Warning: this one is long, personal, and not an easy read emotionally.  Bullying is discussed throughout. Just letting you know in advance.

On the first day of first grade, I was coming in from the first recess and I met my first bullies.

There were two of them.  I’ll call them Mike and Dave.  Yes, those are their real first names -  I don’t want to give them any psuedonyms, they can own this if they somehow ever run across it.  One of them asked me what my name was.  Not realizing that I was about to experience the first of many days - no, years of bullying I said “it’s Tia!” and smiled.

Dave smiled a wicked, evil smile and said “Tia? like as in Tia Pee-yah? Do you wear diapers?” I didn’t know what to say. I just stared at them as the smile faded from my face. What I remember after that? Mike egged Dave on.  Mike said things that have faded from my memory. Dave finally said “Wait! I know! We’ll call you Tit-Ball Tia!”

And they laughed. They laughed and ran away.

But they kept coming back.  Day after day.  Recess after recess.  In the lunchroom.  In classes where they sat close enough to whisper evil little words never caught by any teacher. In P.E. (I don’t care what you say, Dodgeball is an evil game designed solely for the bullies to pummel the crap out of their targets.) Anywhere I was, they were.

They would call me Tit-Ball Tia every time they could get away with it - which was pretty much all the time unless there was a teacher within 3 feet. At six, I’m sure the words “tits” and “balls” were about as far as Dave’s “dirty word” vocabulary had progressed.  It’s a stupid little name.  No bully worth his salt would come up with it… but it stabbed me to the heart. Every time it was hissed at me under someone’s breath in a classroom, or flung at me after school as a parting shot, I died a little.

It’s stupid, as I said… but you have no idea what it took me to just write that.

I so want to erase it and tell this story without it. I’m 44 years old and I can’t bring myself to say that stupid, childish, silly meaningless phrase out loud.  Not without tears and the heartache of old wounds never really healed.  My inner six year old takes over whenever I even think of that phrase and I start choking up.

They called me a lot of other things - fat, stupid, ugly, useless - I could sit here and list them for a long while.  But somehow Mike & Dave just seemed to sense that calling me that one made-up name was a surefire way to make me feel worthless and empty and alone.

For awhile, another boy joined them in their games.  He stuck it out from about 3rd to 6th grade - then something changed in him and he just stopped.  I don’t know what it was - but he did stop. Because of that? I’ve decided to keep his name out of this.  It just feels right to me.

Later on, around 4th grade, they were joined by my first female bully.  She wasn’t really friends with them, but hey - they had a mutual interest in making every day a living hell for me!  So Carolyn (yep, her real name) joined Mike & Dave in making my life miserable.  She would tell me every day and at every opportunity how she was going to beat me up - just as soon as I was alone.  She picked up the vile nicknames and would often collude with them in finding new ways to torment me.  Oddly, one of their favorites was to call me ‘a baby’ due to the fact that I was short.  Until Carolyn came around, I was the shortest kid in my class.  She was, like Dave, one of those smaller kids who turn mean to make sure they aren’t the victim.

For the most part, they tried to make sure I was alone when they struck.  So if I was with one of the girls I was friends with, they would usually go find easier prey.  My friend Jeffe defended me (and saved me unknowingly) more than once in grade school. Bullies are cowards when it comes down to it.  They’re usually victims of some form of bullying themselves.  Whether it’s another kid that bullies them, or a sibling, or even worse a parent - they learn the behavior and pass it on, but inside they’re just as sure they are worthless and unloved as they try to make their own victims feel.  So when it comes to the courage that goes hand-in-hand with good self-esteem? They lack it completely.

I did have one dear, close friend who they didn’t mind bullying me in front of. That’s because she was bullied herself.  Mercilessly. No, I won’t out her here.  But she was a grade higher than I was - so her bullies were looked up to by mine.  Her bullies were worse than mine.  So when she was around, mine felt perfectly safe being evil to both of us at the same time.  It wasn’t until she moved away in 5th grade that she spent a single day in peace; going to school without feeling that icy fear in the pit of your stomach that comes from realizing that for some unknowable reason, these people truly hate you and there’s nothing you can do to change that.

Unfortunately for me, despite my pleading, begging, and constant attempts to get my parents to either move or to put me in a different school - I went from 1st grade through 12th grade with some of my bullies. I always envied her escape.

Mike & Dave had less power over me by high school because they had less power in general.  As we went from grade school to middle school to high school - they were marginalized themselves.  Yes, they stayed bullies, but somehow they never got really good at it, so they ended up just being annoyances.  They gave way to my teenage bullies.

If you haven’t already twigged to it, by the time I was in high school, I had no self-esteem whatsoever.  I never even dreamed of being ‘that girl that went away over the Summer and came back suddenly cool, beautiful, and popular’.  I did dream constantly about what it would be like to go to a new school full of people who didn’t know they were supposed to hate me right off the bat.

Once, for one day, I experienced that when I spent time touring a private school my parents briefly considered sending me to for 7th grade.  I don’t know - maybe I would’ve managed to escape the bullying if they had let me go there.  Or maybe I would’ve just met new bullies.  Never can say.  But for one day I was treated as if I was a perfectly normal girl who might be a new classmate & potential friend.  It was surreal… and the happiest day of my grade school existence.

But we’re up to high school now, aren’t we?

When I was fifteen, I would wear men’s shirts with the sleeves rolled up, jeans, and Dr. Scholl’s sandals to school every day no matter the weather.  I think I thought that maybe if I wore the same thing every day people wouldn’t notice me.  Maybe I’d be invisible.  Maybe I’d be on the periphery and they would forget to bully me because I blended in.  That, by the way? Was an ineffective strategy.  It just gave them something more to work with

Also at fifteen, my self-image was fixed into what it would be for the next 10 years.  I developed a crush on a boy who was cute and popular.  He ran with the crowd I always thought everyone wanted to be a part of (not knowing that high school was no picnic for most of them either.)  I only told one of my best friends about my crush.  We got in a fight.  She went and told him I liked him.  I vividly remember starting to close the yellow door to my locker and suddenly finding him on the other side of it.  He said “Hey, I hear you like me,” and I mumbled something incoherent about having to go to class.  He said “Look, you’re a nice girl… it’s a pity you’re so ugly, or I’d go out with you. But I have a reputation to maintain, you know?”

I closed the locker, locked it, and said “of course.  I’ve got to go now.” And tried to keep from falling apart outwardly on the way to my class.

It’s-a-pity-you’re-so-ugly-or-I’d-go-out-with-you looked back at me from the mirror every single time I looked in it for the next 10 years.  Sometimes, it still does.

No one else really knew.  I learned to put up a very confident outside.  My agoraphobic, social-anxiety-ridden self became this bold, brash, gregarious young woman who managed to fool a lot of people.  I learned that the best way to survive was to mimic the traits I’d seen truly self-confident people navigate their way through crowds with.  It turns out that if you pretend hard enough to be something?  A bunch of people will believe you.  Mostly because they are too busy hoping you don’t notice their own insecurities.

The guy who said that horribly scarring thing to my fifteen year old self?  I won’t tell you his name. Mostly because it might somehow be used to identify his victims.  I learned later on that what he said was intentional and calculated.

He used the break-down-your-self-esteem technique to get more than one girl to feel worthless enough so that when he raped her? She didn’t feel like she could report him.

He would say to them “who is going to believe you? It’s your word against mine. And they’ll just think that you are a pathetic loser who wanted me but made up the story because I wouldn’t be with someone like you.”

More. Than. One. Girl.

When some of us talked about it amongst ourselves 10 years later? (note the timing)  It was clear how lucky I was that he only said that one thing to me.  Not one of those women had felt like they would be believed if they spoke up. Bullying was just the tip of the iceberg for that particular predator.

Sometimes bullies grow up to be good people though.  I know it, because I’ve experienced it.  I’ve had one apologize to me for things he said and did to me in High School. Years later, he had lived through events that gave him a real perspective.  He had done your garden variety bullying back then.  The kind where someone is with a group of friends and one of them starts the malicious taunting of someone and they “go along” with it out of fear that if they don’t, maybe their friends will turn on them instead. He didn’t target me specifically - I was just one of those casualties of acquaintance. His apologizing to me and then becoming an actual friend in my twenties was a huge turning point for me.  It was the one that made me realize that some people would be perfectly horrified if you tell them that they are a someone’s bully.

I would be perfectly horrified to find out that I was someone’s bully.  Wouldn’t you?

Back to that title up there?  When I started 7th grade, I decided that I didn’t want to be ‘that Tia person’ anymore.  I kept trying to get people to use my real name, Lucretia.  It’s a name I love.  It’s a matriarchal name.  It comes down every-other female generation.  It’s my Nana’s name.  And it’s a name that was never mangled by my bullies.  It’s a name that doesn’t rhyme with “Pee-yah”

It was hard to get anyone to switch over in school.  Some people would call me Lucretia - then they’d get confused when someone else would say “who? Tia?” and  somehow instantly the person who had been using the name I love would adopt the nickname I hated.  Sometimes I just didn’t even bother trying.  If it was a group of people that I met through anyone I already knew? I just told them “call me Tia” right off the bat.

But I so hated that name.  It was that girl who was bullied every day in grade school. The one who had a sign over her head that said ‘victim.’  The one who would never go on a single date with a boy from her own high school. The one who found out early on that the phrase “I choose you. On the playground. After school.” meant you’d better leave early or late and either way, you’d better run home, because otherwise you will get beat up.  I hated that girl. I hated ‘that Tia person’.

By disowning that name I was seperating myself from that helpless, angry, lonely, sad, victimized girl.  By insisting upon being called Lucretia, I was trying to create a new me - one that wasn’t afraid every day.  One that looked at that other girl and felt sympathy, sadness and a desire to comfort - but from the outside, not the inside. One that bullies would fear instead of the other way around.

Somewhere in my late twenties the balance shifted.

The number of people who only knew me as Lucretia became greater than the number of people who insisted on calling me Tia (even when they knew my real name, knew I went by it professionally, and knew that I didn’t like Tia.)

In my thirties, what people called me told you how they had met me.  Any time someone asked me for a nickname when they heard my name? I refused to give them one.  I got a lot of nicknames.  Not once did someone come up with Tia independently.  My husband and my best friends Lee & Nathan were the only ones who could shift back and forth easily depending on who they were talking to.

Somewhere around forty, I realized that I don’t mind being called Tia by a few select people.  The people I learned to lean on and to trust over the years.  The ones who associated good things with me and therefore my name.  The ones who never had an inkling why I hated it so. Those are the people I tell “you can call me Bob, Hey You, or anything else and I’ll answer you.” Strangely, most of them go out of their way to call me Lucretia whenever they can break their old habits.

So why am I telling you all of this?

Because it seems we’re finally focusing as a society on the fact that the “anti-bullying” initiatives that seemed so imperative after the Columbine shootings over a decade ago really didn’t do much to stop the bullying after all.  The news is full of children every day who are pushed to the point of suicide by bullying.  And no matter what the “reason” behind their torment - sexual orientation, weight, economic class, race - there really isn’t a reason.

It doesn’t matter whether it’s a ‘real’ difference (like sexual orientation) that the bullies use in their taunts - or something as stupid and made up as “Tit Ball Tia” - it’s all about making someone feel isolated, alone, unaccepted, unloved, and powerless.

And when you feel that way? It’s a short step to wishing you didn’t wake up to feel that way tomorrow.  I know.  Because no matter how much I tell myself that Lucretia & Tia are two different people? The only me I really am remembers exactly what it feels like to wake up every day not wondering if someone is going to bully you - but wondering how bad it will be.

My husband & I disagreed about one thing when I read him this before editing it.  He thinks bullying is, in some way, human nature. That left alone, kids will ‘try out bullying’ as part of their social development.  I don’t know.  I think that it’s a learned behavior. I think we pass it along generation to generation - right along with those childhood playground songs that get passed down year to year.

I hope so anyways.  Because if it’s not? We don’t ever stand a chance of stopping it.

What do you think? Is bullying part of human nature or can we change it?