10. Making fun of my name. This is just the table ante of bullying, the lowest-hanging fruit on the bully tree. It takes no original thought whatsoever, because you can always call someone’s name funny; since it’s a subjective judgement, the target has no way to respond. But where to go from there?
9. Pushing my books out of my hands. This happened to me many days in high school. High school, for God’s sake. Seriously. Like, Nellie-Oleson-style shit.
8. Stealing my hat. Did the bullies throw it back and forth? Did I chase it back and forth, yelling at them to give it back? Need you ask?
7. Making fun of the fact that I had trouble saying my Rs. I guess there must be grade school kids who don’t have to go to the speech therapist, because otherwise they would make Speech Therapy a regular class between English and Math—but seriously, have you ever met an adult who’s like, “Yeah, my speech was just fine when I was a kid, and no one ever made fun of it, and I never had to go to the speech therapist”?
6. Spitballs. This is just so fucking gross. If your bullies never made it to the stage of pelting you with little wads of paper soaked in their spit, consider yourself lucky. This was a mainstay tactic of the bullies who actually forced me to transfer schools in seventh grade; they’d rain spitballs on me all day long, like Chinese water torture. Thwack. Thwack. Thwack. After I went home one day and erupted in a rage of existential angst—why me? why me?!—my parents finally took me in for a meeting and informed the school principal that they were considering transferring me to another school because I was being bullied. The principal referred us to my homeroom teacher, who was like—I’m paraphrasing here—um, Jason, try not being so weird all the time and the bullies will leave you alone. Thus ended my three-month tenure at St. Mark’s Elementary School.
5. Leaving bullying comments on blog posts. Internet commenter bullies just embarrass all of us, especially the ones who pretend they’re doing you a favor and/or condescend to you. (“Jay, Jay, Jay.”) Who’s got the byline, asshole?
4. Not letting me play with the Playmobil guys. I spent years of my life trying to psychoanalyze why, when I was a little kid, I’d always play with the girls instead of the boys. Then I realized the answer is simple: the boys all banded together in their little boy-cliques and treated me like shit. In preschool, the boys would always play with the Playmobil knights and horses, and they would always say I couldn’t play with them. The teacher said they had to share the toys, so they’d give me one token horse with one little knight bro who I’d lead off around the room on solo missions. One day they accidentally gave me the LEADER KNIGHT, with the shiny vest; I was almost breathless with excitement until the other boys realized their mistake and swiped the leader knight back, giving me a plain old regular knight per usual. At least in the house area, my domestic skills—however modest—were wanted.
3. Making fun of the way I walked. This one took some close observation, so I’ll give Erik the Sixth-Grade Bully credit for that. It wasn’t until I was in my twenties that a doctor finally figured out what had been causing the scoliosis nurses such confusion over the years: my right leg is slightly shorter than my left. You were still a jerk about it, Erik, but…good call.
2. Stealing the seat of my Big Wheel. This was my one girl-bully, and I still remember her name: Lisa. When I was about five, I liked to ride my Big Wheel around the block—but I learned that if I saw Lisa the Big Kid standing out in front of her house with her girl-thug friend, I should back it up and get the hell back home before they could catch me, yank the seat out of my Big Wheel, and throw it back and forth between them while I ran around crying and yelling for them to give it back.
1. Not letting me cross the street. This was Lisa the Big Kid again, who in retrospect was a pretty epic bully. This one actually involved an outright abuse of authority: Lisa was a crossing guard, and she’d let all the other kids cross, but would make me wait for as long as it amused her to do so. I had a vivid nightmare once where I defied Lisa’s authority and ran across the street; when I got home, the police had already ransacked my house and arrested my parents and sister as punishment for my lawlessness, and they were on the hunt for me. I snuck into my house through a side window, where I encountered a grizzled old fugitive who had also defied the crossing guards as a boy and had since spent his entire life on the run. “You can never stop running,” he told me bitterly. “Never.”
– In fairness, Jay Gabler suspects he might have been a cyberbully himself if Twitter had been around when he was a kid.
Leave a Reply