LIKE many other people, I, though far from being an innocent student or kid, was bullied as a youth (mostly my early teens), although atypically to a degree surpassing that experienced by the average youth or youths as a collective.
In fact, as one burdened (and it showed via my behavior) since birth with emotional over-sensitivity—i.e. “Frank, you take life way too seriously!”—I thus attracted all the more the type who could seemingly smell such susceptibility in a potential bullying recipient, quite like a shark to bloody waters.
The first very formidable authority figure bully with whom I was terrifyingly trapped was my Grade 2 teacher: A mischievous friend and I would often be denied recess, lunch and/or after-school-hours leave; or we’d receive sheet after sheet after sheet of lined paper upon which to ‘write lines,’ sometimes until we each had a small pile of about a couple dozen. It was absolutely absurd; and because my friend seemingly couldn’t behave himself, I got dragged down along with him—indeed, plus some. From recollection, I actually would endure a considerable deal more. My friend being of indigenous-nation heritage, one might’ve expected that, being the early 1970s, he’d likely have been the one upon whom a brute teacher would focus her fury. But, no, it was to be me, the red-headed kid, who’d receive most of Mrs. Carol’s wrath during 2nd Grade. Although I can’t recall her abuse against me in its entirety, I’ll nevertheless always remember how she had the immoral audacity—and especially the unethical confidence in avoiding any professional repercussions—to blatantly readily aim and fire her knee towards my groin, as I was backed up against the school hall wall. Fortunately, though, she missed her mark, instead hitting the top of my left leg.
With clear hindsight, I feel confident saying that when I was in grade school some teachers had signed up for their corrupted corner of the teaching profession in large part to enjoy the power trip over very young and helpless children, who were forced to go to school on a daily basis by parents who naïvely held unconditional confidence in such ‘educators’. Though there were other monster teachers, for me Mrs. Carol was uniquely traumatizing. For other students, however, there was her sole Grade 2 counterpart, the creepy Mrs. Clemens, situated in the classroom immediately next door; and not surprising, the pair were quite friendly with each other.
They were the true nightmare teacher scenario for a lot of very young students back in the day.
Mrs. Clemens was similarly abusive but with the additional bizarre, scary attribute of her eyes jerking side to side when she talked to you or her class. It was rumored she had a heroin addiction, though I don’t recall hearing of any solid proof of that.
I remember one fellow second-grader’s mother going door to door in my part of town seeking out any other case of a student who, like her son, had been assaulted by that teacher. I had not told anyone about my own ordeal with my (the other) Grade 2 teacher, and I just stood there silently as my astonished mother conversed with the woman. It now seems to me that as each grade passed, I increasingly realized how all recipients of corporeal handling/abuse in my school were boys; and I then reasoned to myself that maybe it was because men can take care of themselves and boys are basically little men. It was the early/mid 1970s, after all.
With all ordealic second-grade things coming to an end, I moved on to Grade 3, during which the afternoon teacher on one occasion mockingly humiliated me before the class. She questioned my alleged lack of intelligence with incredulity after I asked her a question that she considered to be stupid.
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By far the worst of the bullying that I’d endure at the non-mercy of enough student peers occurred during Grade 8-9, until I decided to acquire my GED at the exceptionally student/teacher friendly White Rock Work & Learn program. While in regular high school, I just barely passed my Grade 8 and 9 essentials—Math, Science and English—so I was able to leave that tormenting environment behind, since Work & Learn taught a compact version of Grade 10-12.
It’s worth noting that I ‘skipped out’ of about half of all high school days during Grade 8-9, instead happily spending them at YVR airport.
There, I received greatly needed, lengthy, pleasant escape from perpetual high school hell, usually while pretending that I was actually waiting to catch a flight somewhere, anywhere preferably a great distance away. Yes, I missed a lot of schooling, but it was a much better option for me than enduring the awful alternative—typically unrelenting bullying, which would’ve prevented my weary mind from sufficient learning, anyway.
But before I escaped high school, I first had to endure the ordeal of having my Grade 9 science teacher single me out from the entire class, scold me and then tell me that the virtually-nothing offense I’d allegedly committed was “why [so many students] don’t like you!”—all while a girl on whom I had a (went nowhere) crush for many years sat behind me. I could not believe my ears, and I wondered how in hell I got myself (though I’d earned nothing of the sort that I’d so brutally received) into such an incredibly demeaning, humiliating situation—and that was when I truly felt like dying.
Although the experience wasn’t in any way physical, to me it felt more damaging psychologically, especially to an already scarred teenage psyche. Oh, yes—glory days.
Following my drug experimental summer capping the high school nightmare, I began Work & Learn and thus a journey into a strengthening of my self-esteem. There, it was pretty much fulltime peace of mind, though unfortunately it also involved getting into frequent illicit drug use (which I’m sure would’ve occurred anyway had I remained in high school).
Most significant for me, however, was my meeting and befriending of two of the toughest, if not the toughest, guys (a few years my senior) in the White Rock and South Surrey area; and perhaps not surprising, they were foster home reared guys for many years prior to my connecting with them.
I began to stand my ground, hang out at the local arcade—called Laser Palace though nicknamed by a few as Loser Palace—and readily enough get into a street fight (during which I’d expect to receive notable licks), though unfortunately too often at the drop of a hat. Eventually, I realized that standing up to some asshole seeking an easy victim may cost me at first, but he’d soon enough get the message that I was not, or at least no longer, just a ‘cupcake.’
Soon enough, my assertive-aggressiveness evolved into a nasty, unpredictable chip on my shoulder the size of a Rubic’s Cube. My new surly attitude craved over-compensation for the plethora of times throughout my youth that I allowed myself to be physically, verbally and/or emotionally assaulted. While carrying around with me such a psychologically burdensome, multifaceted grudge, which existed mostly in the form of a mental list of scores to settle, I also began hanging out with local “skids” inside and outside of the small, nearby mall.
It was at the center seating area of that mall that I bumped into a former high school bully who’d singled me out during my first six weeks of high school, about three years earlier. He’d always spew insults at me, mostly regarding my weight, and challenge me to scraps. (Those six weeks ended with me getting suspended, which then moved me on to the second and last high school I’d endure.)
So, then and there at that mall but a few years later, he was talking with me as though he and I, during those first six weeks of high school when he’d made life for me miserable, were somewhat like equals: “Remember how we were the fat kids who everybody tried to pick fights with?” (FYI: He was always taller and larger than most, but he definitely was not at all one of “the fat kids” with whom any other guy would “pick fights with”!) I said absolutely nothing in response, for I didn’t know what the hell he was talking about. He and I, together, getting picked on?! Maybe he’s confused me with someone else, I rhetorically asked myself.
Unless I’d been losing my weary mind all of that terrible time, he, on his very own, was my most dreaded reality of going to high school every morning for the first one and a half months of Grade 8; he was in fact the asshole who gave me the hardest time. And then, a few years later, we’d somehow, suddenly become a bonded pair from ‘our’ past persecution?!
Sure enough, however, even his phony—or outright self-deluded—version of the true bully injustice that he’d served me while just beginning high school wouldn’t last: One sunny morning at the Loser Palace arcade, he talked me out of whatever money I had on my person, sixteen dollars, with a blatant BS intent upon turning it into some cannabis for me. Henceforth, every time I’d insist upon the whereabouts of my money or otherwise promised cannabis, even more BS excuses came out of his mouth. That was far more like the prick I knew and endured but a few years prior.
However, it would take almost three more decades for me to learn that I myself, according to topic research terminology, would currently be classified as a “bully-victim,” since I have/had been doing my own share of what is now considered to be forms of bullying activity. Beginning as an eight-year-old boy teasing my older sister to borderline madness and occasionally even to tears, I was on my own journey away from innocence and towards an albeit much milder form of bully-ville.
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A person filled with fear at just being in the presence of an unrelenting bully is at a great psychological and therefore physical disadvantage, as far as defending oneself goes. The well experienced bully can usually sense fear—or on the other hand, a complete lack thereof—emanating from his target victim and thus react accordingly.
From a more personal perspective, the dangerously debilitating effect of succumbing to fear—or contrarily, the greatly empowering effect of controlling and even eliminating fear—when it comes to physical confrontations, usually means the difference between getting thoroughly thrashed and, on the other hand, getting safely through the conflict with one’s confidence intact and minimal, if any, lacerations.
Meanwhile, although there’s an on-going ‘war against bullying’ to hopefully minimize and eventually eliminate bullying trauma suffered by victims, there’s little mentioned in the media how the chronically bullied boy can grow up to become an unrestrainedly enraged bully himself. But there are those, regardless of minority or majority quantity status, who apparently outright defy the said potential bullied-turned-bully scenario:
I can recall one boy from elementary school and another from my Grade 8-9 stretch who were both bullied to unusual extremes. Seven to nine years after I’d last seen each, I came across and dialogued at length with each of them. Yet unlike me, at that time they very much appeared to not at all be wearing and bearing any chips of any size upon their shoulders (which I felt was, particularly on a mental health level, great for them); though I’d have presumed that especially they would be lugging around with them at least some major baggage.
Then again, both past victims of massive and/or chronic bullying might have just been wearing a temporary façade of life contentment, but I perceived their ‘normal person’ (albeit brief) social interaction with me, and apparently also in maintaining employment, as genuinely psychologically functional.■
Frank G Sterle Jr (Originally written on January 14, 2014, but adjusted/rewritten multiple times since.)
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