SCHOOL BULLY I FORGIVENESS

Keep Your Friends Close — Keep Your Enemies Closer

True friends lift you up, while frenemies drag you down

I stood in line with the other school girls — each of us, anxiously waiting for our turn, and praying we’d be the lucky one!

We all wanted to be her best friend. She was, by far, the prettiest girl in the class. We had been instructed to form a queue and ask, “Will you be my best friend?” We had to then painfully wait in anticipation for who she would choose. Would I be picked — she and I did almost share the same birthday — two days apart to be precise!

She sat cross-legged with her back against the wall wearing the prettiest summer school dress I had ever seen. The skirt splayed out — fashioned as a peacock’s train; the symbolic pride matching her self-importance. I don’t remember who won that coveted position, nonetheless, I was still worthy as a second-rate friend and played over at her house during those formative years.

A wealthy couple had adopted her; a dream I had always ached for. I even questioned if my mother was my real mother. I didn’t want her to be. We were dirt poor — even though my mother had grown up in a middle-class setting. Mom was the least maternal and most fertile woman I ever knew. Our house had the barest necessities — not even heating, apart from a fire stove that heated the water; not forgetting the two old-fashioned fireplaces in the front and top rooms.

I loved going to my friend’s warm and beautiful house and even took to cleaning the chaotic but modern-styled kitchen her family took for granted. I was used to cleaning being that my mother had us disciplined to a military level. I would daydream that it was my house and my parents.

One gorgeous summer’s day, I was walking the short journey back to her house from school — my friend had made me carry all her books. She walked ahead pushing her new bike (mine were always bent and second-hand), chatting away with her friend — both completely ignoring me. I remember feeling sad, head down, as I felt their disdain for me — and knowing all too well I had given her freely — all of my dignity.

I felt ostracized by all but one of the girls in my class; the one that happened to be ostracized too. I would stick up for her when she was being bullied. Even my teacher, never praising or encouraging me, would coldheartedly challenge the authenticity of my artwork, telling me I had traced it — or that my creative pieces belonged to a different pupil.

One Christmas everyone received a card apart from me. I remember how I was unnoticed, as they excitedly opened their cards. All selfishly unaware of their lack of thoughtfulness or even some kindness.

When I gratefully moved on to my senior school in the neighboring town, she followed. Fortunately, we were selected in different Houses. I couldn’t believe the irony when on the first day I was seated next to another one of the unfriendly junior schoolgirls, whose family had happened to move to the town during the summer holidays. We never gelled — not until decades later via Facebook — when nostalgia hit our middle-something lives.

On the school bus journey home, she would throw abuse at me, and then rip apart my family. Our bus stop was right outside my house, and so the shame my twin and I felt from the dysfunction and poverty at home spread through to a larger, unpopular adolescent audience. I had no idea what shame was back then. All I understood at that time was the need to anesthetize that abhorrent black pit of unworthiness with as much addiction as possible. And I managed that by the time I was fourteen.

Looking back, I can reflect and understand more about how the relationship with ourselves, is developed and nurtured by the relationship we have with our parents/caregivers. This is the foundation that either helps you to stand tall or makes you feel there is something inherently wrong with you — a prime target for bullies.

Bullies become bullies because they are struggling with their sense of self or family’s dysfunctional dynamics. Perhaps my friend, being adopted, had issues with abandonment.

I had bumped into her when I was eighteen and I had started to blossom as a woman. Out of nowhere, all manner of people were telling me how beautiful I was. And at times, I even dared to believe them. I bumped into her taking it for granted she would have matured, but she still abused me. Was it jealousy? It didn’t appear so. That was the last I saw or heard of her until many years later.

My twin and I held one of our fortieth birthday events at a restaurant that could hold large parties and at a location that suited everybody involved. We had a crowd of friends and family celebrating with us. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw an elderly man approach me where I was seated. He put his hand on my shoulder and said, “Chantal, we loved having you come over to our house, we loved you.” It was her father, a gentle and kind man.

It lifted my heart as I found his words to be healing. I looked across searching the room for her, and discovered her uninterest — as she sat there unsmiling — with her blank-faced mother. Her face had aged so much, and if I hadn’t spoken with her father, I could have quite easily missed her for a bland and frumpy-looking woman.

I took it for karma at that time, nonetheless, a decade and some later, I have worked on myself deeply and my heart would only want her to have that same self-compassion that I am working on.

Hurt people hurt people.

“Hurt people hurt people. That’s how pain patterns get passed on, generation after generation after generation. Break the chain today. Meet anger with sympathy, contempt with compassion, cruelty with kindness. Greet grimaces with smiles. Forgive and forget about finding fault. Love is the weapon of the future.”― Yehuda Berg

Thank you for reading

© Chantal Weiss 2023 All Rights Reserved