I think it best to set the record straight from the start: in elementary school, I was a bully.
But to simply call me a bully is to graze the truth.
To pigeonhole my callow and capricious actions with the cruelties of other children is to characterize all rotten apples by their uniformly ugly husks; in truth, the core hidden beneath the wormy flesh contains the source of the decay and reveals the underlying ailment.
After all, one can diagnose a virus through the symptoms of its victims, but to eradicate it one must seek out the specific strain.
The task of collecting, identifying, and combatting every microscopic occurrence and variation of Odiosus Malum Bullificii is daunting enough to make any field researcher (or would-be education reformer) faint.
The trick, in my experience, lies in defying the bully's expectations of the victim and, with a little help from the element of surprise, allowing their natural sense of empathy to stay their own course.
To reform the bully, one must understand the bully.
For starters, there are the Big Bored Bullies, the junkyard dogs, kids like Danny Baxter who learned their formidable bulk can grant them sway early in life and utilized every inch and pound to their fullest destructive potential.
On the opposite side of the size spectrum are the Small Sad Bullies like Taylor Mason - short statured boys and girls who may have been bullied themselves and thus add to the harrowing cycle by dishing out what they have been dealt.
There are the Situational Bullies, scavengers biding their time to spinelessly swoop into a confrontation.
The Bender Bullies usually have bad home lives and inferiority complexes; their namesake derives from the snarky rebel who epitomized this subset in John Hughes' The Breakfast Club.
The list continues ad infinitum, and somewhere in its despicable recesses lies an entry that describes me: the Class Clown Bully.
As a Class Clown Bully, I cut my observational teeth on everything around me for the sake of a laugh.
With each well-met joke my bravado and self-confidence increased until eventually everything was fair game.
I made a habit of building bridges by burning others, always advancing in my mind but really running in place.
Over time, little by little, the mature and good-natured Dr.
Jekyll civility I usually displayed made more and more room for the sometimes funny, mostly tasteless antics of Mr.
Hyde until I started to feel like neither.
Here, in the mixed up depths of my miniature fourth grade existential crisis, I met Abigail.
I first learned of the new student when I stepped into the gossip corner, the small street-bordering section of playground that provided teachers with the ideal noise level for "candid discussion".
Or so they thought.
That is the excellent hidden quality of elementary school teachers: they underestimate the snooping and hearing capacity of little kids and let their guard down.
Never mind the kickball that just rolled to a stop at their feet - Joshua is already invisible.
The occupants of the Corner came and went, but collectively they produced and relayed the juiciest rumors around.
And no rumor spread quicker amongst kids than news of a newcomer; outside of substitute teachers and P.
E.
dodge ball, nothing drew more anticipation in less time.
By the time morning break had ended, the steps of the fourth grade building vibrated with a palpable buzz.
A dense cloud of nervous energy loomed overhead, marring the brisk October air like a solitary freckle on the sky's silky cheekbone.
After an agonizing wait we eventually filed into class, and I found my seat next to my friends, my audience.
Five minutes passed, then ten, and when 8:15 rolled around the hype had halfway deflated.
Finally, as I took my umpteenth break from journaling to check the clock, she walked in with her mother.
The first red flag sprang up as I watched her mom methodically hang her bag, hand her her supplies, and kiss her loudly on the forehead.
I am all for receiving motherly love, but as a ten year old boy I was honor-bound to resent the entire display.
As she finally found her seat, I first noticed her strange gait.
It was as if she bounced rather than walked, her legs springboards bending at strange, exaggerated angles.
At this point I would like to say I never let it color my opinion of her, and I did not fall into my familiar clownish ways where it concerned her.
But that would also imply I never confronted my virus or learned to self-medicate.
The incident happened during P.
E.
two weeks later, when Coach Coates finally let us choose our own teams.
Usually this lapse in judgment spawned an extremely unbalanced matchup, and that day proved no exception.
Because the game was kickball, and I knew how to toe-poke rubber like no one's business, the first team chose me, and it was downhill for the others from there.
The more we succeeded, the grander my self-image became, just as it did when I made people laugh.
So by the time Abigail stumbled up to home plate, brow furrowed, I was coasting on cloud nine.
By the time Abigail steadied herself for the incoming ball, I was infallible.
And by the time Abigail lost her balance, missed the ball, and fell backwards hard into the gravel, I was hacking up a lung with laughter, too elated to care.
While a few of her teammates helped her up and escorted her to the nurse, Mr.
Awesome-Muscular-Kickball-Champion seized the opportunity to imitate her blunder for the outfield, who all turned their faces but erupted in giggles.
Even the reprimand to end all reprimands that followed did not kill my high.
Walking into art class a few hours later, I barely took notice of what Ms.
Gustin instructed us to accomplish for the day.
My gaze turned itself inward once more as I cracked jokes and screwed around with Play-Doh.
An hour later, my teacher shattered my thoughts with a piercing squeal.
"Oh, Abigail, that is MARvelous!" My head swiveled to a nearby table, around which most of my classmates had already congregated.
Finally, my curiosity won me over, and I stretched to my fullest height to peer over the crowd.
My stomach immediately sank.
The setting sun barely peeked over the lake, casting its hazy hues of pink and gold dreamily through the air and sending them skirting over the glittering water.
In the forefront rode Abigail atop a brown speckled horse, the pair shrouded in a subtle orange aura.
The sinewy curves in the horse's mid-motion stride made the straight lines of her slender figure elegantly simple in comparison.
Although she rode away from view toward the distant shoreline, her arms shot upward and her head tilted back, exposing her closed eyelids and uncontainable smile.
It was not overdone.
It was not tacky.
It was art - genuine, poignant, stirring art - and it was beautiful, not "fourth grade" beautiful but "hanging framed in a gallery" beautiful.
While I made vaguely recognizable clumps of clay and basked in self-importance, several seats away Abigail completely deconstructed my arrogance with her humble talent.
At some point in processing this, my bubble had burst.
Every brushstroke erased a mental muscle, and each deft detail unraveled my petty antics thread by thread.
All of the smiling faces in my mind soured one by one, reducing my persona to its rightful size.
Back in the real world, someone scoffed to the side of me.
Mortified, I snapped my head towards the dissenter and met the eyes of my friends, who, unaware of my inner turmoil, were smugly awaiting my snide comment.
I defied their expectations in the most fitting way possible: I cried, and I cried hard.
I bawled out of immense shame and guilt, out of the staggering wrongs I perpetrated and took for right.
The stuttering, agony-racked sobs demanded to be heard - saving face was out of the question.
By now the entire class observed my breakdown, and for once the almighty slander-slinger became the subject of scrutiny.
Ms.
Gustin hurriedly came to my aid and directed me outside, but not before I caught the bemused gaze of my friends, who barely made an effort to conceal their curving lips and sideways glances.
As for the innocent creator of the beauty, I still cannot recall her expression.
Rising alone against me, her ferocious meekness had slapped the bully from my bones, and I could not bring myself to look beyond the stupor.
In fifth grade, Abigail transferred to another middle school.
I overheard the news of her departure as I did her arrival, courtesy of the Corner.
"She already had a tuition break.
They just couldn't afford it," one murmured to the other, inspecting her cuticles.
So casually they relegated her to a bite-sized blurb in the day's stream of small talk, unceremoniously bookended by the cute new swim coach and some unclaimed cafeteria vomit.
Maybe to most she meant nothing at all, just the girl with the too-small shirts, the girl who never spoke, the girl with cerebral palsy.
And perhaps beyond that, to a certain few, she was a beloved daughter, a trusted friend, a prodigious artist, an inspiration.
But to me, Abigail was the embodiment of a hard-learned lesson in the perils of sacrificing individuality and humility.
Abigail was my cure.
But to simply call me a bully is to graze the truth.
To pigeonhole my callow and capricious actions with the cruelties of other children is to characterize all rotten apples by their uniformly ugly husks; in truth, the core hidden beneath the wormy flesh contains the source of the decay and reveals the underlying ailment.
After all, one can diagnose a virus through the symptoms of its victims, but to eradicate it one must seek out the specific strain.
The task of collecting, identifying, and combatting every microscopic occurrence and variation of Odiosus Malum Bullificii is daunting enough to make any field researcher (or would-be education reformer) faint.
The trick, in my experience, lies in defying the bully's expectations of the victim and, with a little help from the element of surprise, allowing their natural sense of empathy to stay their own course.
To reform the bully, one must understand the bully.
For starters, there are the Big Bored Bullies, the junkyard dogs, kids like Danny Baxter who learned their formidable bulk can grant them sway early in life and utilized every inch and pound to their fullest destructive potential.
On the opposite side of the size spectrum are the Small Sad Bullies like Taylor Mason - short statured boys and girls who may have been bullied themselves and thus add to the harrowing cycle by dishing out what they have been dealt.
There are the Situational Bullies, scavengers biding their time to spinelessly swoop into a confrontation.
The Bender Bullies usually have bad home lives and inferiority complexes; their namesake derives from the snarky rebel who epitomized this subset in John Hughes' The Breakfast Club.
The list continues ad infinitum, and somewhere in its despicable recesses lies an entry that describes me: the Class Clown Bully.
As a Class Clown Bully, I cut my observational teeth on everything around me for the sake of a laugh.
With each well-met joke my bravado and self-confidence increased until eventually everything was fair game.
I made a habit of building bridges by burning others, always advancing in my mind but really running in place.
Over time, little by little, the mature and good-natured Dr.
Jekyll civility I usually displayed made more and more room for the sometimes funny, mostly tasteless antics of Mr.
Hyde until I started to feel like neither.
Here, in the mixed up depths of my miniature fourth grade existential crisis, I met Abigail.
I first learned of the new student when I stepped into the gossip corner, the small street-bordering section of playground that provided teachers with the ideal noise level for "candid discussion".
Or so they thought.
That is the excellent hidden quality of elementary school teachers: they underestimate the snooping and hearing capacity of little kids and let their guard down.
Never mind the kickball that just rolled to a stop at their feet - Joshua is already invisible.
The occupants of the Corner came and went, but collectively they produced and relayed the juiciest rumors around.
And no rumor spread quicker amongst kids than news of a newcomer; outside of substitute teachers and P.
E.
dodge ball, nothing drew more anticipation in less time.
By the time morning break had ended, the steps of the fourth grade building vibrated with a palpable buzz.
A dense cloud of nervous energy loomed overhead, marring the brisk October air like a solitary freckle on the sky's silky cheekbone.
After an agonizing wait we eventually filed into class, and I found my seat next to my friends, my audience.
Five minutes passed, then ten, and when 8:15 rolled around the hype had halfway deflated.
Finally, as I took my umpteenth break from journaling to check the clock, she walked in with her mother.
The first red flag sprang up as I watched her mom methodically hang her bag, hand her her supplies, and kiss her loudly on the forehead.
I am all for receiving motherly love, but as a ten year old boy I was honor-bound to resent the entire display.
As she finally found her seat, I first noticed her strange gait.
It was as if she bounced rather than walked, her legs springboards bending at strange, exaggerated angles.
At this point I would like to say I never let it color my opinion of her, and I did not fall into my familiar clownish ways where it concerned her.
But that would also imply I never confronted my virus or learned to self-medicate.
The incident happened during P.
E.
two weeks later, when Coach Coates finally let us choose our own teams.
Usually this lapse in judgment spawned an extremely unbalanced matchup, and that day proved no exception.
Because the game was kickball, and I knew how to toe-poke rubber like no one's business, the first team chose me, and it was downhill for the others from there.
The more we succeeded, the grander my self-image became, just as it did when I made people laugh.
So by the time Abigail stumbled up to home plate, brow furrowed, I was coasting on cloud nine.
By the time Abigail steadied herself for the incoming ball, I was infallible.
And by the time Abigail lost her balance, missed the ball, and fell backwards hard into the gravel, I was hacking up a lung with laughter, too elated to care.
While a few of her teammates helped her up and escorted her to the nurse, Mr.
Awesome-Muscular-Kickball-Champion seized the opportunity to imitate her blunder for the outfield, who all turned their faces but erupted in giggles.
Even the reprimand to end all reprimands that followed did not kill my high.
Walking into art class a few hours later, I barely took notice of what Ms.
Gustin instructed us to accomplish for the day.
My gaze turned itself inward once more as I cracked jokes and screwed around with Play-Doh.
An hour later, my teacher shattered my thoughts with a piercing squeal.
"Oh, Abigail, that is MARvelous!" My head swiveled to a nearby table, around which most of my classmates had already congregated.
Finally, my curiosity won me over, and I stretched to my fullest height to peer over the crowd.
My stomach immediately sank.
The setting sun barely peeked over the lake, casting its hazy hues of pink and gold dreamily through the air and sending them skirting over the glittering water.
In the forefront rode Abigail atop a brown speckled horse, the pair shrouded in a subtle orange aura.
The sinewy curves in the horse's mid-motion stride made the straight lines of her slender figure elegantly simple in comparison.
Although she rode away from view toward the distant shoreline, her arms shot upward and her head tilted back, exposing her closed eyelids and uncontainable smile.
It was not overdone.
It was not tacky.
It was art - genuine, poignant, stirring art - and it was beautiful, not "fourth grade" beautiful but "hanging framed in a gallery" beautiful.
While I made vaguely recognizable clumps of clay and basked in self-importance, several seats away Abigail completely deconstructed my arrogance with her humble talent.
At some point in processing this, my bubble had burst.
Every brushstroke erased a mental muscle, and each deft detail unraveled my petty antics thread by thread.
All of the smiling faces in my mind soured one by one, reducing my persona to its rightful size.
Back in the real world, someone scoffed to the side of me.
Mortified, I snapped my head towards the dissenter and met the eyes of my friends, who, unaware of my inner turmoil, were smugly awaiting my snide comment.
I defied their expectations in the most fitting way possible: I cried, and I cried hard.
I bawled out of immense shame and guilt, out of the staggering wrongs I perpetrated and took for right.
The stuttering, agony-racked sobs demanded to be heard - saving face was out of the question.
By now the entire class observed my breakdown, and for once the almighty slander-slinger became the subject of scrutiny.
Ms.
Gustin hurriedly came to my aid and directed me outside, but not before I caught the bemused gaze of my friends, who barely made an effort to conceal their curving lips and sideways glances.
As for the innocent creator of the beauty, I still cannot recall her expression.
Rising alone against me, her ferocious meekness had slapped the bully from my bones, and I could not bring myself to look beyond the stupor.
In fifth grade, Abigail transferred to another middle school.
I overheard the news of her departure as I did her arrival, courtesy of the Corner.
"She already had a tuition break.
They just couldn't afford it," one murmured to the other, inspecting her cuticles.
So casually they relegated her to a bite-sized blurb in the day's stream of small talk, unceremoniously bookended by the cute new swim coach and some unclaimed cafeteria vomit.
Maybe to most she meant nothing at all, just the girl with the too-small shirts, the girl who never spoke, the girl with cerebral palsy.
And perhaps beyond that, to a certain few, she was a beloved daughter, a trusted friend, a prodigious artist, an inspiration.
But to me, Abigail was the embodiment of a hard-learned lesson in the perils of sacrificing individuality and humility.
Abigail was my cure.
Source...