Bullies, Outcasts, and Suicidal Thoughts: Why 50 Is Better than 14

Bullies, Outcasts, and Suicidal Thoughts: Why 50 Is Better than 14by Lorna Tedder · in Personal Evolution

Hi, dear friends and followers, this is the second part about child abuse and bullying. None of us who have had this experience in our past really relish much talking about it, but as the lady in this post says, it seems and feels like it is of importance to educate others on this with the hopes they can prevent their child from going the same route we did. It is a very lonely and painful route. Thank you very much for visiting and reading my blog.

In the last couple of years, blogging about victims of bullies–particularly those that result in suicides or “merely” suicidal thoughts–has become downright trendy, and perhaps that’s why I’ve resisted. It’s not an area of my life I talk about much, because I’ve discovered that being 50 is a hell of a lot more fantastic than being 14. For me, at least. I don’t think much of it, but I’ve been reminded this week. After all this time, that little outcast who never felt she fit in or had a place where she belonged is still there underneath, even though she grew up to find places where she fit and even to relish being different.
Yes. Yes, it does get better.

Two years ago, I started a colossal project to digitize all the paper in my life. That means that important papers in the mail, old tax papers, even old letters are scanned and kept in two backup locations. It took around a year to get through 9 file cabinets of paper representing my home business. My 600+ square foot home office now needs less than half that space due to this project.

Next, I digitized important financial papers–tax records, old deeds, paid off loans, divorce papers. Last summer, I was down to more personal boxes of letters, research, and even–truly an excavation–the first fiction I wrote in my teen and pre-teen years, complete with paper doll cut-outs from magazines to illustrate my early spy novels written in purple (my favorite color) ink

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This week, I hit the very last stash of paper…the deepest-held pains and the longest-held treasures. These were my “nothing books,” also known as “anything books” or “blank books.” I think I was 12 or 13 when I started my first one. Just a hardcover journal, unusual at that time, with around 200 or so blank pages to fill with my thoughts, dreams, ideas, and lots of poetry. I named them according to the theme from those 2 or 3 months of my life that I recorded in the days before blogs, titles like Life Flows On, Anyhow, Melting Slowly, He Waits on a Distant Planet, Better Left Unsaid, andWillow Rover. This was long before my “poetry-novel,” Nails for my Coffin. Yep, I was a chipper little thing, downright Goth in the boogie-oogie-oogie 1970’s, but it was very much a reflection of the isolation I felt in my world.

So much of that pain of isolation is captured in these old handwritten books of mine, whether as rambling poems or short “diary” entries.

Some people are bullied or shunned for their sexuality or their weight or just no reason at all. For me, it was almost always how I thought. Sometimes, it was about religion, but mostly it was about how I thought. I’ve always been different. I think differently, and that’s not something most people can accept. As an adult, I know generally how to fit into the structure. Even so, the colleagues and bosses who’ve encouraged me to “think outside the box” since the 1990’s are quick to tell me to get back into the box when it comes to my ideas about God, relationships, sex, publishing….

But the first time I remembered being treated alternately as an outcast and then bullied, it was early May when I was only 9 years old. And it was a temporary music teacher who incited the incident. Rather than simply excusing me from singing a pop song that wasn’t aligned with my belief system–no one would have known I was only moving my lips and not vocalizing with the other 100 kids–he singled me out to defend my beliefs, beliefs that no one else shared, beliefs that elicited laughter from my peers. And from him.

His name was Dan. I remember his last name, too. The song? “Jeremiah Was a Bullfrog.”

I remember the laughter, the pointing, the constant ridicule after that. I also distinctly remember hiding at home so my parents wouldn’t know how upset I was, sitting and crying on the front door steps alone, realizing for the first time in my exceedingly young life how different I was from my peers…and contemplating suicide.
Seriously.

At the age of 9.
I’ve heard of child suicides over the years, and while other adults shake their heads in confusion, I do not lack comprehension.

After that, my secret was out. Both to everyone else…and to a little 9-year-old girl who didn’t know before that there was something different about her. I was the kid who was different. Or for those who lacked the sense to employ that euphemism, I was “strange” or “weird.” The fact that I saw things in life in a different way was enough to make me a target.

The bullying was always emotional but in my case, it was almost never physical. The closest was a 5th grade incident I wrote about in The Justice Card in Tarot: That Integrity Thing

To be continued

Thank you very much again, dear friends, for visiting my blog. Please share your thoughts with us, if you will. Have a great day. 

✿ ڰۣ❤In Loving Light from the Fairy Lady❤ڰۣ✿