It’s easy to think that I have always been bullied in my life when I was younger.
It wasn’t always like that, but it feels like it.
High school was hard for me.
Heck, school was hard for me.
I believe I missed around 122 days of school during my high school career.
Saying that’s a lot is an understatement.
I was once told by a secretary in the office that she was surprised I was going to graduate.
I was in bad shape, emotionally.
Looking back, I can’t tell you why.
Maybe it was a close friend moving away.
Maybe it was just growing up.
Maybe it was hormonal.
I dunno.
I know that in tenth grade, the school intervened and essentially held an intervention. I was failing classes.
I was floundering.
I was suicidal.
The school put me through some tests, talked to me some, and eventually put me in Special Education for emotional problems.
It saved my life.
Literally.
While I can’t say it did wonders for my education, the space served more as a safe haven for me than a spot to learn (I was there for three hours a day for the remainder of tenth grade and then a couple of hours the other two years). I survived and went on to college, so it worked.
Being in SpEd didn’t make the bullies go away, though.
I would be hip-checked into a locker from time to time.
Or someone would embarrass me in class.
Or once I was threatened on the first day of school that this guy was going to just get into my locker – they gave the numbers and combinations out in class, out loud – and steal stuff, and I shrugged. I was in SpEd then and didn’t even use my locker, so what did I care?
I had trouble with the lockers.
I had to have a friend jam it open when I first used them.
I was a mess.
I went away to a Commercial Art class in 11th and 12th grades and got in more because I was in SpEd than because I was a good artist and the teacher made it clear he didn’t want me there and resented my being there.
Going into class one day I was minding my own business and was cup checked so hard – you know, punched in the crotch – that I hurt the rest of the day. Why? Because I had a University of Michigan winter coat on, and the guy who did it, hanging outside with his friends, didn’t like the school’s team.
As an adult, I had the pleasure of being targeted for bullying by an ex-girlfriend and some former friends of mine. I had made the mistake, I guess, of going into the video store where the ex worked, which was news to me, with my girlfriend of the time. She waited on us, laughed, and that night my car was covered in Vaseline and pictures of old women from a porn mag. My dad woke me up to tell me about it so I would go clean it up. This was a girl who broke my heart terribly, and she had targeted me.
That was just who she was.
Then, years later, those friends I mentioned started stalking my old blog and posting nasty comments on it – once going so far as to make light of my father’s having Cancer at the time – and even contacted a different girlfriend of mine to tell her how awful I was. I had a table at a convention and even ran into one of them who had made a shirt with my face on the back with the front saying Hello, Is It Me You’re Looking For – as a weird way to be just generally cruel with no real cause or reason. These were the people I had surrounded myself with. Adults who never grew up. Children. Bullies who thought they were funny. They had so little in their lives that they wanted to obsess over me. Had I known I lived rent-free in their heads, I wouldn’t have paid for the apartments I had.
None of this is to paint myself as a victim or to say that I am some sort of innocent in life who has never slighted anyone or done anything that I regret.
That isn’t the case at all.
I am someone who regrets many things, looking ahead, looking back, and in the moment, and wondering, ‘What if?’ I am someone who survived, though. I found my people, I found my heart, and I found the future, those people long in my past.
They are out there, though, floating like so many turds in a toilet.
What it is to say, however, is that none of these bullies ever got their comeuppance.
None of them ever saw any form of justice.
These people just went on with their lives.
They had families, got jobs, found love, and moved on.
They hid whatever damage they bear behind a mask of nastiness, and people applaud, so long as they aren’t in the crosshairs. But they never changed. They are the people they always have been: small, useless, and weak. They pick on people they think they can best in some way, or hurt. There is nothing more to them than nastiness.
It’s pathetic.
They spend so much time angry at the world, at people they decide are enemies, or make enemies, it makes you wonder if there is any joy in them.
And of course there is, and that’s one of the bitterest truths – that these cave people can move on after they have emotionally – and physically- damaged people.
They grow up and hide behind computers and phones, threatening from afar because they can. Because they are broken, empty, and useless.
They were smart enough to do it and charismatic enough to get away with it, and still are.
The thing is, they’re never the bad guy.
Never.
The other person is. They MADE them bully them. They DESERVED it. They’re this, or they’re that, or they upset me, or inconvenienced me. There is no empathy to them; there is just them and the ghosts that haunt their heads.
Some bullies grow up.
A lot of them don’t.
They just change how they operate and tumble through life like the detritus that they are. They brood. They cyberstalk. They threaten behind the veil of anonymity because they know that the days of their getting away with the things they do are over. Now there are consequences. They find reasons to lash out at people they dislike because there’s nothing else for them. Oh, they have families and friends, but clearly, something is missing that anger soothes.
And me, I finally reached a point where I had better support and had gotten a little meaner myself to survive. There’s a point where you have to stop letting someone with a social and psychological issue affect you because they want to run their mouths. If they persist, then tell the cops and invite them to the party. Let them have some fun, too.
But it sucks, it sucks to be an adult and still have someone play at being a teenager. Play at being a bully. But this is the world we live in.
And sometimes, surviving is all you can do.
Sometimes it’s the best you can do.
To forget these idiots exist, and know that while you may still bear scars, they bear nothing. They offer nothing. They are nothing. They’re vessels of absence.
We all like to think that there’s going to be a cinematic moment where the bully meets the bigger bully (which isn’t really a great ending, is it, as it’s just another bully) or that we, the bullied, stand up for ourselves and it matters. We hope that there will be a moment of divine revelation where these people realize what they are doing and the kind of ugliness they are perpetuating, but it rarely happens.
Sure, there are some that grow out of it.
Some that are loved out of their nastiness.
And some do meet that bigger bully and realize that it’s easier to go along.
Again, though, most don’t.
They just go on.
They enter the professional world and bully underlings or fellow coworkers.
They abuse their loved ones or kids.
They abuse their friends.
They are bombs looking for a target.
They are barely contained rage, looking for someone to set them off.
Doubt me?
Look around?
They are addicted to it and can’t help themselves.
And in the news…
We are witnessing a horrific slaughter in Ukraine perpetrated by a monstrous man who is the worst-case scenario for bullying – a man who needs to show how strong he is by dominating at any means. Putin is content to murder thousands of people under the false flag of Nazi-ism, which is a buzzword that is still powerful and reminds the Russian people of the glory days of beating back the fascists. It’s a rally to garner support where none is needed. Calling him a bully isn’t strong enough, but when you boil it down, that’s what he is.
He’s a bully.
And he’s one we can’t just ‘stop’ because he has access to weapons that could kill millions, if not risk destroying the world.
And that he’s willing to threaten using them if someone stands up to him shows you the sort of madness he’s under.
The bully with the biggest gun, and we’re all forced to watch him do whatever he wants because if we try to stop him, he’ll kill everyone.
Big boy has to have his toys and play his game his way
Then there’s Donald Trump, America’s big bully, a man who shouts down anyone who dares to oppose him. This is beyond politics; this is about a man who has been given permission by the people around him to say whatever he wants, whenever he wants, like an infant learning to speak. All because he is ‘just speaking plain’. People like that ‘plain speak’ because it gives them permission to say what THEY want to say. We don’t mind people being bullied so long as we’re not the victim, am I right?
Trump is ego made flesh, and while he never got us into a situation like Russia is in, he is happy to applaud like a giddy child for the strongman actions of Putin because the only thing a bully likes more than bullying is to be pals with the bigger bully in the room.
And these are just two people in a world of billions.
All of us have worked with or for people who bully us or others. People on power trips want that small bit of control over others.
Heck, we bully people, not always meaning to, but not being mindful of the fact that something we think is harmless fun can be hurtful to someone else.
It’s a slippery slope.
Life shows us, time and again, that bullies win.
If you are famous, attractive, rich, or powerful, you can do just about whatever you want.
Just look at the mess of a person that is Kanye West, someone like Trump, in that he says whatever he wants and does whatever outrageous thing he desires, and people either laugh it off or support him as living the best life. If the person isn’t pointing their rage at us, we don’t care.
Make us laugh.
Give us drama.
Make it messy.
That’s all we care about.
Give us a show.
We are so caught up in our own entertainment and lives, and honestly, desperately trying to avoid our own drama, that we love it when others find themselves caught up in it.
Hey, at least it ain’t me being bullied.
Bullies win.
Only, it doesn’t HAVE to be that way.
Yes, they often win, but it’s because we don’t stand together as one. We look the other way. We don’t say anything. We don’t support people going through it. We just hope it doesn’t come our way.
Bullies love the confrontation and the continual ‘juice’ they get from the nastiness they spew. Sour that juice, though, and they realize it isn’t worth the squeeze. If we stand together and say something, it stops being worth it. If we stop laughing at the humiliation of others, the bullies realize that they won’t get the attention they crave this way.
If we stand together and say ‘no more,’ then they realize that they can’t win in the end.
Stop supporting and encouraging strongman/bullying behavior and stop fostering environments that breed these monsters.
No, they won’t just go away. Bullies are part of what we are.
But that doesn’t mean we have to let them flourish.
That doesn’t mean we have to help them profit from us.
That doesn’t mean we have to shrug and just ‘take it’.
We can’t always beat bullies, but together we can stand up to them.
We can support one another and make sure that we don’t feel isolated and alone, the way they want us to feel.
We can look out for one another.
And slowly, we can build a world that has no use for bullies and doesn’t tolerate them.
This world is too precious, our souls too rare, to let someone use us as cannon fodder or as the butts to their jokes because something is broken in them, and they won’t put the work in – or don’t know how to put the work in – to fix it themselves.
Yeah, bullies win.
But that can change.
Believe it.
The Spooky World of Chris Ringler 