The dark we don´t see
The dark we don´t see
While hanging out with a few friends during the weekend, we started talking about high school and what a good experience we all had. We found ourselves later on reflecting about what we all wanted to do with our futures and also sharing how hard it is to adapt to our new lives. Specially, how anonymous we all feel in the whole college abroad experience. We could all agree on one thing: we all wished to go back to school because everything seemed easier.
Thinking now about high school I can indeed say it was definitely the best time of my life. There was not such a warm, comforting and safe place such as my school in Rio. There, I had met a good number of people and made friends for life. Thus, I could never even start to imagine how my life would be in a different school. These thoughts occupied my mind for a few days.Coincidently a few days after our discussion, I started watching a new series on Netflix about high school. I did not previously know what the series was all about so I only ended up figuring out after the first 10 minutes of the first episode.
To my surprise, it was not an ordinary series about high school drama or even about gossip, boys and parties. The main theme caught my attention because it was different from what we are used to. Mostly when it comes to television shows and the media. The story was about an American girl’s suicide during high school. Her name was Hannah. However, my goal with this article is neither to release spoilers about what’s new in Netflix, nor about what happens at the end of the first season. Readers interested will watch it, and maybe, will have a similar reaction to mine afterwards. I had also preciously heard about the case of Megan Meier in 2006 ( because of Megan Meier Foundation) and a few other stories about suicide led by bullying experiences during high school, but never really dug into them.
Watching all episodes in 3 days (that´s a lot of time spent, believe me) got me thinking about high school all over again. However, I started to see it from another perspective other than mine. I started to imagine how different everything would be if I didn’t have any friends, or if had been on the same position as the Hannah in the series and always trying to please everyone around me. For the first time in a while, I got really scared and tried to walk in somebody else’s shoes when the subject was school. Even though the series is based on a fiction book, it deals with a sometimes chronic issue lived by millions of children/ teenagers every day.
For me and for my friends, sitting on the hall and even walking through the corridors to get to class was fun. It meant meeting friends and talking to a few people about high school drama, teachers, news and even gossip sometimes. Sometimes, I even got excited for school on Sundays. School meant friends and friends meant fun.
On the other hand, I started to think about what it could feel like when walking to class felt like walking a tightrope and wishing for high school to end as soon as possible. I tried to imagine counting the days until graduation and hoping never to step foot into that school again. I couldn’t.
Surprisingly for some, this reality is lived by a lot of young teenagers in the actual days. According to the National Center for Educational Statistics in 2016, more than one out of every five (20.8%) students reported being bullied in the US. Report. However, the numbers are even bigger, because official numbers reveal that 64% of children who were bullied did not report it in the same year. In Brazil, the number of people who claimed suffering from bullying rose. (It increased from 35,3% in 2012 to 46,6% in 2015).
These numbers are scary, I know. But it is even scarier to think that some of us had never even engaged in a serious discussion about bullying, or weren’t even able to look around us. Some have never even tried offering a helping hand to people who could have been struggling with it during high school. I believe we sometime even talked about it, but people were "too busy" to care and that was a mistake. We heard, but we did not really listen because it wasn´t happening to any of us. I know that because I was one of these people.
Even though this is hard to admit and say out loud I wasn’t actually looking around, and I believe I was not the only one. Was I not able to see through the pain of others? Maybe.
That does not make me, or others like me bad people, maybe negligent, but neither bad, nor mean. We just did not see, or did not want to see. These situations could have happened right next to me and, the sad part is that I don’t even know if such situations of bullying took place or not. We were not able to see what was under our noses. Does that make us selfish?
My school wasn’t that big so we all kind of knew each other, at least most names. Nevertheless, I keep thinking about the "what ifs". What if someone in my school, from my grade was suffering from bullying, would I have known? Could I have helped somehow? Was I negligent somehow? I know it is too late now, but I keep wondering how I could have behaved differently and how I could have offered support if someone came to me for help.
Truth is, I will never know what it feels like to walk down the halls scared or even what it is like to cry every day before going to school. I actually got excited to go to the halls during the breaks and miss school until the present days. For me, high school was fun and not a harmful routine battle. For others, on the other side, I thought I would never know until this morning.
Lucky for me, I was able to talk to someone who has been through hell in the same halls where my friends and I used to have fun and take selfies all the time. We shall call this friend B. B is a few years younger than me and we know each other through mutual friends. When talking about bullying and when describing her experience, she felt relieved. Finally someone was actually telling her story and screaming it loudly so that everyone could hear, sympathize or even care about it. She told me that she believes it is important to discuss and to talk about bullying, suicide and depression in schools with realistic points of view so that people can actually see that it happens more often than we might think.
More importantly, it can also occur silently, just like in her specific case. She wasn´t crying all the time. She just stood there and observed while others were going to parties, kissing boys and more importantly, having fun. Our idea of what bullying really looks like is so delusional that we might not even realize that we might be the ones contributing to this toxic environment sometimes. Differently from what we see in movies, bullying is not necessarily putting someone in a garbage can or hiding someone´s material. It is more than that. It consists of small everyday behavior, like social exclusion during the breaks and being ignored in the halls. So many people feel invisible, ashamed and some even wish never to go back to school again.
Luckily for her, B has not had experienced direct bullying often. That includes: verbal and physical aggressions such as hitting and name calling aggressively. However, behind her back, she will never know. On the other hand, indirect bullying was something kind of constant in her life: rumor spreading, social exclusion, for example, she was not often invited to parties or social events.
She told me she wanted to be part of it all and that she used to watch other girls (her former classmates) always laughing together through Facebook pictures, but she felt like she "didn’t belong", so she would rather be alone and hope for the time to pass as fast as it could. She compared herself to others the whole time, and that made her unhappy simply because she was different. Except she wasn´t and that part sincerely broke my heart.
In addition to that, B also said that she doesn’t have any good memories from school. Can you imagine how B felt?
Well, I can’t.
According to a study by Warwick University published firstly in 2015, bullying can be defined as systematic abuse of power with the intention of harm doing. This practice normally involves an imbalance of power and, feasible consequences may involve difficulties in forming lasting relationships and on making friends, integration issues in working environment, etc. Moreover, physical consequences may also be lived by victims of chronic bullying during childhood or adolescence in the future. These may include sleeping problems as well as psychosomatic ones, continual headaches and stomach aches, increased physical tissue inflammations (as a Duke University study shows), among others.
Also important to point out is the link between bullying and mental health conditions, such as depression, eating disorders and anxiety disorders.These are all serious conditions that may even become chronic, may imply more serious and physical harm and can affect the way we feel about ourselves and others.As stated in the same study by Warwick University, victims of bullying normally present low self-esteem issues i.e "negative feelings about themselves, believing that they are not worthy of love, happiness or success" (National Alliance on Mental Illness).
Not to forget, bullying victims present more risks of having suicidal thoughts. Of vital importance is then to focus on the roots of problems that may metamorphose into future possible cases of depression, anxiety, eating disorders or even suicide. A Yale University study in 2008 showed that victims of bullying are 7 to 9% more likely to consider taking their own lives.
Then, how can one end this ?
How can we improve someone’s sense of social self worth?
How can we stop these people from silently suffering every day?
How can we help them see an actual perspective on the future and leave this negative bubble where they live in?
How?
From a previous student perspective, I wish I could go back to school today. Not to have fun, neither to skip classes the way my friends and I used to do, nor to lie down in the sun in the terrace, but to observe closely what actually happens inside the halls. If I could go back, I would pay more attention to the ones around me and follow their every step. I cannot imagine the pain that victims of bullying may suffer or might have suffered every day and, for that I am very lucky.
I cannot imagine how much they struggle and I regret my negligence truly. But looking back makes me want to be more pro active and actually doing something to help others raise their voices. By doing so, their voices may finally be heard. I am really sorry for my delay and for having realized just now what I should have paid attention a long time ago when I had the chance. Even though now it may be too late to fix my high school experience, I hope that the people who are now going through this stage of life really do things differently than me.
You are the focus of this article. Look harder, offer a hand, raise awareness, hear, be present and please: be different. This fight is hard and therefore, we need to unite. To tackle this issue, schools, teachers, parents and counselors have to work together in order to achieve a better and fair atmosphere. However, they can´t do it on their own. They can´t change it on their own.
Social inclusion needs to come from every side and every angle, including from fellow classmates. This is beyond empathy, but the real meaning of living in a healthy community and society where no one is better than the other: just maybe different. On the other hand, if we do not aim at solving this issue, wounds such as the ones from people like B, Hannah, Megan or thousands of others who have struggled in silent will never turn into scars of the past, but will remain open wounds for a long time still.
Note : Next Wednesday, April 12 is the second Wednesday of April. On this day, the Pink Day is celebrated to end Bullying. To do your part and fight this issue, we should all wear pink to raise awareness of the seriousness of this battle