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| Reborn: The 16 Year Old that Finally Ended the Bullying |
[This month I celebrate my 76th year on this planet. And no, I no longer look like that kid above who's sitting on the hood of his 1960 Ford Falcon. Recently I discovered the essay below in a long-forgotten Google Keep file. I honestly can't remember writing it. But it all rings true, so I must have. Please indulge an old dude as he takes a bit of an introspective trip down memory lane.]
I woke up to the dark side of social networking in a 13-year-old body that was over 6 feet tall. Such a body, standing upright but only nominally coordinated, is a bully magnet. Guy teens in local-school-branded shirts who know each other's moves and can damned near finish each other's sentences are all too happy to knock such a body over, sit on its chest and spit in its face. And the more 13-year-old girls who are around to witness the ignominious toppling of such a pubescent giant, then the noisier will be the bullies' cat calls and the more creative their insults.
I remember one such event, lying there on the warm, tar-smelling back street of a PA oil refinery town. I was red-faced for lots of reasons and struggling to break free of my tormentors. I flashed on the last time I had had such a view of the cloud-crowded PA sky. It had been less than 20 miles away in a fallow, overgrown field near Amish country in late July, the tall, browning grass pushing up past my arms and legs and smelling like the hay bales it would soon become. I was blissfully alone, though my dog was somewhere nearby. I couldn't see him, but I could hear him rustling through the field, most likely chasing one of the many rabbits who regularly taunted him. It was slow-breeze peaceful and the greener weeds and timothy grass and moss that framed my head seemed to be breathing back at me with its own wet, oxygen-rich breath. Overhead, like a slow-motion kaleidoscope, the bright white, billowy clouds drifted around against a deep-blue sky and morphed into all sorts of evocative shapes that challenged my young imagination to label them as various people, places or things.
At the edge of that field our single acre of lawn bristled bright green and short. It was a moat of sorts, surrounding my family's first own-it-through-payments house. It was a simple "pre-fab" model that had been put up in just a few days, fresh from the factory and delivered by trucks in several giant pieces. No more rent payments! Instead, my parents had their first mortgage. This place would be my home for all six grades of elementary school. It was the place where the bus stopped out front to pick us up for school and it was the place those same buses would discharge us at the end of the school day. And on that peaceful, empty acre of ground surrounded by neighbors' far-flung dairy cattle and hay fields, I seldom saw anyone other than my little nuclear family. So "normal," for me, meant alone, aside from the occasionally irritating little brothers or my almost-silent and always compliant best pal, my dog.
It was here that my consciousness came to life. Other than the limited time spent in the forced socialization of the public schools, I was free to wander the fields, climb trees and do whatever I wanted or just hang out in my little bedroom and read.
Eventually, at the end of my elementary school, my dad was given a promotion and we moved to be closer to his work. Our new home was in a proper, two-story house on a small lot in that little oil refinery town. And the general area was a bit of a shock. Wandering its streets alone, I seemed to put off gravitational waves that pulled kids from porches and back yards. Singly and in small clusters they would come up and try to engage and ask questions and guess my height and weight. From the solitude of my bedroom window I could see them moving around the streets in clumps. They jabbered and jostled and tested each other's various strengths. I was perplexed that they seemed to spend so much time and energy maneuvering for position in unfathomable hierarchies. I couldn't figure out how the social ranking worked. And when it got too difficult to ponder, I just let it go. I would go for long bike rides, sometimes alone and sometimes with my dog. And this was all the company I needed.
Two years of life in this little burg meant many, many "hold him down and humiliate him" sessions. And I never did crack the social code. So when my dad was transferred far away, I was relieved. And I resolved that things would be different in our next small-town home.
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My first confrontation in that new environment put me face to face with the toughest teen in town. He had no way of knowing that I had years of adolescent humiliation and rage built up. He wasn't deeply committed to a battle. He just figured he was going to push around the new guy. So that first confrontation ended with me exploding all over him and mopping up the floor of a local gas station with him. I never had another bully bother me in that community.
I went on to be class president and lead singer in a rock band. Eventually, I earned my B.S. & M.S. degrees, co-founded a successful instructional design consultancy with my wife, wrote five books and traveled the world teaching and consulting on project management. In recent years, I've become involved in my local Indivisible group, working to bring about political changes that reflect my optimistic, left-leaning political values.
So those moments of humiliation on the pavement in that smelly little refinery town in PA lit a fire in me. It was the fire of determination to take charge of my own fate and to change things for the better. And, as horrible as it was at the time, I'm now grateful I experienced it.
Who says you can't start over?
