I’m lucky enough to be able to say that words are my job. I’ve loved them since I was a kid – the sheer power of the right phrase in the right place. There’s a magic to them – these simple sounds that can cause fights, mend friendships, inspire armies and create monsters. A well-chosen word is a weapon, and the wrong word can work its way like a splinter into your head so you never forget it, no matter how hard you try.
Weak. Cry-baby. Soft. Gay. Girl. Loser. Freak. Not a real man.
I was bullied as a teenager. I don’t say this with any shame, because it’s been 10 years and I’ve made my peace with it, and also because 43% of the UK’s young people are going through it right now. It’s your story as well, or a story you see out of the corner of your eye every lunch break. And for most of us, for a long time, it will be a story of silence.
BE A MAN.
We learn that on the playground and we have to learn it quick, because if we don’t the next lesson has knuckles attached. I’ve never been good at not having feelings, to be honest. Things affect me. I worry. I care. I get invested in causes and people and books. I have so many emotions I had to invent fictional people to put them in, and because I think about words so much…
I wonder when BEING A MAN meant shutting up and toeing the line. I wonder when the Council of the Rules of Men (not a real thing) got together and decided that open meant weak and that bottling things up was better. That’s not how science works (and that is, at base, what feelings are – chemicals reacting in your brain, as natural and human as the beating of a heart) They don’t go anywhere just because you pretend they have.
Is lying to yourself strength?
I kept quiet for years, because I thought that was the way to make the bullying stop. I was quiet for years after the bullying did stop, because in order to survive I convinced myself not talking about it meant it wasn’t real, because if it was real I’d talk about it.
And I’ve watched too many time travel shows to obsess a lot about changing my past. I am who I am because of my experiences, good and bad. The parts of me they targeted – being sensitive, being bookish, being the kid who handed in essays five pages too long because I loved words – are the parts of me I am proudest of now, the parts that allow me to do what I do.
But I wish I had have told someone. I wish I hadn’t decided I was alone in a room, a class, a school of guys deciding they were alone as well because no-one was willing to say the first word.
There’s this movie scene. You know the one – the hero gets injured but manfully struggles on, refusing the help his companions know he needs. They continue, he struggles, lashes out in anger and -
*dramatic music*
- he collapses. The wound is infected. People recoil. Cue boiling water and sutures.
We’re taught to ignore injury, to keep going, to not make a fuss. And we suppress the pain until the wound festers, and you get angry at yourself for getting hurt in the first place. As if being human was your fault. As if the smart thing to do isn’t to treat the pain instead.
The boys who teach us to stay quiet do so because they’re in pain, and like the lantern-jawed hero we’re all supposed to be, they’re afraid to look beneath the bandage. The pain of treatment would be too great, they think, and they attack others because if they’re in pain others must be too.
Anger and fear are all we boys are allowed. Seems a bit of a raw deal.
I wouldn’t go back and talk to Younger Me, if I could. He’d have far too many questions about how I got there, for one thing, and I don’t want to be different than I am now. But I’ve watched bullies live like rats in a wheel, playing out the same patterns over and over again because they can’t admit that they’re in pain, and I’ve seen young men resolutely fight to hold onto the things that make them human, instead of hiding them just to fit in with everybody else. That’s strength – the strength to speak up, for yourself and for others, the strength to be yourself, instead of what other people decide you should be. There’s no power in spending your life in retreat from yourself, and I’d rather not wait until I drop from a wound I’m pretending not to have.
I care too much for that.
Dave Rudden’s debut novel Knights of the Borrowed Dark is available from the Guardian bookshop. More on the annual bullying survey here. If you’re being bullied you can get help from National bullying helpline tel 0845 22 55 787.
