bullying

Lifelong target

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I wrote about some childhood bullying incidents on this blog back in 2018 in the following post:

How I met my bully | Sophisticated Neanderthal

I’ve been dealing with relentless harassment from a bunch of simpletons around me for the last ten years. Actually much longer but the most intense has been since I started my current job eleven years ago and even moreso since October 2019 when I had a strange experience involving missing time at an Oktoberfest event near my home.

I still have those same feelings of just wanting to be left alone. I’m just trying to live my life. Why can’t they do the same? Just live and let live. I am a lover of peace and an encourager. Why should I have to deal with constant hostility and harmful intentions and actions? I remember those childhood feelings of not wanting to deal with bullies. But deal with it I must because they never stop. I’ve come to learn that the insidious, relentless form of harassment I’ve been subjected to for the last eleven years is called gangstalking. I’ll be writing much more about that, but now I want to add a detail that I didn’t yet realize was significant the last time I wrote about it.

I remember the day on my paper route when the bully pushed me into a snowbank. He finally gave up for that day when that still didn’t elecit a fist fight with him and he sarted walking away. It happened on Market Street in Bangor between 3rd and 4th Streets. My route took me out Third St. and the site of the occurrence was near Bangor Elementary Center on Fourth St., where I attended grade shool a couple years earlier. I can still picture as I got back on my feet and was putting my brown knit hat with white stripes back on after brushing the snow off it, that I spotted the old windowless beige van driven by my 6th grade English teacher. Bangor is a small town and I knew it was her vehicle. A couple friends and I knew what many of the teachers drove. We paid attention to cars.

The thing that struck me as I recalled that scene recently was that the teacher, now deceased, bore the same last name as one of the main ringleaders of the ongoing harassment against me. I saw her sitting at a stop sign on the next street up and looking toward me and the scene that had just unfolded. She didn’t turn down the hill and come my way. I thought she might come to see if everything was alright, but she just went on up the hill. I remember feeling relieved because I was embarassed to have been seen “losing” the struggle with the bully. I felt wimpy. You would think she would’ve been concerned and checked on me, but oddly did not. Only recently I thought, for the first time, about the fact that she bore the same last name as the current ringleader of harassment against me. It wasn’t the first time I thought this stuff started at childhood, but it was the first I thought about the name connection.

Then I thought about how she was a closeted Lesbian (she had a semi secret affair with the female gym teacher and had bipolar or some kind of mental health diagnosis. I previously figured that part out when reflecting on how she was telling the class how all the women in her family were witches and their abilities were only passed down through the women. She had an extended absence right after that day. She must have been off her meds and had to take a medical leave to get inpatient treatment. I don’t know that, but it seems like a good guess. The chief bully gangstalker is also Lesbian and mentally not well. A former friend who’s also involved is also gay and bipolar. And his mom bears a resemblance to my old teacher. Things that make you go hmmm!

Back to the snowbank, I wonder what would have happened if I had taken the bait of the antagonizing bully and threw a punch with the teacher looking on? I think she would have claimed that she didn’t see him do anything but that she only saw me hitting him. Then they would’ve sent me to a juvenile delinquent center or something. Who knows what might have happened there? Were they trying to corrupt me by exposing me to other rough kids and/or abusive staff, or was someone at the juvenile center intended to molest or assault me?

Fortunately, I stayed away from that fight and any other trouble my whole life, following the good example of my parents. I’m thankful I came from a good family and had good people around me through friends of the family and my church. No bullies or troublemakers were ever able to shake me. I miss my dad but I thank God for his quiet strength and steadfast faith and love of the people around him and living a good and simple life. It’s our family legacy and no one is going to take that away.

One thing is for sure, this target is done being bullied. 54 years is enough! The gangstalker creeps will be exposed. They shrink from the light of day. I am a lover of light. They slink around like cowards. I am honest and straightforward.

Resist, Rise, Reign

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When dealing with bullies, or harassment, or systemic oppression, or any persistent problem, really, there are three important facets in affecting positive change.

The first is to resist. Anything they try to do to you, you evade or circumvent their efforts to whatever degree you can, you sabotage their efforts and you power through. Most importantly, though, after you’ve done any remediation you can, you simply live your life as though that wasn’t going on.  Take the wind out of their sails. Bullies can’t stand it when their efforts go in vain.  Take pleasure in knowing that it pisses them off to see you flourish. That helps to alleviate your own rage. Turn the tables on them.  It’s not that they’re harassing you and getting away with it. It’s more like you making them ineffective and feeble, irrelevant, and pathetic losers. That’s what they are, of course.

As you resist, you will also rise against them.  You will rise to a new level of existence. As you live in heightened awareness and ramped up determination, due to necessity, you will hone your coping skills and sharpen your God given strengths.  You will learn that you are stronger than they are, and even stronger than you knew  yourself to be.  Bullies are weak, childish beings. They are powerless before God! Keep that in perspective. 

Unfortunately, when bullying or harassment continues for years on end, as I am experiencing, it’s inevitable that it will get to you at times. You’re only human, after all, but just keep your eye on the prize. Play the long game, and play to win! You’re better than they are!

I have a magnet that has a silhouette of Bigfoot and says “Believe in yourself, even if no one else will.” I claim that over and over.  I’ve been maligned and defamed and slandered by my enemies, underestimated and dismissed and misunderstood by friends and family, but I’ve learned to be self reliant. I don’t care what anyone else thinks, friend or foe. No one else has walked in my shoes. They can judge and dismiss all they want. I shall not be moved!

The last leg of the tripod of defense may seem a bit surprising.  To reign.  It’s bold, I know, but what I mean is to reign over your own life. Own the things you can control and let go of the things you can’t. Be you, and do it full blast! The more they try to crush you, the more you rise! Double down defiantly against the tyranny of the inferior!

An example of that is when I started weight training last fall despite continuous and ever escalating harassment.  Despite being dog tired all the time, and getting a cold once a month like clockwork, I started working out for the first time in about 12 or so years.  I was inspired by a book by David Goggins called “Can’t Hurt Me”.  I highly recommend it.

So, get out there and reign over your mind, your emotions, your talents, your life!  Take help if and when you can get it, and don’t shut out family and friends even though they may piss you off sometimes with their misunderstanding.  No human is an island. You’ll need allies, but you’ve got to have your own body, mind and soul in the right place first. And remind yourself every day that: I believe in myself! I can do it! I shall not be moved! I will overcome! I will Resist, Rise, Reign!!!

Editor’s note: a friend who read this entry posted a comment, which I chose not to approve because it was a bit sarcastic and even felt a little bit mocking. I’m sure that wasn’t the intention, but I just didn’t want to allow any negativity to spoil the post. (I will note that this friend is very good about reading my posts and nudging me when I don’t post for a long time. I appreciate both those things. But I think he misinterpreted the part about starting to workout despite harassment. I was not saying that I’m harassed during workouts, but that the harassment has been constant in every aspect of my life for years on end and I began working out in that environment, despite external negative pressures. I took a positive, healthy action in the midst of petty people trying to drag me down. Perhaps I’m tooting my own horn in saying that, but hey, I deserve it. If you don’t believe in yourself, no one else will. And if they still don’t, double down.

How I met my bully

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I had a paper route when I was a kid. I think it was from about 6th to 8th grades. It was a small town rag, the Bangor Daily News, eight pages or so. Pretty light work. Good thing since it was a whole dollar for the two week collection period. Guess I’m dating myself.

I remember delivering it through all kinds of weather. A record summer where it was in the 90’s about every day all summer. An ice storm which found me teetering on the edge of the curb as if I stood at the top of a hundred foot precipice, desperately trying to save face and not tumble over the edge in an embarrassing array of flailing limbs.  The jock who delivered the bigger regional newspaper in the same part of town, looked on with a sort of bemused suspense from across the street. I managed to recover my balance, long enough to take a step and then fall anyway.  No harm was done.

Then there was the thunderstorm that blew my umbrella inside out, and the time I went to put up my umbrella, but when I pushed the button, it flew right off the handle on to the sidewalk. And then opened. Good times.

I look back now and laugh, and value the character building experience. Some of that character building came in a different way, which I value even more, though it’s not so funny.

I had several encounters with an older kid and his sidekick/friend. To this day, I’m not sure if he wanted to fight me and was pushing me to that end, or if he just wanted to see how much I would tolerate.

What I do know is that I was totally passive in those meetings. I talked back to him, kind of defensively, but I didn’t raise a fist, or shove him or block him or anything physical. I tried to just keep walking. They would walk along with me, but block my way at some point. It wasn’t that I was refusing to be violent, or making a conscious decision to be forgiving or turn the other cheek. I simply didn’t want to deal with it.

I didn’t want the other boys to be there, to bother me, or even to talk to me. I just wanted to deliver my papers and make the long walk back home to resume reading the latest fantasy epic I’d picked up at Waldenbooks at the mall. (Now I’m really dating myself.)

I couldn’t understand why anyone would do that to another person. It was so alien to me. Unfathomable. And I suppose that led to the feeling that I was doing something to deserve it, that I must have annoyed him somehow.

The bully started with verbal antagonizing the first time I saw him and the sidekick. I can’t say for sure how many times I ran into them, but two times were more distinctive.

One was shortly after a snowstorm and in his efforts to pick a fight had me head first in a snowbank. I was trying to get up and he was pushing me down. A car going by honked loudly, and slowed down. That was enough to scare them off for the day.

The other time, the bully was taunting me with a cigarette saying I wouldn’t even know how to smoke it. I said I didn’t and I wouldn’t want one. He flashed his lighter in my face several times, until finally he accidentally caught a bit of my hair with the flame. I remember that he looked genuinely concerned, and he patted the singed hairs out.

Both boys laughed heartily of course, but some part of him felt bad. I thought about the look on his face sometime later, and I knew that he didn’t come from a good family, just by knowing the part of town he was from. I assumed that he was abused, and that’s why he was acting out. Yet, despite all that, he felt bad when he went too far. I could forgive him then.

But again, I can’t say there was any lofty nobility at the time this was going on, except for God’s presence in me. But I think my low energy, depression and anxiety, and low self esteem left me all but paralyzed in the face of a bully I just wanted to avoid.

Perhaps this is why I get so incensed by injustices now. But some kind of reaction is good for me, and anger can be useful when channeled into something constructive. I hope I’ve found a good balance.