I have a rather unpopular stance about bullying. I’m definitely an unconventional mom when it comes to this. Prepare yourselves… this is anything but P.C. My stance is that if you are being bullied, go crazy ass, apeshit, nutcase, ninja geek warrior on them. The first time you feel the knee-buckling fear of being truly bullied—the kind of bullied where you fear for your physical safety—go out swinging.
Here are two reasons why I feel absolutely justified in giving this advice.
Reason #1: BEARS. Bears are big. Bears are wild, ferocious smelly creatures (much like most bullies.) Bears can absolutely kick human ass. Begs the question, why will the bears do an about-face when most dinky wee humans are around? Because their survival depends on it. They instinctively know that easy prey equals live another day. A simple paw wound can take out a bear for a whole hunting season. Bullies are like that bear. They want the easy prey. They want the easy victim.
I tell you—hinder their hunting. Let them know that YOU are not a Twinkie on a stick. You are not the easy prey. YOU are the species to be avoided. Apeshit ninja geek warriors might get their asses handed to them like a slice of ass cake. But not without first inflicting two kinds of injuries to the bear. One, to their ego. The second (hopefully) to their big mouth.
The other reason I feel justified in giving this advice is that I’ve been bullied. Hardcore bullied. I’ve been sick and walking to the local store with a high fever, just hours away from my first job interview at a clothing store at the mall, and have had a van pull up, a pile of crazy bitches from my neighborhood file out, and proceed to hand me my ass along with handfuls of my hair.
I’ve had a “she-male” (my name for her because she used to beat up the guys in high-school) hold me up to my locker by my throat and threaten to beat me down every day after school until I habitually carried a roll of nickels and wore big rings at all times for a semester. I was ready. I was waiting. I was sick to my stomach at school every day for six months.
In tenth grade, at the homecoming dance, I was jumped by a gang. I lived in L.A. in the San Fernando Valley, to be exact. When I say “gang” I do not say it as a figure of speech. When I say jumped, I mean eight girls, kicking, swinging, pulling, scratching, all that the same time.
Here’s the funny thing. To look at me, you would never guess my past. If you read my previous Dear Teen Me post you were probably surprised by what I revealed. I know now that I was bullied for lots of reasons; most of which had NOTHING to do with me. That’s the thing about bullying. It’s more about the weaknesses of the bully. Once you know their secret, their power vaporizes. Secret=They are frightened little human beings.
I’d like to tell you that bullying stops. That you grow up, they grow up, and everyone always plays nice in the sandbox of life. Not true. Bullies, if not checked, bully as adults. They become “anonymous” bullies making inane comments online. They bully their employees. They bully their spouses. They bully their kids.
Bullies need to be checked.
They need to be stood up to or you have the seeds of monsters like Hitler who ran amok with their unchecked psychopathy and terrorized a generation. Little fucking bully. What’s worse than Hitler? The little fucking scared people who didn’t fight back in his early bullying career and put him in his place before he bullied entire countries.
CHECK THE BULLIES.
I told you this was not P.C. I warned you at the door. And so now I’m going to give my most profane, crazy advice ever: IF YOU KNOW YOU’RE A BULLY, CHECK YOURSELF. Stop thinking that power over others equals personal power. You crave respect. Guess what, you don’t’ have respect. You’ve only succeeded in roping fear by the neck. Fear from others is not respect. You know this, too. You know that if you let up and stop creating fear, you will lose your underlings. Poor little bully.
You have to say a lot of loving things to yourself to break a bully’s curses. That leads me to the most insidious kind of bullying on this planet—self-bullying. No one, not even the girls that jumped me, or the people who wanted to keep me down, have ever said worse things to me than I’ve said to myself. You want to hold your head up? Then don’t let the scared little bully inside you have a bullhorn to your brain anymore. Don’t feed the bear. Check that damn bully.
LOVE YOU. Whether you’re a bully, or the one being bullied, it all begins with how you feel about yourself. Work on that. Erode the sharp edges with love and compassion toward yourself and toward others.
I pledge to take a stand against bullying each and every day. #OneVoice
~ Tracy Clark, author of Scintillate
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Tracy, a great article! We teach this in our karate school – self defense and defense against bullying is always ok. You have to fight. You may not start it, but you can finish it. It may be not a P.C. thing, but it is the right thing. Thanks for sharing and for saying what needs to be said!