Now Playing: Mean by Taylor Swift (and I can see you years from now in a bar, talking over a football game with that same big loud opinion but nobody's listening, drunk and grumbling on about how I can't do anything...but all you are is mean)
How do you feel when you see people have been mocking you behind your back for months? How do you feel when people say the most outrageous, insulting things about a blog that has been your pride and joy since you were twelve years old? How do you feel when half your classmates cheer when someone calls you a whore? How do you feel when people you thought were friends not only stood and watched as you are bullied, but join in the fun?
Nothing. You don't feel anything. Everything is just numb and hollow when you don't trust anyone anymore. How do I know who is a friend now?
But I'm not apologising for anything. I am myself, and I can never be ashamed of that.
Everyone remembers the first time they became a target.
I was six, and a baby socialite. I loved people and people loved me. And then, when I was six, during writing time, I wrote something. I dug it up a few years after and could only see the incoherent ramblings of a six year old, but my teacher saw talent. And from that day on, I was branded.
And that was the day I remember very vividly the bullying beginning.
Being bullied as a writer is particularly unique. People, society, have always been afraid of writers. It's why women and the poor were banned from reading or even kept illiterate. It's why the punishment for writing or saying something that the people didn't want to hear was sometimes the same as the punishment for murder. Because once learned you can't remove words, or ideas, from someone, and you can't stop words from spreading. Even a little girl like me can be seen as a threat to some people.
My bullies have always tried to silence me. Some of them made me so afraid I could hardly breathe, let alone speak. Some of them mocked whatever I wrote or said so mercilessly I felt compelled to stay quiet. There are lots of ways to get a scared little girl to shut up.
But they never fully succeeded. What I say, what I write - even just the act of writing itself - is so integral to who I am that I can't ever let that go, no matter how intimidated I am. You may as well tell me not to breathe.
But more importantly, I'm not that scared little girl anymore. You can't bully me out of anything. I call the shots in my own life. In the words of Elizabeth I, I shall have one mistress here, and no master.
So I'm going to keep writing. For a long time people have been out to shut down this blog and to scare me out of the cybersphere entirely, but that's not happening anytime soon. I have no doubt that the bullying will escalate. I have no doubt that this won't be the last time people mock me behind my back and indulge in a little slut shaming. But I'm still kicking, and so is my writing.
Be fearless.
1 comment:
First reaction:
And silencing writers is the lowest of the low.
No, I don't remember the first time I became a target. Or the fifth, or the tenth, or even the hundredth. After a while, it becomes very arbitrary. Alienating; disconnecting; ostracising; isolating. Not rational, not decent and not fair.
I remember also that for every target there is a source. Perhaps a hundred sources.
(Yes, I do remember seeing that particular mockage - in January 2011 it was written - I only saw it in October-November 2012. I will only say that it was about makeup and religion).
Branded for talent. And how talent at five or six years old may be predictive even if it isn't terribly measurable.
It is at least as bad as hounding someone for actual or perceived deficits, with or without correction or coercion.
And as for shutting up a girl (or anyone) when she is already scared ...
It does stand out, especially when I think of my own experience of support + indifference + uncertainty.
Just how easy it is to drive someone out of their feelings and their reason.
And how hard it is to cheer when they have themselves again. When they are themselves and they're not ashamed.
But there's more to it than not being ashamed.
Thinking about this, Starlight:
"It's why the punishment for writing or saying something that the people didn't want to hear was sometimes the same as the punishment for murder. Because once learned you can't remove words, or ideas, from someone, and you can't stop words from spreading. Even a little girl like me can be seen as a threat to some people."
These last two sentences in particular. It's interesting to think that non-linguistic ideas are no easier to lose than linguistically encoded ones. Which is why I think in words plus.
Words are memes - they're intended to spread and ensnare.
I wonder how much this teacher knew about the "incoherent ramblings" of six-year-olds. Or how those six-year-olds see their own and others work years later. It's been my experience that early childhood teachers and staff work in their own silo.
In the end, it's not about the words. It's about the thoughts; the relations; the connections; the growth and development.
This is something that people who silence writers have a dim understanding of. Or else they understand too well and they use this in their silencing.
Post a Comment