I am “That Girl”
Bullying, as defined by the dictionary is the act of intimidation of a weaker person; the process of intimidating or mistreating somebody weaker or in a more vulnerable situation. The topic at hand is one that many fall as victims to in today’s society. Your age does not limit the mental, physical, and emotional pain that can be inflicted upon you as a victim of bullying. A majority of the victims of bullying never openly speak about how it has molded them to evolve into the person they are today. Throughout middle school I was severely bullied, but had never spoken about it to anyone.

Middle school was never the place where I had pictured myself being cut down, emotionally, mentally and physically. Ironically, that is exactly what had happened. It is a set of memories and a rollercoaster of emotions that I never intended to revisit. In middle school I had suddenly turned into a weakened victim of bullying and antagonizing. I had become “that girl”. That girl that you saw sitting alone at recess, that girl who ate lunch in the band room by herself because she had no where else to go, that girl who was secluded from the rest. That was me. The typical middle school cliques had isolated me out and had convinced me that I brought the bullying upon myself. I was never an anti-social person until I was coerced to become one. My quirkiness had left and took that spark that once was in me with it. I had simply become what everyone told me I was, a “loser”. I was never fully able to understand what caused the abuse to begin, and to this day I still cannot explain it.

You can never fully understand the personal pain and struggle of someone who has been emotionally and mentally beat down until you are in their position. The torment I faced in school had followed me off campus as well. I had become a master of disguising my everyday suffering at school, and convinced my mom that I was simply being negatively affected from lack of sleep. It was not until I began receiving threatening phone calls and text messages within every minute was I forced to admit to my mom what had been going on the past few years. Of course I dulled down the severity of the problem to a simple “fight with a few of my friends”, my favorite phrase had become “I’m alright, I promise.” All of this distress and verbal torture was such an abstract feeling to me. I was losing sleep as my mind, like a song on repeat, replayed the voices of my tormentors in my head, progressively becoming louder each time. Every verbal slur in the book had become a common adjective they used to describe me. Words I began to learn to refer to myself as. I sat silently at recess as one by one kids who I had grown up with pointed out my flaws, inside and out. I would come home to an empty house and cry for what seemed to be hours, until my mom would arrive home, oblivious to what had occurred just moments before. On the few occasions that she did catch me crying I always assured her that “I’m alright, I promise”, and she would leave it at that. “That Girl” had become the persona I took on; it became the major factor of my life. It was not until seventh grade that I suffered my first encounter of physical abuse.

I stood there memorized as the two girls with their fists clenched and exchanging demeaning phrases prepared to start fighting in the bathroom. Their words, firing like bullets during a war, became increasingly more vicious with every sentence. I unconsciously stepped in between them before one of them threw the first punch, in attempt to persuade one of the girls to walk away before this happened. She grasped the collar of my shirt glaring into my eyes like a predator does to its prey, before it goes in for the kill. Within seconds she had shoved my head against the lock of a bathroom stall, I sat there in shock, as the other girls quickly fled the restroom. I briefly blacked out, and when I reconnected to the real world with my head pounding, I looked up to see the girl who had inflicted so much pain upon me, begging for me not to tell anybody. I finally had the opportunity to determine her fate; I with held the power. Yet like a dog trained to obey the alpha male, I cowered and out of fear, I was sworn to secrecy. She left me there, where I sat pondering trying to wrap my head around what had happened in the past ten minutes. As promised, at no time did I ever tell a soul.

The pain I faced within those three or four years are to some extent unexplainable. Words cannot fully suffice for the darkness that still reminisces in my mind to this day. Nobody knows the whole story or the entirety of its effects on me. I received physical, mental, and emotional pain, something no child should ever have to go through alone. I will only agree to reveal parts of what happened to me to those who ask, for most of it I will not allow myself to go back to. I took it upon myself to block most of the negative memories as a way to start fresh in high school. The bullying I fell victim to made me a stronger, thicker-skinned girl. I constantly carry the bourdon of self-doubt, and question my actions and myself, but at the same time I have learned to not worry about others opinions; for it can be your greatest demise. I define bullying by the terms of a word used by kids to make the actions and pain they inflicted on another seem rational. Of course, they never admit to being a bully, but then again they never see what happens after they leave. The victims take all the suffering; they are forced to put on a smile, to keep their mouths shut in fear of retaliation. What many do not understand is that the pain lingers and there is nothing you can do to remove it because it is part of your past. It is part of you and it always will be. The best you can do is not dread and focus in the past but learn to accept it and look forward to the future. Almost all of my friends in high school know me as the full of life, energetic, courageous girl that I have become. That spark came back to me after I left middle school and ignited a flame, a flame that although may become dull sometimes, refuses to burn out because it knows that I will never face the darkness that I did in the past. I will not relish on the past or pretend that it never happened. I have learned to accept that I was “That Girl”.