The Club

Harassment. 

Noun. 

Aggressive pressure, intimidation, or coercion. 

I’m sure everyone has heard the word “bully” before. Yes, I said it. Bully, a word so elementary that it sends bubbles of laughter up through my throat every time it exits my mouth. Bully. Bullied. Bullying. Whatever tense you decide to use the word, it all comes from the same root, and that root is “bully”.

I don’t know about you, but when I hear the word “bully”, I picture a playground. Tiny shoes covering tiny feet that sink into a giant sea of tiny pebbles, rusted swing-sets that you can just barely hear squeaking over the sound of laughter and shouting. The sound most people would define as general happiness. I mean, what’s happier than a  group of little kids that don’t know half of the stuff going on around them? What can possibly be more care free than uneducated, inexperienced little minds that have set life goals of getting to the playground first? Perfection in a three foot six little body right?

So back the the word. Bully. I picture tears running down a toddler’s soft red cheeks, a scraped knee with small playground rocks embedded softly into the skin, the wails of an upset child. The satisfaction of the one in charge of the damage, the young one not knowing quite yet that it is socially unacceptable to hurt other people. 

I picture an elementary school hallway, a stereotypical nerdy kid with red hair, glasses, and a face resembling a connect the dots worksheet filled in with red ink, being slammed into a locker. And of course, the “bully” delivers the ever so needed punch line that goes a little something like this- “Give me your lunch money!”

I can see a middle school football player, cocky as ever, picking on the weaker man. Swirlies being given, half-hearted punches delivered, text books being knocked out of hands. It’s all so . . . cliche, isn’t it? The stuff you see in movies? 

But it stops there. Now that we’re at high school, the word “bully” seems to erase itself from the picture. “Bully” and “High School” don’t coexist in my mind. They don’t work out. Can you really imagine a seventeen year old asking an underclassman for his lunch money or giving swirlies in the high school bathroom? High school seems to be the place where it stops, but at the same time it doesn’t. It never does, really, it just matures along with the people. 

This so called “bullying” continues through life and even into adulthood. I’ve seen adults be rude to other adults, make immature comments or do something completely out of character for a grown man or woman to do. 

Bullying doesn’t stop, it just changes. So why can’t the word change as well? I mean, yeah, there are other words you could use, but to be honest, in certain situations, the word doesn’t quite do the justice that it was meant to do. 

Do you know how much it angers me to watch the news and hear “Teen commits suicide due to depression caused by bullying”? Do you know how much it pushes my buttons? I honestly can’t even contain myself when I hear things like that. Those words are said so lackadaisically, so carelessly, like it means nothing. But it means something.

I may not be an adult. I may be seventeen years old, but I’ve seen things in this world that have matured me more than a lot quicker than I would’ve liked.

I’ve seen real depression, not that cheesy stuff you see in the LifeTime movies. I’ve seen real pain, not that thing that over dramatic eighth grade girls wear as a mask over their attention seeking faces. I’ve seen agony. I’ve seen suffering. I’ve seen suicide. Self harm. Cries for help. I’ve seen it all. And let me tell you, not one bit of it was caused by swirlies in the bathroom or lunch money deficiency. People don’t self harm because someone knocked their text books out of their hands. People don’t kill themselves over being pushed into a locker or being called a nerd. There is an unseen motive behind all the self harm and suicide going on in the world.

And it isn’t “bullying.”