Odd Girl Out

I am the odd girl out.

It begins around third grade, the differentiation between "popular" and "unpopular", "cool" and "uncool". Up until then you're allowed to be whatever you want to be and do whatever you want to do. But in third grade, it starts.

If you're privileged enough to be one of the cool kids, you don't notice the changes because for you there aren't any changes. Suddenly there's someone new to be mean to, maybe, if you're so inclined. That's all. But the outcasts and the oddballs are in a perfect position to observe the social tide. And you'd better believe we noticed the difference. All of our friends may have turned against us, unless we had none to begin with.

I was one of the uncool kids, in third grade, and my friends were quite emphatically not. They drifted away slowly, and I don't think I really noticed it until I approached one of them one day, and one of the girls I had always classified as "nasty" asked me smarmily, "Who said you could come here?" And it was all over.

We moved many times, and many times I changed schools. But it was always the same; I was an outcast because I liked dragons, or because I read voraciously outside of school, or for any number of other silly, frivolous reasons. I like to think that this made me a fierce individualist, as indeed it has, but it went quite a ways toward undermining my self-esteem and turning me into, well...the one who squeaks and runs away.

And this is the result of endless bullying from which there is no feasible escape.

You ask me why people bully others. I'll tell you: it's because it makes them feel better about themselves. Yes, it really is; your parents are correct for once. Something causes someone to feel bad about his or herself, and they take it out on someone else because it makes them feel better. Sometimes it becomes a habit. And there is another key here: all of the bullied must thereby also be a bully to someone at some point.

Yes, I've done this, although I am far from proud. I can be very, very nasty when I put my mind to it, when I think someone deserves it. And if I regret it afterward, does that make it okay somehow? It does not. Bullying is a vicious cycle. Many bullies were once bullied themselves.

And the only way to escape the cycle is to refuse to let yourself be affected. Very few people can manage that. But eventually, perhaps, enough of them will change things for the better.