What the world needs now!

I'm expounding on something I mentioned yesterday in my blog.

Recently, I'm becoming more and more aware that bullying is getting to be a bigger issue in the schools. I watched a video clip from the Ellen show ( linked here: http://www.facebook.com/video/video.php?v=592846987806 ) And it got me thinking.

Some of you may remember Phoebe Prince since her story was pretty big news a while ago now. (Here linked: http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/2010/03/29/2010-03-29_phoebe_prince_south_hadley_high_schools_new_girl_driven_to_suicide_by_teenage_cy.html) And at the time I remember thinking that children get bullied in school all of the time, myself included, and that it’s a natural occurrence and that it was a shame that none of the adults had done anything about it. I did not realize at the time how extensive the bullying was.

It got me thinking about my own experiences. I spent 2 years of middle school (7th & 8th) going to Mountain Shadows Middle School in Nuevo, California. My freshman year, I spent the time at Perris High School in Perris, California. During this time I was bullied and tormented almost relentlessly by various groups of people.

When I moved to Nuevo, I did so from South Carolina. Nuevo is a small town with a very small population (less than 10,000) and shy and awkward me did not fit in well there. Needless to say I was not liked by the popular kids. I was smart, and shy, and very nervous when trying to make new friends though I was nice. I was also a bit on the chubbier side. But I was nice to everyone and even made jokes with a popular kid in my class while working with him on a project. His girlfriend later approached me and accused me of trying to take him away. I wasn’t afraid of her but I did tell her I had no interest in taking anyone away from her and she walked away.

After that I was a social outcast. If I sat at a table, people moved away from me. If I tried talking to someone, I was mostly ignored. The two years I spent at that school I was miserable and that compounded with the problems at home and more than once I considered suicide. If I had not made the few friends I made (and one of those friends even came to one day in all seriousness and told me I was going to go to hell for cussing so much.) I remember teachers talking to me about how miserable I was but almost none of them took steps to actively stop it. Everyone just told me it was going to get better in high school.

Once I went into high school, I had high hopes. This time I befriended the wrong person and thus, was the object of bullying again. My tormenters even went so far as to throw eggs at me one day while I was walking past them. I immediately went to the principal’s office and nothing was done about it, other than they let me call my mother for new pants. The bullies in question were never punished.

Thankfully, we moved just after my freshman year and I went to a new school in a new town that was sort of preppy. Since Perris High was pretty well known with a bad reputation, most people who knew I went there assumed I’d been in a gang and left me alone.

To be continued tomorrow...

Day 42 - 323 Days to Go