There’s More To Bullying Than Sticks and Stones
By: Jessica Mardian
Content Writer for The Stories We Need to Hear
Mean words hurled in the elementary school pick up line. Nasty comments on social media posts aimed to take down confidence. Up and down glances of judgement as steps are taken into a room. Rumors running rampant and the burning flush of humiliation. Everlasting messages and accounts created by a face that gains its power through anonymity. Pushes and punches. A tangle of knots looping through the stomach at the thought of having to go to school again. Repeated attacks and a confused hurt that can snake it’s way to the bones. Bullying is not — and never was — as easy of a thing to get over as the placated phrases like “sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me” made it out to be.
I remember being so nervous for school. All kinds of tricks and flips would be going on in my stomach as my mom pulled into the drop-off line. This was third and fourth grade. I didn’t have any friends, really; I stayed the shy girl who always had her homework completed and wore ribbons in her hair. The good times were taking my younger brother to his classroom then walking through the enclosed breezeway that connected our two buildings to my own classroom, days when my mom would volunteer in the classroom and a student teacher who I adored. This was on days when my mom would volunteer in the classroom with a student teacher who I adored. None of the positive third and fourth grade memories involve other students. Time and a general reluctance to remember, set a haze around my hours spent in school those two years. There are two markers in my memory that make at least some extent of past bullying and emotional pain undeniable.
The bullying was verbal and even at just eight years old I felt isolated in school. The bully that sticks out the most is a girl who, of course, was in both my third and fourth grade classes. Near the end of fourth grade she pulled me aside in the hallway during a class bathroom break and presented me with a box set of “The Chronicles of Narnia” books. I guessed this was her attempt at an apology. I didn’t, and truthfully still don’t, know what to make of the gesture. In the midst of cleaning out old items that had accumulated with time, a few years ago I rediscovered the set. A wave of resentment, anger, and sadness hit me. I gave the books away. The second marker in my mind of the bullying’s existence and extent, was that I didn’t go back to that school for fifth grade. My little brother and I transferred to a Montessori school that was a forty-five minute drive away from our house and required my parents to join a carpool group.
The bullying I experienced was over twelve years ago and bullying has not just stopped existing since then. Emily Bazelon, journalist and author of “Sticks and Stones: Defeating the Culture of Bullying and Rediscovering the Power of Character and Empathy”, defines bullying as “a particular form of harmful aggression, linked to real psychological damage, both short and long term...it’s about one person with more social status lording it over another person, over and over again, to make him miserable”. Bullying is aggressive and intended to hurt, and involves a power imbalance which is repeated behavior. The ultimate shapeshifter, bullying takes on different forms: verbal, physical, social, prejudicial, and cyber.
Social media opened up another sphere for harassment to thrive, and the opportunity for anonymity online injected an extra dose of venom. A 2018 Pew Research Center survey on the climate of cyberbullying found, “59% of U.S. teens have personally experienced at least one of six types of abusive online behaviors”. To go further into the depth of bullying, than my own experience, I had a conversation with The Stories We Need to Hear founder and my editor, Greta Nagy. Her vulnerability and openness in sharing her experiences with cyberbullying and the toll it can take on mental health is truly incredible.
Jessica: What was your experience with cyberbullying?
Greta: I'm sure that my experience is actually very similar to many young women's experiences because I was young, you know when this started happening. The cyber world can be a very, dangerous place...So, for about a year and a half, I was receiving anonymous messages from accounts and I never really got down to who the person was. I tried to get Instagram involved. I tried to get other parties involved and it didn't really work.
The messages Greta was receiving began with body shaming; she received them from random, untraceable accounts. When she blocked one, another would pop up. The vitriol increased with time; messages moving from body shaming to reacting to pictures of Greta with her family and boyfriend with things like “they don’t love you” to saying she should kill herself.
Power dynamics are further skewed by anonymity in cyberbullying. A tormenter with no identifiable face or clear cut way to trace back to, makes it even more worrisome to know that abusive online behavior is being experienced by more and more people. The bully is allowed to sink back into the shadows. While the individual receiving the messages, seeing the comments, facing the torment, has to reconcile with the pain.
Jessica: One of the ugliest components of bullying, I think, is how individuals will internalize the attack. How did you handle this? Was the bullying kind of being re-spoken by your inner voice and staying with you even longer than the actual time that it occurred?
Greta: The words that were used in terms of my weight, really stuck with me. Just because I had previously kind of had some issues with that. Just seeing certain phrases like, “she has the weirdest body I've ever seen” or “she's so disproportionate”...these cons. I literally put them in my head and could not get rid of them. For a very long time I was [pauses] I became very very very obsessed with working out and monitoring what I ate. What amazed me was it had taken me so long to finally, you know, reach a healthier weight and be happy with that weight; finally seeing my body is something that I loved and I was happy with and that was healthy. Then seeing these comments, out of the blue just completely took all that progress away...It was like a robot just controlling my life and I had no way to weigh in on it.
That’s the thing with bullying, it can burrow into the mind. Undoing confidence and reshaping —demanding control — of the inner voice. Infiltrating from the inside. A 2014 study cited in The Atlantic found, “This bullying (both occasional and frequent) was associated with poorer health later in life—victims had more psychological distress at 23 and 50, and were at higher risk for depression, suicidal thoughts, and anxiety disorders at age 45”. Mental health feels the force of bullying and it can be carried inside. I hadn’t even drawn the connections to how the bullying I faced in childhood affected me later on, until this article. Maybe it’s because I hadn’t been willing to. Now I can’t help but wonder if the shyness, the nervousness I had after fourth grade was because the isolation of bullying was still lingering; taking power and my confidence in social situations and replacing it with fear.
Jessica: How did you look after your mental health in the wake of cyberbullying?
Greta: I had a really hard time dealing with it. [Pause] It was definitely not an easy six months back when this happened. Therapy can do a lot but that comes with time. I know that I've worked so hard to get to the mental place that I am now. No one can take that away from me. Because really, no matter what you go through, you drive and define your own mental health. To some extent, people can influence you, people can make you sad, people can make you happy. But I put so much hard work and progress into my anxiety and my depression. And I know that that's not just going to be taken away by someone who has nothing better to do than to be a mean person who probably needs to work on themselves.
There is no set way to combat or process bullying. Not everyone has a support system to help them through bullying. Sometimes the impact isn’t processed until years after the fact. Others search for role models to help guide them through it. Starting from how people are taught about mental health is one strategy aiming to be taken by Texas schools. State Senator for Texas, Jose Menedez, is looking to expand David’s Law, named after David Molak who took his own life in 2016 after being cyberbullied. One of the components in this expansion of the bill is requiring Texas students to take a mental health class in high school. The goal of this is to begin destigmatizing mental illness in schools and encourage more empathy in students. Maybe this isn’t the cure-all and maybe some circumstances make it more difficult to rediscover your own power in these situations. Having more open and honest conversations about bullying and the pain it causes, is a way to break the ice around the topic. Keeping hush over bullying only allows the harassment to sink back to the shadows, gaining further traction. Classes that talk about mental health and people like Greta who are open in sharing their experiences, that’s confronting the difficult. Bringing bullying into the light, takes away some of its power.
