Boy meets girl, girl falls in love, blah-blah-blah.
Let me be clear with you from the beginning. This is not that kind of story.
My name is Cait, and I live in the great city of New York. Okay, so maybe I've only lived here for a week and a half...
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I still hadn't turned on my phone by seven o'clock that night. I was too afraid of what I'd find, of the bullies commenting on my Instagram feed, of my dwindling self-esteem.
If I was completely honest, I was also ashamed. It embarrassed me that I let it impact me so much. These strangers - people I have never met and probably never will - doing this to me, and I just let them. I let it happen. Again.
There's a difference between responding to bullies and not letting them win. You don't have to respond to say to them, "Hey, this isn't going to get me down." Winning comes from within, as cliché as that sounds. I've known it for years. But here I was, terrified of these strangers, scared of the things they'd say about me, instead of reminding myself that they don't actually know me and I don't care about what they think.
Bullies will always exist. No matter what we do to try to get rid of them, some people simply enjoy watching others suffer. Sometimes it's not even a malicious intent, it's just the power trip of it. The feeling surging through your veins that you have control over this one moment in time, these words, these actions, on a planet that is hurtling through the universe while we cling to the surface like the tiny specks of life we are.
I've known all of my life that bullying was unacceptable. I've known it was wrong. We're taught it in elementary school, but then we see that standard fall apart. We see middle school and high school bullies gain popularity. We see them succeed when the rules of fairness tell us they should fail. We see the things we were always taught that mattered above all else reduced to nothingness, that people don't matter. That feelings don't matter. That love doesn't matter.
We forget the golden rule. Whatever form of morality you subscribe to, we forget that we are all made of the same recycled atoms. We forget that we breathe the same air, that we have the same goals, that we all just want to be loved. To feel safe. To be happy.
The thing that we so often forget about bullies, the thing that I forgot about bullies, is that we decide if they win or not. We decide if we're going to stay down or if we're going to stand back up. We decide whether to add fuel to the flame, to give them the reaction they're looking for, or if we're going to snuff it out. Drown it with love and remember our inner strength.
You can run, sure, but then what? What have you learned? What have you accomplished?
I sighed, flopping my head back up on the sofa, and stared at the ceiling. It was a struggle, one I was fighting in that very moment, but I didn't want to let it go down like that. I just...I didn't know what to do next. I didn't know how to respond. How to stay strong.
Sometimes you remember what you should do, but you forget how to do it.
"I don't think I could be a celebrity," Val said from her bed where she'd been cuddled up watching Netflix for the past hour, drawing me from my thoughts. "People are assholes."
