Bricks and Stones
how being bullied as a child has followed me into adulthood
[content warning: assault, bullying, childhood trauma. dad, please don’t read this one]
I had a fairly good childhood. Most of my memories are good ones; upstate vacations, swimming, birthday parties, Christmases, dinners at Grandma’s house every Sunday with my cousins. But there are enduring memories that aren’t so pleasant and wholesome, memories that come up in dreams, that force themselves on me at 3am. They come suddenly and violently, unwanted and obtrusive. My brain will never let go of them because they are as much a part of me as those good memories.
I was eight or nine, walking home alone from school as we did in those days. There were two boys ahead of me, neighbors of mine who would make it their business to torment me for years to come. I walked cautiously behind them, knowing that at any minute they would sense me there and turn to hurl hurtful words at me. But this time words weren’t enough for them. When they noticed me walking near them, they picked up some rocks out of a neighbor’s garden. I immediately headed for the other side of the street, terrified that one of those rocks would hit me in the head and they’d leave me there on the sidewalk, bleeding to death while I called out for my mother. Their aim was bad and the rocks missed me. Joey, the younger of the two, then grabbed a brick out of the garden. A brick! Steven followed Joey’s lead and grabbed his own brick. They chased after me and I ducked behind some bushes, small protection that they were. I put my hands over my head and started crying, yelling at them to leave me alone. I heard Joey laugh and the five pound cement projectile landed next to me with a soft thud. I don’t know to this day if he meant to miss or if his aim was off, but it didn’t matter. He threw a brick at me. I didn’t know what I did to deserve this, but in my child’s mind I was sure I did something. This was my fault somehow. My fault I was bullied. My fault I was tormented. Steven and Joey left me there in the bushes crying and I stayed cowered for a full five minutes before I made my way home. “They threw bricks at me!” I shouted to my parents, indignant and shaking. I don’t know that they believed me.
Steven and Joey weren’t my only bullies, but they were the main characters in my life for years. Their assaults on me remained mostly verbal until they weren’t; at some point they became sexual, and the words they used when assaulting me - no one will believe you, you deserve this, you should be grateful we pay attention to you - kept me from telling anyone about it. Instead, they told people, other kids, proudly bragging about what they did to me, telling the others that I enjoyed it. It was a devastating, humiliating time for me. At night I’d lie in the dark and ask God why he didn’t let Joey hit me in the head with that brick and kill me.
I retreated into my own little world which consisted of my record player and library books. I read voraciously; The Boxcar Children, Encyclopedia Brown, The Half-Magic books, and, later, Are You There God, It’s Me Margaret, and Go Ask Alice. I played records borrowed from older cousins. Black Sabbath, The Who, Led Zeppelin. I was happy in my own little world and those summer days when my mother forced me out of the house, or school days when I had no choice but to be surrounded by children who loathed me were a constant toll on my self-esteem. I was anxious at an early age and it’s no wonder why. I spent half my waking life wondering when the next salvo would be flung at me, whether I would have have bricks and stones thrown my way, if I would be cornered by Steven or Joey or one of the older boys in the neighborhood looking for someone to conquer.
Some people believe that being bullied strengthens you, prepares you for life. They think that bullied children benefit from being tormented, beaten, made fun of. They decry the ongoing efforts to eradicate this behavior in schools and workplaces because they think that what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, when really it just makes you want to die.
Spoken like a person who was never bullied.
I’ll tell you what it does to you. It makes you a nervous wreck. It makes you feel worthless and unwanted. It twists thoughts around in your brain so that you take every word every bully has said to you and weigh them against the encouragement and kindness of parents and teachers and the negative always wins that weigh-in. A spider-web forms inside of you and you catch and internalize every single insult, every hurtful phrase, every act of aggression until you are fundamentally changed as a person. No longer do those words of encouragement from other people mean anything. Everything is an aspersion. No one means any compliment they give you, it’s all lies meant to trip you up. No one genuinely likes you or cares for you or wants to be your friend. You carry all this with you into adulthood, where you’re just a mess of a person who needs intensive therapy to deal with things that happened to you a lifetime ago. Because it never leaves you. Bullying doesn’t teach you anything, it doesn’t provide valuable life lessons. It only serves to demean, to wear you down and erode your self worth until you are a mere shell.
That there are people who truly believe that bullying provides something positive is why so many workplaces are toxic havens for men and women who graduated from being high school bullies to becoming the demons of their offices. The bullied lived in fear in school, and live in fear as adults. There’s always a Steven or Joey around waiting to pounce on you, to prove to themselves that they are tough and powerful.
Steven and Joey were just my mainstays. There were others. Gloria and Lorraine, Barbara and Stacy, Eddie, Rob, Jimmy. Each of them played a part in turning me into who I am today. We all have roles in society and I played mine perfectly; I fell into a trap early and was never able to get out.
I’m in therapy now and I hope to finally be able to let go of some of the lingering feelings I have toward these people, and toward myself. I hope to eventually come to terms with everything that happened and be able to sleep at night without all of it invading my dreams, making me wake up at 3am in a cold sweat, swatting imaginary bricks away from my head.
I don’t know what happened to Steven or Joey. I’ve heard rumors about both of them having miserable lives that include jail and alcoholism and that doesn’t make me feel good or anything. I didn’t want them to be miserable, I wanted them to grow out of who they were and into something, I don’t know, better. I wanted to believe that they could change because selfishly that would go a long way toward helping me heal.
Maybe I feel like they all owe me something I am never going to get. Not an apology but something more intangible, maybe just a sense of well being. But I’ll never get that, not from them. So I have to get it from myself. It may be very late in life to embark on this journey, but if I want to spend my remaining years in peace, I’ve got to go to war with my memories. I won’t ever forget the feeling of having a brick thrown at me, just for being me. I won’t ever forget that day when they assaulted me in my own home, in the sanctity of my bedroom. I won’t ever forget the way they made me feel because in so many ways, I’m still feeling it. But I can face these memories, stare them down, and maybe scare them away somehow. Writing about it is the first step.
Mostly I want to tell people who think bullying is somehow beneficial: it’s not. I’ve learned nothing from it but how to loathe myself most of the time. It didn’t prepare me for life. It didn’t give me fortitude. Anyone who thinks that was most likely a bully themself, trying to make good out of bad, trying to philosophize their way out of feeling guilty.
I don’t know why I wrote this. Perhaps it’s a precursor to being able to talk it out with my therapist, a sort of groundbreaking. I’m shaking loose the spiderwebs that have gathered inside me. This is a start.