Bullied.

Dear Reader,

I know my blog has been a little blah lately because I'm trying to only write when I have something to say. Well I do. It might be a little morbid and a little broken-record, but I really want to talk about this and hear what you have to say.

Everyone, I don't care who you are, has been bullied at one time or another. We all do it. We all talk about someone behind their backs, maybe not as much as others, but we have committed a social crime. I'm 19 and I'm still bullied, I'm just mature enough to handle it better than I did in middle school.

In middle school I was a target of my ex-boyfriends NEW girlfriend. She wanted to make damn sure that I wasn't going to steal him back from her... which I never had plans to in the first place. She got her volleyball team to jump me in the hallway one morning and tell me that I was so ugly that no guy would ever look at me. They told me that if I ever talked to her boyfriend again that they would be back and hurt me again. I was so afraid of these muscular tall girls that I didn't say anything. I thought it was funny that she had sent her volleyball team because they were bigger than her, but she wasn't even there. She would write terrible things about me online, post conversations she had about me that were horrible to places where I could see, and created an online hate page about me.

Me and my friends were just appalled about what was going on. We tried to fight back, say equally mean stuff etc. but it never ended. I can promise you that I never even considered hurting her or posting hate pages. I did bump shoulders with her in the hallway a lot, sometimes she would come out of nowhere and jam into me. Besides venting about it to my friends a lot, I didn't really know how to make it stop or "even the score" so to say.

Then one day this boy had dumped her and that's when I got hurt. She and her friends found me in the bathroom at lunch and started screaming things I couldn't hear. "You had something to do with this" and "you're the reason she's heartbroken" and "home wrecking slut" and many more. Then someone grabbed my arm and swung me around into the sinks and then into the towel dispenser. The girls were scratching my arms where they grabbed me and were just swinging me around and around into things. That's when I hit my head on the edge of the paper towel dispenser and started bleeding all over the place. When I started to cry they all scattered. A teacher found me.

I can still remember my mothers face. It was a mixture of anger, horror, revenge, and sadness. She asked why I didn't tell her and I said that I honestly didn't know it would get to that point, and it wasn't like I hadn't been mean back. My mother demanded to know every name and for someone to pay for my stitches. I can still remember my mom chewing out the other girls mother, waving around the print-outs of the hate page her daughter had written, and then demanding action. The other girls mother tried to defend her daughter but the bruises on my arm and the cut on my forehead silenced her soon enough. She was expelled, the volleyball team was suspended until further notice, and there was legal trouble for her about the website she made about me.

I still remember crying over the mean stuff that not only her, but people I thought were nice, people I didn't even know were saying about me. I still remember feeling anger and resentment at everything that had happened. I didn't handle it well... because by the time I had it was too late. I just remember crying so much because it was so mean.

Now I'm older, in college, and there are still mean girl everywhere. There's no beating them, no running away. I can handle myself better now. I roll my eyes at the immaturity. The way I see it, is that I've already dealt with it once before with girls who were at least acting their age... 13. I am not willing to act with college girls being bullies. Never again. I'm a lot stronger.

If you've ever been bullied, how did you handle it? I'd love to hear your story.

Lou