Schools, bullying, Facebook and legislation.

Another teen lost to suicide because of bullying

So, my homelife was really variable - sometimes wonderful, sometimes horrendous.

My school life was also variable. I loved schoolwork, enjoyed many of my teachers, and liked being challenged.

I had no friends most of the time.  I was odd, fat, initially christian fundamentalist and strange, poor, MPD, and not always hiding it well, and living in my head to cope with trauma a lot.

My best friends were from books, and starting at about 8 I wanted to be a vulcan so I wouldn't have to feel anything.

I was bullied.

JK- Gr 1 -  Her name was Elever, and she bullied me in the Christian school I went to.  When I left, she told me she didn't hate me.  I had no idea.

Grade 2 -  I went to a school I could walk to when I was 7, I was chased home by bullies, Chris and some other guy, who kept me from getting into my building, and beat me up.

Grade3-7 I was bullied by the gym teacher, and a rich girl named Heather at the gifted program I was bussed to. She and I had a rivalry, but she was clearly better, and we both knew it.

Grade 7, my one friend left, because the people in the school were jerks.

Grade 8 I got sent away (which is the subject of another post, maybe, someday), but I came back to a girl-disaster in my school, and re-friended a best friend from years ago.  We spent the year being chased to the bus, getting mooed at, and being ostracized.  The group accepted her back, but not me.  Maybe it's because I don't forgive and forget.

Grade 9 I survived on auto-pilot, with no friends, attending a "group" for students with difficult home lives - an emancipated minor, two siblings whose parents beat them, and a few others I don't remember.

Grade 10, I switched to a private boarding school - I was the wrong kind of person, not christian enough, and again everyone hated me, but I met my best gay friend who kept me alive for the next 15 years.

Grade 11 Half a year at the boarding school, I try to kill myself, and am expelled, then out to a public school, this time an Academy, so uniforms, and try to get out as fast as possible.  I join the SAC, get some credit for university.

Grade 12 - keep my head down, pass unnoticed, get out. No one hates me, and I make it out.

I used to escape onto the BBS network, and talk to people online.  I used to escape into books.  I used to escape into making friends from other schools, who didn't know the people who were hating me.  I didn't have many, but a few who didn't know what a freak I was.

If I'd had a Facebook with all the hate and rage and bile from the people who were maing my life miserable available not only during my school life, but also all the rest of the time, as well as for the entire world to see, I am not sure I would have been able to compartmentalize things well enough to avoid ending my life.

I attempted suicide once, and almost succeeded.

I self-harmed, I had eating disorders, I hated myself.

I can't imagine having available to me a public forum for other people to help me hate myself.  Especially as a teenager when I was already so incredibly vulnerable.

As a society we need to teach our youth to be better people.

The culture of difference, of "othering", of sameness and conformity, and media bombardment by imagery of perfection - these are all contributors to the issues causing bullying.

Girls gain status in social realms through possessions, boys and bullying each other.
Boys through sports, achievements, possessions including girls and money, and violence.

This is the problem.

Girls are still left with very few "legitimate" avenues of gaining status in our culture, particularly teenage culture, and bullying is one of the ways to gain status.

Achievement needs to be a way to gain peer status among girls. Whether at sports, intellectual pursuits, or other skillsets.

The commodification of "girl power has been a horrifying phenomenon, as it has eliminated the essential ideology behind the original message which was the egalitarian ideology that girls are as good as, and as valued as boys. Girls have the same innate abilities, and the same potential for achievement, and that it is possible to be a girl, and to achieve whatever one wants to, in whatever way one wants to.

The concept of "girl power" has become little more than a motif to be emblazoned with a few flowers onto a toddler t-shirt.

It is appalling.

Girl power needs to be rethought, and re-empowered as the potential for change within adolescent female community as something to create powerful social networks without status deliniation, without harmful class and race boundaries, and without the necessity of gaining power at the expense of another.

The lack of intersectional anaysis including the powerless nature of femaleness and childhood becoming adulthood leaves a gap where lives are slipping through.

Can we legislate the gap away? close a loophole? Put the lid onto the pandora's box opened by the internet's ready availability of blogs, facebook, free hosting, and all the tools available to legitimate authors, as well as those with the intent to do harm?

I don't think so.

I don't know what we can do.  Some people are suggesting work camps, harsh(er) sentencing for bullies, loss of privilege, school sanctions.

I know that when bullying was brought to the attention of the school in my case, they held a "talking circle", and the bullies promised to stop, later threatening me and the other girl with renewed violence in the event of further reporting.

In most cases, it never occurred to me to report it. Bullying was a fairly constant part of my school life, and it was easier to avoid other students than to report it or deal with them. Reporting it often exacerbated the situation, as schools are powerless to deal with violence off school grounds, and parents are reluctant to become involved in what is seen as"normal."

Perhaps in the age of Facebook, where these things are documented, there is greater accountability. 

Connecting with the cosmos, and becoming sXe

I see drug use as a form of the sacred. A way of connecting with the cosmos, moving outside yourself and gaining greater awareness than you might otherwise have.  Marijuana helps with pain and seizures, and made a big difference to me.  Psychotropics engage parts of the consciousness and the brain which are normally disengaged.

That said, I have made a conscious decision not to, anymore.  I do not drink, because it interferes with my seizure medication.

I don't think we make enough space for the magical in our spirituality anymore.  There is no room for personal experience, for mysticism, and for experience.

My transcendent experiences were pretty much all positive, I was either with good friends at wonderful, community events, in loving homes, or outdoors in the beauty of nature.

The worst that happened was that I got sunburnt.

Pretty boys

They're pretty, young, handsome, perfect, able-bodied, well-loved, social, have families that love them...

In fact, the young men in Get Up's new 'It's Time' campaign for equal marriage have only one obstacle to their idyllic life - marriage inequality. 

And that's the problem with this campaign which is entirely lacking in intersectional analysis of any kind.  I can hear the advertising agency now:

Shouldn't we include a person of colour?
Don't make it about issues.

But don't gay people have problems with their families?
Families will love them when they conform to societal ideals.

Aren't we making this unrealistic?
We want to make it simple for people to understand.

Aren't we making them too perfect?
They should be likeable, you know, TV likeable.

The message:
Gay people are just like us, only gay.  All they need to fit in is marriage rights, and then they'll be as close to normal as possible, and stop all this messy, sexual identity politics nonsense.

Some of us are republicans, or not, some want 2.5 kids, some want a house in the suburbs, some are urban, some rural, some want to be single, and have sex in tearooms and bathhouses, some want to pay for sex, some want a multitude of partners, some want a multitude of relationships, some want monogamy, some polygamy, and the variety is endless.

Marriage equality will be true when all queers can get married, in the ways they want to get married.

Legal rights offered to those conforming widens the gap further, strengthening pressure from family and society for gay couples to marry and conform in the way that common-law heterosexual couples experience it.  But queer relationships have a history of not conforming to the status quo, and encouragement to conform to a heterosexual model stresses queer relationships more than heterosexual ones.

I think that perhaps the pressure of producing children on childfree couples might be a similar one.  Childfree couples live a life that is radically different than what is considered "normal" within heterosexual culture, and the pressure to conform by producing children requires not only that they push back, but also explanations, many of which are intrusive and personal.

I was married.  I wanted to be.  It made a great deal of difference when I was in hospital, and when I was sick.  Saying that my wife was there, was vastly different than saying "my partner", or "my girlfriend."  Regardless of the comfort level of the hospital staff, there is a certain level of respect that is required legally when someone is a spouse.

It's very different.  I'm scared of being different again, but I still understand that it is not acceptable to take a privilege at the expense of someone else.  Some privilege I cannot help but have.  I can be aware of those, and notice them, and deal with them, and do what I can to mitigate the impact of that privilege on others.

I can still try not to grab for things which others do not have.

The second time

I had been having trouble with being tired, and being out of sorts a lot.  Couldn't figure out what it was, exactly, but it seemed like I was just short tempered. 

That day, I felt dizzy while walking down the stairs. I passed it off as jitters about going out, needing to eat.  It wasn't the first time.

Less than half an hour later I came to, sitting on the sofa, surrounded by firemen and paramedics, having just had my first tonic-clonic (grand mal) seizure, and then heading to a local hospital.  It was New Year's Eve.  I spent it in the ER.

That was the first of the seizures, and the first of the strokes. Altogether, there were 3 strokes, and 5 or 6 major seizures, and innumerable minor ones.  They figured out it was Lupus, with blood clotting disorders, central nervous system involvement, seizures, obviously, and I got a bunch of new medications. 

That was the second time I was given a 50% chance of survival. 
That time it was surviving the next 5 years. 
I have 13 months to go.

It would take another two years to figure out that the short-temperedness had to do with being in pain, because I have excellent internal mechanisms for blocking pain, and gritting my teeth to get through what I have to get through.  It just doesn't leave much room for interpersonal interaction.

The first time

The car is dark.  I remember blurry lights, and it feels like it's raining. It might not have been, but that's the sensation.  The man driving is very very angry, but also very kind to me. He is angry at the passenger, who is the Dean of Students at my boarding school.  I am passing in and out of consciousness in the back seat, and he keeps reminding me to stay awake, gently, saying my name.  his voice is kind, not like the others here, who do not like me.  I am different.  I disrupt their ideas of "nice".   I have always  disrupted people's ideas of nice.  There was always more to me, more to be seen, more going on. more.

I don't remember arriving at the hospital. I do remember drinking activated charcoal - yeuch. And lying in a hospital bed, alone, with an IV, and that steady drip, and everyone being very kind.

That was the first time I had a 50% chance of living through something.
On that occasion, it was through the night.