Being Bullied

So, this blog is about something that actually happened to me a few months ago. It was a pretty intense experience, but also kind of weird and embarrassing and I put off writing about it for a while, and then when I did finally write about it, promptly forgot about it in the back of my notebook. Today, in my Children's Literature class, we discussed a book called Juul, about a boy who is bullied and ultimately mutilates his body piece by piece in a search for acceptance. It was one of the most intense things I've ever read, and it made me feel compelled to share this. I may no longer be a child, but this was definitely a unique experience for me, and I think there is something to be learned from it.

 

I was walking home with a feeling like iron in my bones; I don’t remember why. I came up the hill, heaved a deep breath, turned right into the twisting narrow streets where during the holidays we heard the incessant boom of dynamite, where a singed bath tub has been sitting for weeks, where once a group of kids burned a chair and left its stinking carcass in the street. I heard someone laugh, it was loud, childish. I turned down a street, there was a group of kids, teenaged girls and a chubby soft-faced boy; the boy was in the street, stepped backwards as I turned the corner and turned to make an ugly gaping face at me. He made a harsh braying sound, and I gave him a kind of skeptical half smile, the tense look that draws up my eyebrows, and kept walking. The boy stepped in front of me. I tried to edge around him, and the girls poured out all around me in this awkward surreal kind of stream. I was looking down at them, they were either young or small or both and were united in a strange unspoken agreement, an instantaneous decision, to be whimsically cruel. There was a flood of sounds, ugly irony, their faces contorted in blind hatred, they got close up to my face, just barely resisting touching my skin, they screamed in mirthful glee, pulled apart my body. An older girl with a Monroe piercing and dry skin stuck out a finger, jabbing at my piercing, ¿que es eso?, she demanded with her mouth loose and wagging. Un piercing, como tienes tú, I finally said, the words coming incredulously from my tense, guarded smile. I guess it broke the spell, I pushed my body forward, finally resigned to move past, to flail if I had to, and they pulled back from me in reluctant, stubborn little steps, crying, ¡un aplauso! and clapping and howling as I walked away.

As the clatter faded behind me, I walked home listening to my breath. My face sighed down, anxious smile erased, I bit my lip and marveled at the silenced that roared in my hollowed out body. I got home, climbed the stairs, sat on the edge of my bed, and cried resentfully, struggling against each silly tear.

It’s strange to spend your life in a self-aware position of cultural dominance, with that history of privilege, that shameful advantage of being a white, middle class American, to be aware of that horrible dark thing, historical cruelty and repression, with all it’s echoes and ghosts, and to live all your years with the knowledge that you will never experience this twisted thing that you are implicitly and helplessly destined to be a purveyor of cruelty. It’s strange to be taught that this feeling is something you have no right to experience, and then to turn a corner one vulnerable day and be confronted by exactly that.

It’s strange to find yourself in a place where nothing you do is the right thing—your words are deformed, uncertain creatures, violence will only turn around and eat you up, silence is weak and indefensible. So, I cried on my bed, and then tried to breathe and felt quiet and lonely and strange and bad, and counted my limbs and my unbroken skin, and breathed and sighed and went downstairs, and found a new way to walk home. And then I cried more and felt weak and helpless and lame, but at the same time, hesitantly satisfied, because I’d glimpsed the nauseous thing a white American never thinks they will touch, and maybe there’s something to be learned from it, maybe this little piece of trembling, blurry nightmare day will be useful to me in that endless process of becoming—becoming a whole person, a better person, a worthwhile person, a new, never stagnant person, a changing, continual self.


Comic relief:

(I would prefer to use the scene after this when the guys are telling their parents about the incident, but I couldn't find it.)

Solipsism and Interconnectivity

I.

I’m trying to say that nothing feels real. Moments come and go and fade away. Memories seem like dreams, I can almost see myself in them, like a different person. Sometimes reality even seems implausible, sometimes while sitting, looking, talking, I feel the world tilt back away from me, glaze over like a dream. I’m never quite certain if I’m awake.

I’m trying to say that I feel sometimes incredibly disconnected from all that is around me, as if I’m floating through life without touching it. People sometimes seem impossibly distant, impossibly different creatures. I don’t understand the things they do, or why we all behave in this kind of shadowy secret way, as if we don’t have innards. I wonder why it’s not okay to show more. I feel like words are often inadequate for expression—thoughts are so much more than words, they are multi-dimensional experiences that mix up bodily feelings, senses of all types, goals, dreams, hopes, conjectures, memories… And I’m often frustrated by my inability to access the experience of others, and by my inability to share myself, my experience, my thoughts, my inner world, with others. Misunderstanding is a human condition. When a series of events produces a reaction within me, I want it to be touched and held and seen and understood and validated by others. That rarely happens. This makes me feel dismissive. This makes me feel achy and uncomfortable in my own skin.

There is some comfort, but also horror in the idea of solipsism. I am the only thing, just one long thought process blossoming into a complicated, colorful word within which I’ve built a place for a concept of self. Sometimes time feels jumpy, like I’m being plopped down into different settings and manipulated into interacting with varied, imaginative stimuli, just to produce feeling, to test the limits of the imagination, the boundaries of the big, sustained thought process which is the only thing, ever.

Sometimes I feel that way, but more often I guess I feel like we are isolated little units, blundering into each other with no hope of communication. Not only is language inadequate, it’s incredibly personal. A word is a only a symbol, attached to which are a series of experiences, and these will never, ever match up. Maybe this isn’t solipsism in a pure sense, but I think it relates to Gorgias’ idea that even if something exists, and even if something could be known about it, knowledge can’t be communicated to others.

II.

Despite all of this, though, communication does occur, at least to some to immeasurable degree. We can relate symptoms of physical pain, for example, and diagnose illness. We can meet for lunch at 2 ‘o clock. We can even listen to the same haunted notes and cry. And sometimes, quite often, despite the fact that we try so hard to present an outer idea of self and conceal our inner world, the inner world leaks out, and we study each others actions, personalities, histories, and come up with sometimes accurate conclusions. How?

All this makes me feel the opposite of alone; it makes me feel intrinsically connected to everything. It makes me feel as if we are not individual selves but fleshy pieces of a huge, breathing organism, something universal and communicative. Perhaps words are inadequate, but we seem to be communicating through out pores and veins, through our irises and our nerves.

These are the things I’m trying to say. These are the sensations I’m trying to convey. The words are inadequate, but I hope I am transmitting something.

Disclaimer of sorts: I know pretty much nothing about solipsism or Gorgias. These are just thoughts that I had brewing in me today, after watching Solipsist and reading a very small bit about the idea of solipsism. They are also probably influenced by reading excerpts of Emerson's essays on Nature.

JFK

Stuck in New York for a night due to missing my connecting flight. Despite all the stress, all I can think of while in the JFK Airport is:

Anyway, major sleepies, must succumb to the king sized bed I'm all up in. More to come soon.