9:55am January 28, 2012

Bullying

To readers in general:

Don’t ever feel like there’s some amount of bullying I talk about, where you can’t talk about your own experiences because you see them as less severe than what I’ve experienced.

Sometimes people see what happened to us as less severe than what happened to someone else, when it’s not. Sometimes we even do that because the bullying taught us that we are people who are okay to bully, whereas anyone else shouldn’t be bullied. It creates a distorting effect.

Sometimes what seems “objectively” more severe can be less severe in impact on us, than bullying usually defined as milder.

Sometimes one person receives far more emotional damage than another, despite less bullying.

Sometimes people reach a point when no matter how much worse the bullying itself becomes, it’s impossible for them to be hurt any worse emotionally. Because they’ve hit what a friend calls the basement level of human emotional experience, and can’t go any lower.

And sometimes both bullying and emotional damage really are less.

But no matter what it is – there is no good amount of bullying. There will always be someone with a worse story and that doesn’t mean nobody else suffers or that people shouldn’t talk about what was done to them. Unless you’re pulling something like “I dealt with bullying just fine so you should too,” which is wrong no matter how bad the bullying is. Then I’m not going to get offended because you describe bullying that you think is less extreme than what happened to me (or what you imagine must have happened to me).

Notes: