends. If someone new moved to town and I tried desperately to be their friend, she'd make sure the friendship didn't stick. Or even get off the ground.
I know these things because she made no secret about what she was doing to me. Hell, she liked to brag about it to many people, especially to me.
And she didn't let up until she saw me in tears.
Then she (and her minions/friends) would walk away howling in laughter.
And it wasn't just A-- involved in these crimes: she always got her friends and family (mainly her little sister and cousin) involved in the teasing, harassing, insulting, tormenting, gossiping about, and otherwise abusing of me.
When I younger, I would cry myself to sleep about what she was doing to me day in and day out.
When I was older, I thought I'd grown a thicker skin because I didn't cry about it any more.
But I was wrong.
I had learned to swallow my anger and my hurt and my fear, but that was the problem: I had learned to swallow it. I hadn't learned how to constructively deal with those things, those powerfully consuming emotions, and so the constant stress manifested itself in other ways: I developed obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), anorexia, and substance abuse issues. I engaged in promiscuous sex. I skipped school a lot. I let my grades drop substantially.
I never told anyone what was going on at school. Most of the teachers knew already anyway. They had working eyes and ears, but they chose to make them blind and deaf in these situations. See, this was the days before the Columbine school shooting, so bullying wasn't taken seriously. "Eh, it's just kids being kids: the tortured kid needs to toughen up about the torment and stop giving the tormentors reasons to torture them" was what they'd all say. So when Columbine happened and it supposedly occurred because the shooters had been relentlessly bullied by their peers, I understood.
I understood the motivation, internal and external, of two mass murderers.
That fact still sends chills down my spine.
I don't condone their actions and never will, but I understood the rage and the hatred and the anger and the frustration that led to their actions because, well, I could've seen myself doing the same thing had I been an inherently evil, unbalanced person with access to powerful guns. Where the Columbine school shooters had directed their explosive anger outward, I had swallowed mine. I had turned all that negativity inward towards myself. And I was no less of a mental and emotional hot mess than they were.
And all because I was bullied.
Granted, A-- wasn't the only person who bullied me relentlessly: I had the luxury of gaining more people to torment me once I matriculated into the town's only middle school, where five elementary schools deposited their students who'd finished their respective sixth grades.
But A-- was my first bully.
And that's why when I selected to remove the link to her memorial golf outing page from my Facebook feed, I selected the reason of finding the page "offensive" as the genesis of the need to remove it from my feed.
I labeled it offensive merely because I was sick of seeing her smiling face every day on my Facebook page. All that smile had ever--and will ever--represent to me is cruelty and malice.
I know the censors at Facebook, if they even get notice that I flagged the page as offensive, will look it over, determine that the page is, in fact, not profane, obscene, bigoted, misogynistic, pornographic, etc., and will not do anything to remove it, so those who loved A-- will still have the page to cherish her memory on.
Which makes my actions childish, petty, and spiteful.
Just like A--.
And I'm a better person than that.
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