The Thing About Bullies

*This is an older blog post that I'm reposting for a friend who is dealing with a bully. Thought it might help those of you who are dealing with bullies too.*

Most of my life I have dealt with various bullies by either trying to stay under their radar or by trying to kill them with kindness. What heart of stone could resist my continuously applied sweetness and light? Surely I could tame the savage beast and hence be special enough for the bully to be kind to me and bully anyone who messed with me.

Turns out that's exhausting and doesn't actually give you much in return. I don't know about you, but I don't have people messing with me very often. Besides, it's usually the bully in question who is messing with me, so what's the point of befriending him in the first place?

Lately, I've had enough of bullies and I've been speaking up for myself. Of course the conflict riles me up and stresses me out. I prefer that everyone be nice, including me. But enough is enough. Turns out being a doormat just encourages bullies to wipe their feet on you.

So the other day I dressed down a bully. Oh, I went in for the kill. I sliced and diced the bully with the long knives of a verbal ninja and the bully didn't know what hit him. I was mostly stunned by how easy it was. When I actually lashed out and took the bully to task, he had nothing to say. It was almost like slapping around a baby. He fell apart under the truth being hurled at him, no holds barred, no filter, just the brutal truth. One after the other. Brutal truth punches left and right.

It wasn't nice. It wasn't pretty. And he probably felt completely emasculated and like a ginormous loser after I was done with him. I imagined I would feel really bad about it after all was said and done, but oddly, I felt empowered. Emboldened. "Don't mess with me." Hells yeah!

Kinda like a bully, right? I worried about that. Had I just turned into the aggressor? No, I was merely holding the line, announcing that I have boundaries and they will not be crossed. Bullies like to leap over your boundaries and then slap you in the face. This particular bully once knocked me around a parking lot and I had to get a restraining order to make sure he didn't leap over that boundary again.

And he hasn't.

That's the trouble with bullies. We want them to be reasonable. We want them to be good, to simply obey the rules so everyone can live in peace. I don't want any trouble. I just want to be left alone. But nooooo.

Yet the guilt persisted. Was I now the bully? The bully had called ME a bully and that threw me off, I admit it. Doormats aren't accustomed to being called bullies. We want people to like us. And to have clean feet. So I did a little Internet research on how to deal with a bully.

It didn't help.

In column after column I read about how it is best to avoid conflict with a bully. (Duh.) Article after article spelled out how the bully is actually a very psychically fragile being. A bully is merely the gruff mask to a terribly insecure ego. Wracked with insecurities, they lash out in order to protect their tiny, tiny egos.

Some articles went on to say that you should encourage the bully and praise the bully for what they do right and not mention where they fall short. Are you kidding me? If that's not a co-dependent and dysfunctional relationship I don't know what is. Jesus.

So should I praise the bully when he stops grabbing me by the arms and banging my head against the wall?

"Thanks for stopping your attack! That was really nice of you and showed a lot of restraint! Good job!"

Screw that. I may be trying to progress along the Buddhist path, but I'm thinking the Buddha wouldn't think I was showing myself compassion if I let a bully continue to scare me. So I looked around a little more, ignored the self-help writers and went straight for the politicians.

This is what I found:

"If you let a bully come in your front yard, he'll be on your porch the next day and the day after that he'll rape your wife in your own bed."    

- Lyndon B. Johnson

That's what I'm talking about. I'm not a bully. I'm not prancing all over someone else's lawn. I'm just telling one asshat to stay off mine.

Dante's Forgotten Circle of Hell. Part 2.

Are you there, God? It's me, Mandy.

This is the second part of a series. If you missed the first part, please click here.

As it turned out, the Summer of Rehab wasn't half bad. Mom dried out and stayed sober until Christmas. That summer unwound in the soft golden light that only the Kodak film of the time can accurately capture. My feelings were the same butter yellow, soft and mellow, as the sound of seventies soft rock playing on the radio in the kitchen while my mother simmered ground meat in a pot of Ragu spaghetti sauce.

My mother even took me on a shopping trip before school started. We didn't have much money and if I hadn’t been so damn tall, I probably could have worn more of my older sister's hand-me-downs. It was with pride and care that I selected two new pairs of jeans. I was quite certain that wearing jeans that weren't too short for me would propel me into popularity in the seventh grade. There would be new kids and new opportunities. Things were going to be different, I could feel it.

I showed up at middle school that fall, the only girl in straight-legged denim. Somehow, over the summer, every other girl had gotten the memo that both puberty and the eighties had officially occured. I don't know why I wasn't on that mailing list, but there I stood — braless, flat chested and woefully out of date. Tapered jeans and pinstriped denim had appeared overnight and I was standing at the bus stop in a pair Lee Easy Riders.

Not one to be easily overcome by obstacles, I resolved to win over new friends with the sheer force of my personality. I was the youngest child of an alcoholic. I was scrappy. I had wit. I had chutzpah. I loved attention. What could go wrong?

In elementary school the most popular people had two things going for them: 1) They were nice and 2) They were good at sports. I had both of those things. I was just too darn shy. I simply needed to hurl myself out of my usual reserve and strike up conversations with people, I reasoned.

So it was that I sat down in my first class, in front of four kids who are all talking and joking around in the desks behind me. Here was my chance. New Outgoing Popular Mandy was going to make her appearance. I overcame every alarm bell that was sirening off in my head and turned around to chat. I slung my arm over the back of the chair, super casual-like, and crossed my legs.

"Hey! What are you guys talking about?" I flashed them my toothiest, most Popular Girl grin.

"Turn around," a sullen, acne-faced boy replied.

"I'm sorry?" I cocked my head. "I was just asking what you guys were talking about." I tried the super popular girl smile once more, in case he hadn’t noticed it the first time.

"Turn around," he said again, this time circling his finger around in the air in case I was a complete moron.

"Okay," I slowly turned back around. I heard their laughter as my back was turned and felt my face turn hot. I secretly vowed to hate that spiky-haired, pizza-faced, pop-collared wanna-be for the rest of my life.

Unless he decided to talk to me. Then we would be totally cool.

It seemed that Antoine de Cadillac had somehow telepathically transmitted the message to every adolescent boy at middle school that I was a Grade-A Loser. Or perhaps my Lee Easy Riders were doing that for me? As I looked around, I noticed that in addition to bras and pinstripes, girls were doing their hair. They wore headbands. They had curls. Frosted lipstick. Accessories. Somehow over the summer they'd not only gotten their hands on the hormones that started breast development, they'd also done summer internships with John Casablanca. Clearly I needed a clue and a rich daddy to bankroll it.

Unfortunately I didn't have either.

It's not that I didn't have friends, mind you. I was in orchestra with all of the other socially clueless kids who were still waiting to get their periods and the ability to style hair. My hair up until that point had been a source of annoyance rather than pride. I somehow gathered in the fifth grade that the bowl cut was really over so I started growing it out. It was my nod to femininity. I mean, it would be nice if a boy liked me, but even better if they would at least stop ridiculing me. I thought long hair would help. And maybe I needed to ease up on the plaid flannel shirts.

Unfortunately my hair styling included asking my mother to hack off the bangs every once in a while so I could see. Grooming meant I remembered to pull a comb through my hair before I rode my bike to school. I'll be honest, most days I didn't remember. A couple of my friends had gently tried to help. I remember the sweet-natured Elisha recoiling in horror at the sight of me in a ponytail and twin barrettes when I showed up on the bus for picture day.

"Oh no!" She gasped. "You can't wear a ponytail in your school picture."

"Why not?" I said, confused by her reaction. I was wearing hair accessories. I was being girly. I not only combed my hair, but I put two barrettes it and a ponytail holder. This was me at my fanciest.

"You'll look like you have no hair. You can't see a ponytail in a school picture." My god, it was like the rules were a constantly moving target. One minute you have things figured out and the next you're Dick Cheney. Thanks to Elisha, we managed to remove the ponytail and left the two barrettes in place. When I look at that photo now, I see a sad plane of bangs lying straight across my brow. I had so carefully combed them straight down my forehead so they looked nice and neat. In reality, I looked like a total goon. I didn't need a French witch doctor to hex my social life. I was doing a fine job of it myself.

To read the conclusion click here.

Middle School: Dante's Forgotten Circle of Hell. Pt. 1

     

Can you feel my 13-year-old sex appeal?

I concluded my elementary school career by attending group therapy at my mother's rehab facility. To say I was ill equipped to handle middle school would be an understatement.

I recall telling my three closest friends that my mother was going away to a hospital for a while and she had a disease called "Alcoholism." I thought having a sick mother with a nameable disease would somehow normalize my life. What I didn't realize was that there were acceptable diseases — like cancer — and then there were the things one wasn’t supposed to mention.

A few days later, one of these three friends informed me that her mother said she wasn't allowed to play with me anymore. It is without malice that I now mention that her mother was quite possibly more pickled than my own, but I digress.

It's not like it was a surprise to the neighborhood that something was awry at my house. For several years the catholic school punks down the street had been heckling me on the way home with taunts of, "Your mother's a drunk!" When I was younger I hadn’t known what a "drunk" was, but I did know enough to be ashamed and to find a new route home

In the sixth grade I had already acquired a bully of my very own. For some reason, the quiet, awkward, tomboy that I was had inspired rage in this particular bully’s pre-adolescent mind. He went after me with the full-throated screams of a zealot on the playground and with whispered threats during class. We'll call him Antoine de Cadillac because his name was French and I'm from Detroit.

Antoine alternated between finding me repugnant and wanting to grab my ass amongst the book racks. It was too early for me to understand the kind of sullen loathing a pre-adolescent boy could have for a girl. This type of creature also mistakes being "unpopular" for being "easy." I would encounter more of his type later on in high school. 

However, my lack of dating opportunity never quelled my fervent desire to be choosy and to have the same blue-eyed dreamboat of a boyfriend that the popular girls had. In fact, I thought popularity was something that fell upon you like winning the lottery or getting hit by an asteroid. Although I believed it was out of my control and not likely to happen, I still felt it was within the realm of possibility.

So it was that on one golden June afternoon while all my peers were full of summer hopes and I was preoccupied with dreading group therapy at Mom's rehab, that the slope-foreheaded Antoine de Cadillac grabbed me by the collars of my off-brand Izod shirt and pinned me against a brick wall at school.

"You are a loser, Mandy. You will always be a loser. I know people in middle school and I know that you’re gonna be the biggest loser there," he said, his spittle hitting my face like tender drops of summer rain.

I managed to save face by shoving him off.

"No! You're going to be the loser, Antoine! I know people in high school! So there," I said. But I was shaken by the Frenchman's prognostication. It had the ring of a hex about it. I worried that he could either see me more clearly than I saw myself or that he had somehow French cursed me into a life sentence of unpopularity.

To read Part 2, please click here.

*This is an excerpt from my memoir, from the chapter, "Middle School: Dante's Forgotten Circle of Hell."