Cycling Samsara

On Being Bullied

In the last year of my prep school I took a staring role in The Boyfriend, our school play. I was twelve, and remembered all of the thousands of lines with no difficulty. The show was a success, night after night when Y. T. and I took our bows, we were met with a standing ovation. It was enthralling - I felt king of my little world, because I was.

Four years later, I secured a tiny one-line role in A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

I really had only one line to deliver. Easy. No?

No. I approached the stage engulfed with fear on every afternoon. My neck was hot with sweat. Hands shaking.

In front of a disappointed audience I forgot my line every single show. After each of the five performances, I walked off stage hating myself, filled with shame and fear for the next performance.

What had changed?

In the intervening years I had moved school and was bullied from 13 to ~16. You can see it in my school photos, my posture changes, a kind of fear clouds my eyes, I look pale and scared.

The bullies (I remember each of their names of course) were tragic little boys - but they were older than me, or stronger than me, and they took advantage of the power they had.

In boarding school, there is no escape. And the boys would carry me to the toilets and flush my head. They would hound us in the lunch queue. They would come into the dorms at night and flip our beds - crushing us between the mattress and the plywood bed frame. In my top drawer, they discovered How To Win Friends And Influence People - the extraordinary book by Dale Carnegie, which I read to try and improve my social life - and they bullied me for that. Slowly, I developed a fear about who I was. Then I began to hide who I was, and forget him altogether.

I was no saint. One of the most vile things about being bullied is that one tries, at essentially all costs, to shift the direction of the bullying onto others. So that to avoid the judgement of others, I found myself displacing judgement onto others. I bullied in my own way, more calculating, to deflect and protect myself. (I’m sure this was true of a lot of the boys who bullied me).

This tale is not unusual. But I am writing it because the fear and the shame I developed in these years still haunt me today - as a 31 year old man.

31 looks like a big number, but it doesn’t feel it. There remains a part of me, quite a large part, fearful of the judgement of others, and full of shame. This empty, voidness, part of me I tried filling up with alcohol and porn and cigarettes and drugs. And none of them held firm.

Thanks to this pervasive feeling of shame, I became a brilliant people pleaser.

Because I couldn’t gain the respect of my immediate peers, as I felt absolutely unsafe to be authentic around. I learned to appeal to the teachers or the prefects: those who couldn’t bully for reputational reasons (and who were genuinely nice). I began to learn not to trust those around me, and stay reserved with my authentic perspectives. More than anything else, I wanted to please, to feel safe, to not expose myself to judgement and criticism of others.

And, of course, this manifests in how I live my life today. I am running Loaf, and yet

Writing is without doubt my favourite past-time. It could be my biggest psychological liberator, and yet I don’t write about how I am spending my time and what I am working on, because of the scars that remain in my psyche from having my head flushed.

My practice today is to hold that 13 year old boy - who is fearful, pale, sweet and faintly meek, and tell him he is safe now. I practice this to unlock some of that inner power, which I have held in a kind of shame-fuelled paralysis. I’m holding back, without doubt. And this practice helps to release this shame.