Real Teens Speak Out

It’s a battle, really.

When I was really young, about 5 or 6 I was so much smaller and just overall skinner and shorter than everyone. Nobody said anything. But a few years later I weighed more. I was over weight. From 3rd grade, and still going on now, people have made fun.

It’s never a fun feeling and it overall makes you feel bad. People who say unkind things don’t care about the outcome in the victims life. People say mean stuff, and go online.

I know that anyone who goes through this won’t listen to the whole "it gets better" story. But it does.

I wish I could do more about this. I hate seeing people hurt. I hate that people think there’s no point. Everyone deserves to be happy. No matter what.

The surprising truth about rejection

On July 25th I took the TEDx stage in Fargo, ND and shared my most heartbreaking rejections and biggest humiliations in front of hundreds of people. Yes, it was scary and vulnerable and the events I describe are kind of messed up, but I did it for a good reason: I want to take the stigma of rejection and bullying out of our culture’s collective closet.

We each have our own stories of experiencing rejection. Some of them involve bullying, and others are simply a moment in time we put ourselves out there—we were vulnerable—and things didn’t work out how we wanted them to.

These hurt us and caused real pain. I know it did for me. Our fear of rejection causes us to feel shame and pushes us to hide away. It dampens our own brilliance. When we feel this way do we share it with anyone? NO WAY! That would make us look weak and vulnerable. We keep our rejection a secret because we think it makes us unlovable. We’re afraid if we tell others, they’ll laugh at us, judge us, and make us feel even more pathetic.

But that’s simply not true. I tried to hide my rejections for years and it just made everything worse. Eventually, I discovered that seeking support and being open about my challenges made them easier to overcome, and made me feel much better. It made me feel a sense of relief. By opening up it did the opposite of what I thought it would do. Instead of pushing people away, it brought them closer. By sharing my vulnerabilities it made others comfortable in sharing theirs, and this created a connection between us.

It was (and still is) uncomfortable to share, but learning how to let go of my own shame around rejection and instead using it as an opportunity to connect with others has been a major breakthrough in my life. And I bet it will be in yours too. You are not alone and I hope by sharing my story you can see that we are in this together. It’s in our collective efforts that this movement will grow and have the impact on those who need to hear it.

merubah hidup

saat saya sd,saya pernah mengalami di bully.. saya di kucilkan selama 5 tahun,saya tidak pernah bermain atau di ajak bermain.. saat guru memerintakan untuk bekerja kelompok,tidak ada yang ingin sekelompok dengan saya. saya merasa sedih dan stress. saya tidak punya teman di sekolah maupun dirumah.orang orang tidak pernah peduli terhadap saya. saya berusaha menguatkan diri saya. saya menyendiri disana dan tak tau saya harus cerita kemana..saya berpikir untuk menjauhi mereka..saya tersakiti oleh sikap dan tingkah laku mereka terhadap saya.. saya tau saya bisa.saya selalu bersemangat walau tampa teman.dan saat saya pergi meninggalkan sekolah itu dan lanjut ke sekolah menegah atas. saya mempunyai teman baru yang menerima saya. dan itu sangat merubah hidup saya.saya tak lagi perlu takut saya percaya diri untuk pergi. dan itu merubah hiduup saya. tapi kadang kesulitan dalam pertemanan itu sangat memberatkan dan menyakitkan. sahabat kadang membuat kita iri terhadap orang dan kadang merendahkan diri ku juga. kadang sahaat ku banyak peraturanya. iya aku tau tidak ada yang perfect. tapi aku tidak tau harus bagaimana. aku bercita cita menjadi seorang designer atau penyanyi seperti demi lovato. saat aku mengenal pacer itu membuat aku bersemangat.dan aku ingin mensharing apa yang aku pelajari dari website ini. aku akan mengenalkan kepada sekolah ku teman ku sodara ku, serta lingkungan dimana aku berada. apakah aku bisa ikut dengan komunitas ini. aku ingin menghilangkan intimidasi dari teman ku ke teman ku yang lain. aku ingin mengajari mereka. an merubah pola pikir mereka terhadap bullying,merubah kebencian menjadi pertemanan. membantu teman teman u berbicara terhadap apa yang mereka alami. aku ingin membantu mereka yang putus asa. karna aku tau posisi mereka yang di bully. karna aku pernah di bully juga. aku ingin merubah sisi negativ dari oran yang membuly kita. dan aku sangat berterimakasih kepada pacer 🙂

Translation (provided by Google Translate; please excuse errors):

change of life
as I sd, I never experienced in my bully .. isolate for 5 years, I have never played or were invited to play .. when teachers memerintakan for work groups, no one wants to group with me. I feel sad and stressed. I do not have any friends at school and dirumah.orang people never care about me. I am trying to strengthen my self. I was alone there and did not know I had to stay away from the story kemana..saya think mereka..saya hurt by their attitude and behavior towards me .. I know I am always excited could.I even without teman.dan when I left school and up to the high schools. I have new friends who accept me. and it is transforming the lives of me.I no longer need to fear me confident to go. and it changes my hiduup. but sometimes difficulties in friendships that are very burdensome and painful. friends sometimes makes us envious of people and sometimes demeaning myself too. Sometimes my sahaat much unregulated. yes I know there is nothing perfect. but I do not know what to do. I dreamed of becoming a designer or a singer like Demi Lovato. PACER as I know it makes me bersemangat.dan I want mensharing what I learned from this website. I will introduce my friend to my school my Sodara, as well as the environment in which I was. if I could go with this community. I want to eliminate bullying from my friends to my other friends. I want to teach them. late change their mindset towards bullying, hatred becomes perte manan change. helping friends u talk about what they experienced. I want to help those who are desperate. because I know their position in the bully. because I’m never in the bully as well. I want to change the negativ side of the membuly oran us. and I am very grateful to PACER 🙂

I am still a good student!!

I have been bullied for 2 years! I am a good student, so my classmates were jealous about my marks… A girl called aggeliki was "a friend" when she and her brother started making laugh about me. I was’t popular, so i didn’t have friends to support me. After a while everyone was against me and hated everything on me! My name, my face, my hair, my marks…. The situation was getting worse and worse every day! …. Today they are still bulling me and i have no confidence…

my life

I have been bullied all my life because I have a learning disabilitie called cp and i was born without half of my c1 bone.

My Best Friend

Hi, I am Asia and a while ago (up to about 2 years ago) I bullied a girl who had glasses and everyone thought she was over weight and I called her 4 eyes and fat and today she is the only thing I care about,she is my BEST FRIEND! I love her to death and she is like my sister and she got sent to a foster home about an hour away from where I live and I never get to see her anymore. It makes me so sad because I just remember everything I did to her,I made her cry SO many times! And to this day every second I think about it and its just terrible,she is beautiful,not fat AT ALL. The only reason I said any of that is because I was always REALLY REALLY JEALOUS of her in every way. Now when I get bullied because I am short and weird I know I deserve it because of what I did to my best friend. I just know that she was so hurt because of the stupid things I said to her and I don’t even know what to do because I can’t take any of the things I said back because it already happened and then one day in Art Class she got bullied right in front of my face and I said A LOT OF THINGS TO THAT BULLY. Gosh I know this is bad to say but he has no feelings and I hate him but I can’t stop him. I told the teachers and they didn’t do ANYTHING. But now she started over and she is okay with a lot of things that happened in the past and she forgave me for what Iv’e done. I feel good for her because she’s happy where she is! I love her sooooooo much,when I hear her name all I think of is family because she is just like family and we have been through EVERYTHING together! And that’s my story.

i am sorry poem

I am sorry that I was mean
I am sorry that I was green
now I will never do that again I hope you won’t do that and be a bully like I was

Be the Change

Lasting damage caused by thoughtless words
Voicing insensitive judgments just to be heard
Your words are daggers, painful, penetrating, cuts
Your mouth runs off, but results in what?
They walk around with heads bowed low, defeated, drained, and empty
Each word and phrase played over embedded in their memories.
He’s been robbed of years of mental stability and strength
To mend the mental wounds would be a task of significant length.
She tries to mask her life, a stream of treacherous pain
He fights an internal battle striving to stay sane.
She gives of her body openly, worthlessness she feels
He has no understanding of exactly how to heal.
Your victimizing, mistreatment, and harsh verbal abuse
Cause thoughts of depression and sadness, they’ve got nothing to lose.
We must stop the bullying before it’s too late.
Change how you treat others, stop with the HATE.
Be the change, the one to make the first move
Treat others with kindness, only then will it prove
That words will move mountains… at least in their eyes
Many will gain strength and you’ll be surprised
Love and respect make this world a better place
Peace and harmony will triumph and you’ll be amazed.

All Love No Hate

“She’s so weird”
“Why is she so ugly?”
“Who would want to talk to her?”
“Are you contagious?”

This doesn’t even begin to touch the words that I would hear on a daily bases. While most people were excited about the first day of school, plotting their new outfits, or excited to reunite with old friends and make new ones, the beginning of the school year was always just the first day to a 180 day nightmare I would live every day at school.

Things started at a young age, as far back as second grade. I can remember the teacher having to move my desk next to hers so that no one else could pick on me after a boy pulled my chair out from under me just to see me cry. I can remember in middle school, walking down hallways and having to walk over legs being stuck out to trip me, or dodge objects like wet paper towels, pencils, and pennies being thrown at me. During my seventh grade year when my purse got missing and the janitor had to retrieve my purse from the car port where the buses were parked so I could use my key to get in the house that afternoon. In High School, girls would go up to guys, point to me and tell them I wanted their number, and I would have to act like I didn’t see the face or hear the comments of disgust the guy would make, and the laughter of the reaction. During my Sophomore year I remember while I was in the bathroom, the lights went out and I was terrified, thinking that I was about to be jumped. Upon emerging from the bathroom, I came to the realization that it was just a group of kids waiting outside the door to point and laugh at me. These are just a few accounts of the everyday acts of bullying that I would have to deal with every single school day.

I’ve always kept quiet about the bullying that I went through during my school days to my family and friends outside of the school. I often thought of those places as my get away. The only people who truly knew what I was going through are the friends of mine that I was in school with that saw me go through these things every day. I had a best friend and a guy that I was dating at other schools but I never told them anything about the everyday battle I had. At that age I knew that your opinions can change according to the company that you keep. I loved the person they saw me as and I didn’t want to change that, and I was very thankful that other kids couldn’t change that either. I certainly didn’t tell my parents because that last thing I needed was for one or both of them to come up to the school and make a scene, and that become the topic of the week and yet another thing for me to have to deal with once they left.

I can say that halfway through High School and towards graduation, school life got a lot easier. Once these people got to know me, they began to like me and the bullying came less and less. By my Junior year of High School, I had enough and started standing up for myself, putting bullies in their place and letting them know that I was not taking it anymore. I would let a teacher know after class if a person was bothering me during the lesson. In the halls and after school, I would finally shoot back at the names and comments being made. I thought if I ended up in a fight as a result, I’m going down punching. I had remained quiet for so long, after they saw that I was finally taking up for myself, they seemed to back off. After a couple of conversations with me, a few even became my friend. Later on, thanks to Facebook and other social media, I have actually had a few people that have, as adults, reached out to me and apologized to me for the way they treated me during those school years and stated that they admired my courage, and how it didn’t seem to let it bother me.

One great lesson that I have learned from being bullied every day is how to be strong in situations where you feel like you are at your worst. My sister went through some forms of bullying at one point and she told me something at a young age that I could carry with me even into my adult life. Her advice was this:

“The things they say may hurt you, tear you down and even lead you to tears, but the words that hurt worst are the ones that you believe are true.”

No truer words have been spoken. With everything that was being said to me, I had to remember to look in the mirror and tell myself “you are not who these people say you are. There are people who love you, friends who like you and they are the only ones that truly matter.” I had to find my own individuality, and learn how to shut out the negative things that were being said, a skill I’ve carried with me even into my adult life. You have to learn to use those negative words as motivation to prove them wrong, making you better by proving to yourself you can do it.

As I look back at those times, as bad as they seemed, it doesn’t compare to the bullying that is going on in the schools today. In these times where technology has taken over, Cyber Bullying makes those days I spent secretly crying in the bathroom seem like a walk in the park in comparison to what the kids today have to go through. Instead of a prank being the gossip around school for the day, now it can be uploaded on YouTube and Facebook for the whole world to witness. That rumor that was just something to talk about at lunch between friends, can now be a forwarded text. An email containing pictures and other things can be passed around and forwarded a lot quicker than a handwritten note was back in the day. If bullying had the impact on me that it did, I can’t even imagine what my god kids, nieces and nephews are facing. Lives are ending more and more due to bullying. No one should endure the loss of their son or daughter because of this. Parents should pay attention to what is going on with their kids on Social Media, cell phones and emails. You child could be a victim of bullying or worse, be the bully. I think it is important to encourage our youth not to bully other kids and report to an adult when they see other kids teasing each other. We have to let them know that these things are not okay.

October is National Bullying Prevention month and I encourage everyone to get involved. Every October, schools and organizations across the country join together to observe National Bullying Prevention Month. The goal: encourage communities to work together to stop bullying and cyberbullying by increasing awareness of the prevalence and impact of bullying on all children of all ages. You can get go to different websites to find out what your child’s school or your community is doing to prevent bullying in your school system. More importantly, make an effort to teach your child that their words and actions can effect someone else. Let them know that they can talk to you if they, themselves are being bullied or to tell a teacher or another adult if you are not around. And most all give them three simple words to live by:

Words do hurt.

Bullying .

Last year , I was Bullied everyday , for my height and size. I’m pretty short and i was pretty heavy. Kids would throw spit balls and kick me around. It was so upsetting that people would just sat there and watched or even join them. If you see bullying Please speak up , No one Deserves to get Bullied.