Please be sure you’ve read the first post in this two part series, or the following may not make sense.

I am a victim. I hate saying that and I hate typing it. It feels like I’m confessing some horrible secret that should be kept under the rug. It’s humiliating as well. I cannot say it in the past tense because even today I am still dealing with the pain and the fallout of the abuse. I am still coming to terms to what it did to me and what I had to do to myself.

You either survive or you break. If you break, you may crash and burn in some mental corner of your own making and no one ever knows what went wrong. There’s nothing to be done with you except to be careful, medicate you, and move on. Another way to break is to turn upon your abusers and it is that break that we often hear about on the news.

I understand, all too well, what those kids have gone through. I know the anger. The clique of kids that bullied me are all too lucky that I chose a different survival technique. I shut down. I shut down my emotions, tightly, and locked them away. They would push, prod and do all in their power to make me react, but I never reacted. For three years I locked away the tears, the pain, the fear and the anger. At night I prayed, hoping that we’d leave the city we were in and go to another state.

A move was coming, but not until the last year of school, 7th grade. An incident happened at home and though my parents knew I was having a rough time at school, the incident clued them in to the fact that it was much more than a rough time. Something was very wrong. My bottled up emotions were slipping out and I was starting to strike out where I shouldn’t.

A few weeks later the For Sale sign went up and never had we moved so quickly before. For that one day, it seemed like everything was over. Those kids, the school, everything was behind me. I found all too quickly during the summer that we settled in our new town, that it wasn’t all right. I wasn’t all right.

I didn’t want to run into more bullies at my new school, but I was no longer prepared to keep shutting myself down. I wanted to cry when it was appropriate to cry. I wanted to laugh where it was appropriate to laugh. I wanted to feel my emotions the way I should.

That first Summer is when my mother gave me a notebook to write in. I had yet to tell her everything that had gone on in the old school, but we were talking and she gave me an outlet for the anger that was boiling inside of me; I wrote. I filled that notebook up in a few weeks and was quickly working on another. It freed a part of me. It freed that part of me that wanted to kill those kids that had hurt me. My anger spilled onto those pages and not long after, spilled onto my artwork. Bold, hot colors and drawings filled with ghastly images.

Not everything was hateful, though. I wrote stories of humor and “cool weirdness” to read to my little brother. A part of me that I liked was slowly coming back.

I sometimes think that if I’d had counseling way back then, maybe I’d be more well-adjusted than I am now, but no one thought of such a thing. Even my mother, who was doing her best to insure that my future at the new school would be a good experience had no idea of the damage that was deep inside of me. I didn’t know myself. I did know that come that first day of school, no one would bully me.

Summer ended and 8th grade began. I remember facing that tall, old brick building and saying to myself, “it won’t happen again”. I walked through the doors, faced my classes, and made my first friend. She was one of many “outcasts” I’d befriend through 8th grade and then High School.

I met The Bully in my last class. A cute, somewhat exotic looking girl that came from one of the wealthier families in town. Her clothes were all new, she had beautiful, black, curly and long hair. She walked through the halls of the school liked she owned it. Her green eyes settled on me, appraised my polyester blue shirt and polyester green pants, my eyeglasses, drooping hair, and saw me for some piece of white trash and an outsider. She made some cutting, clever remark, at my expense and received adulation from a few other girls around her who laughed at her wit.

In that moment, I wanted to take her by her hair and throw her out of the third story window. I wanted to see that nasty smile of hers broken up by smashed in teeth and a crushed nose. The anger of the past boiled inside me like physical pain. I had to decide how I was going to deal with her. Whatever I did would mark me not just for the rest of the school year, but it would start me on an inexorable path through high school. I knew I didn’t want to shut down my emotions again, and neither did I want to kill her. The former would lead to my own, self-inflicted death, the latter would send me to prison.

My mother once wrote a story about my smile. How it brought smiles to other peoples faces, and brought out the sun. I only had a shadow of that smile back then. I also had another smile. It is that other one that I gave to my new bully. It was a smile that shut her up, a smile that brought down a chill into the overheated hallway. The bully recovered quickly and pushed away. Someone whispered something about, “that new girl is ODD”.

ODD and WEIRD. Those worked for me. My new bully didn’t stop trying to put me in my place for the rest of 8th grade, but she held no fear for me. High School brought on a whole new set of bullies, but I’d somehow moved beyond their sphere of influence. I was still a broken thing trying to fix myself where I could, but something else inside of me was making it hard to recover. It was at that delicate time that I began to get sick so much. My constant illnesses and absences from school kept me labeled as an Outcast, but I was fine with it. I gravitated toward other outcasts, when possible, but for the rest of the time I wrote and drew.

Another incident at school and at home finally sent me to a psychologist. I saw him once a week for the last eight weeks of 9th grade. He gave me tools to work with so I could heal and his report kept me from being sent away.

Each and everyday is a struggle of some kind for me. It’s either dealing with physical pain from my body, or old memories that still haunt me. I realize, now, how much of what I am and who I am in the present is due to the abuse I was subjected to as a child. I still cannot seem to wash away the feeling that somehow I invited the abuse, that I deserved it. My rational, grown-up mind can say that I never deserved the abuse all it wants, but inside me is something small and frightened, that doesn’t believe it.

I still wonder if I’ll ever “grow up”. A part is me is still that smiling 5th grader who didn’t have a clue what she was stepping into. I am pleased to say that I have more days where I feel like I’m more put together than I have been in a long time. There are a lot of things I can cope with now, that I couldn’t for years. In a strange way, I’ve become the survivor I didn’t think I’d become. Bullies still exist and they still manage to knock me backwards a few steps. I hit back, now. Not physically, but I know how to fight in ways where their power is taken from them. Even with bullies over the internet. Some of those bullies have felt that “scary smile” of mine and they go away. It makes me feel good.

Once in awhile I’ve given you, my readers, my lovely lurkers, a brief glimpse into my soul. It can be a scary place. I know, I still find myself hiding under the covers to escape it. A few, close friends, have a fair idea of what went into the construction of that dark, spooky place in my head. My mother knows the whole story, my father knew part of it. My brothers probably guessed at it, but I’ve never talked to them about it. At our age and the distance between us in miles, we prefer to keep our phone conversations light. Digging about in the trash of the past isn’t too pleasant. I’ve also been afraid for a very long time of what my brothers would think of me if they knew everything. I wonder, too, would they really have the patience to hear it all?

More than once I’ve thought about opening that distant chapter and dissecting it here upon the virtual pages of my blog. I’ve chickened out a lot because that’s a hard place to visit. Two years ago, just when I thought I was ready, an email came to me from someone who was looking for people she’d known in grade school. It seems she was a reformed alcoholic who was tracking down and apologizing to everyone she’d ever hurt. That’s one of those AA 12-steps and quite frankly I believe it to be one that needs to be scratched out. Some people in your alcohol soaked past don’t want to hear from you because they’re still hurting. She wanted my forgiveness and my friendship.

I fell apart as soon as I read her name in the first sentence. I couldn’t finish the letter. I began to shake, to cry and ran into a corner of my bedroom until my husband could coax me out. His day had begun so nicely, the last thing he needed to deal with was my hysterics. Most people that I mentioned this email to later on did not understand what had gone through me. Their response was to tell me, “just delete it, no big deal”. Of course, I did just that, later. But, the damage had been done.

What had I felt when that email opened? When I saw her name? I felt like I had fallen through time back to the first day of school, 5th grade. I heard the sounds of kids voices, laughter echoing in the hallways, the bells ringing. I could smell the odor of the new carpets and the plastic-y waft of the prefab walls that surrounded our classrooms. I could hear the birds outside and smell Fall in the air. I was swinging my brand new white patent leather purse with the twisted gold chain…

I was bullied in the 5th, 6th and 7th grades. That woman that emailed was the leader of a clique of thirteen kids, almost all girls except for one boy. It was daily mental torture. I cannot begin to outline the many ways these kids, with that one girl in the lead, found to make my life hell. There was even one girl, a nearby neighbor, whom I thought was a friend, but she was a little two-faced devil who fed the clique secrets I confided in her.

Well meaning teachers, who truly had no clue as to what was going on, interfered and talked to the parents of the clique children. What was mere torture became vicious. I’m rather glad there was no such thing as the internet or my humiliation at their hands would have stretched around the world. There were many days when I’d get home late because I’d have to find new ways to make my way home in order to avoid their ambushes. Maybe I’m lucky they never beat me up, they enjoyed their mind games much more.

I couldn’t talk to anyone because their ham-fisted help only made things worse. To this day when I hear in the news about bullied victims turning on their fellows, I ask myself, do adults have any real conception of what their children are capable of? Good and bad means nothing. Sweet children on the surface can turn mean at the drop of a hat. Put them with others and they need a victim to feed on. The one bullied either must survive or break.

Those thirteen kids have grown up now. They have jobs and kids of their own. Their memories of that time are not the same as mine. So, one of them had regrets? Do I give a damn? No. I’m 45 years old and still trying to cope with life and recover from those years. Those children, believed to be such sweet, “boisterous” youngsters by their parents, stole a part of me. I have no forgiveness for them and I do not ever want to hear their apologies or regrets. I chose to delete that email and never replied.