No, it didn't make me stronger. It fucked up my interpersonal interactions until well into my twenties. But I haven't figured out a way to successfully explain this to people who want to impose the "made you stronger" narrative on my life.
Fortunately, Rachel Simmons, author of Odd Girl Out: The Hidden Culture of Aggression in Girls, can explain it more articulately than I can:
These girls described feeling unfamiliar with the most basic rules of relationship, things taken for granted by any socially adjusted person. They no longer feel certain of what makes people angry or upset, not to mention how to tell when someone is feeling that way. Their emotional radar is incapacitated. This can turn a girl into a cautious ghost of her former self, stifled and silenced by fear.
This fear is felt by degrees among girls who struggle with everyday conflict. One of the chief symptoms of girls' loss of self-esteem is the sense of being crazy, of not being able to trust one's own interpretation of people's actions or events. Did she just look at her when I said that? Was she joking? Did she roll her eyes? Not save the seat on purpose? Lie about her plans? Tell me that she'd invited me when she hadn't? The girls I'd interviewed confirmed a similar unrest, the disturbing belief that what they were sure they knew or saw wasn't that at all, but was in fact something quite different. In discord between girls, gestures of conflict often contradict speech, confounding their intended targets.
I always felt like society was operating on another secret set of rules that was completely different from what I was being taught, and I had to guess what was really expected of me. This feeling didn't start to go away until I was in my mid-20s, a decade after the bullying ended, and nearly 200% longer than it lasted. This is what bullying does to people.
7 comments:
Thank you.I have been trying to explain the long term effects of bullying to some people at my daughter's school.You have synthesized and annotated it so well for me!
I think you've about nailed it.
I got out of my bullying situation about 10-11 years ago and it's only been in the last couple of years that I've started get angry about it rather than just trusting that it made me stronger.
My childhood bullying was often treated by teachers as being a result of my own "lack of social skills" and my apparent inability to "gain the respect of my peers". The fact that the adults saw it as my problem exacerbated my own sense of not knowing the rules that everyone else knew, that Rachel Simmons describes.
It wasn't until I got out of that community and into the broader world that I realized I actually have pretty decent social skills. I'm intuitive, capable of emotional empathy, and reasonably articulate. I just went to a small cliquey school in a small cliquey town where there was only one way to be social and my way wasn't it.
I get angry at how long it took me to recognize that and stop trying to work out what was wrong with me instead of recognizing that I'd just been surrounded by a bunch of jerky people who probably now wonder why I left town at the first chance I got.
Thanks for the insight. Imposing the "it made you stronger" narrative on people is so effed up. I think it makes the listener feel a little more comfortable - gives them a rationale instead of just having to live with the discomfort. Bad.
@Sarah: And it's still a work in progress, even now. I'm 30 years old and I just realized, just a couple of weeks ago, that, as a general rule, businesses actually want you to come in and buy things from them.
@Laura: If it makes them uncomfortable, I'd much rather they just walk away and stop talking to me rather than lying to me about my own emotional arc - or, worse, trying to convince me to lie to them about my emotional arc. Sometimes the script is actually "But it made you stronger, right?" Like they're trying to urge me to tell them all about how it made me stronger.
Oh I agree completely. People are so lame in dealing with their own embarrassment or slight discomfort. I'm reminded of people who avoid someone dealing with sickness or death because "I don't know what to say". I have no patience for that.
The "right?" at the end of that trope is maddening.
I actually didn't know until quite recently that "I'm so sorry" is sufficient. I thought you had to say something brilliant and awesome that fixes everything.
Of course, I'm a person who works through grief internally, so even the idea of wanting people to talk to you when you're grieving is Other to me.
"I thought you had to say something brilliant and awesome that fixes everything."
I'm sure that's the problem for lots of people. We should be taught how to make that simple statement.
But many people have told me, "I can't stand to be around sick people" and variations on that. I've been told I should be more accepting of that attitude, but so far, I am not.
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