Why Bullying is Bad, Very Bad…

Bullying costs too much. And I mean that. For the bully, it's free it costs them nothing. But for the person on the other end? The price is way too high.

Nobody actually prepares you for situations like that. Nobody sits you down and says "here's what to do when the odds are completely against you." Because it's never one vs one. It's one vs ten, or it's one vs one but they've got backup, they've got nothing to lose, and they just don't care. Plain and simple.

And I'll be real with you, there are people out there who genuinely believe bullying is necessary. That it builds character. That some people are just too weird and need to be knocked down a peg. I'm here to tell you that's wrong.

It starts young. Really young. These behaviors don't just appear out of nowhere, they're learned early and they stick. And what I've seen over and over again is that there are never any real consequences. Never. The only person who ends up facing consequences is the one being bullied. Not the one doing it.

And that's true when you're young, and it's still true when you're older. I want to break down exactly why that's such a serious problem, because it is one.

Now imagine this. You're not even born yet, and already the deck is stacked against you. Your mom smokes through the pregnancy, drinks here and there, and just like that, before you've even taken your first breath, there's a chance of birth defects. Life long issues that nobody ever diagnoses, because nobody ever connects the dots.

Then imagine that same baby gets dropped on the head. And when they're older and they ask about it? They get lied to. And then the one person who might have had the answers, your mother, dies. She takes everything she knew with her.

So now you're walking around your whole life with people asking "what is wrong with you?" or "were you dropped on your head as a baby?" and the cruel irony is, you actually might have been. But you'll never know for sure. You'll never get a real answer. You'll just keep carrying something you can't name and can't explain.

So I'll ask you honestly... do you think that person has the same advantages as everyone else? Do they get to start from the same place? Do they get the same shot at a normal, meaningful life?

No. They don't.

I'm going to leave out racism and sexism when it comes to the types of bullying people face — and I want to be clear about why. It's not because those experiences don't matter. It's because different types of bullying affect different people in completely different ways, and some of those experiences deserve way more than a paragraph.

A white man will never understand the kind of bullying a coloured woman faces. And I'm not going to waste a single breath trying to explain that here.

What I'm focusing on is something that cuts across all of it, the core of what bullying actually is, how it starts, why it never gets dealt with, and why some people walk into those situations already carrying more than others - without anyone ever knowing.

That's the part I want to talk about.

Let me tell you what cool actually is because somewhere along the way people got it twisted.

As an adult, you are not cool because you have money, sex, power, or status. And as a kid, you are not cool because your parents bought you a fresh outfit and the newest phone. That's not cool. That's just circumstance.

You know what's actually cool? Kindness is cool. Laughter is cool. Inclusion is cool genuinely, unapologetically, fucking cool.

You are not cool because you called someone fat when they're not. You are not cool because you made someone feel ugly, especially when you're standing there being uglier on the inside than they could ever be on the outside.

Words are weapons. And the worst part is that once they land, they stick. They replay. They become the voice in someone's head that was never theirs to begin with. I wish I could change what those words mean so they couldn't hurt you anymore. I wish I could strip them of all their power.

But I can't. So instead I'm just going to keep saying this, the people doing the most talking are usually the ones with the least to offer.

Getting bullied is isolating. And I don't just mean lonely, I mean you start withdrawing from life itself. Because the support isn't there. The understanding isn't there. And how could it be? What hurts you won't necessarily hurt someone else, so how is anyone supposed to get it?

It starts on the playground. And then it starts playing with your mind. You learn to just let it pass. Don't indulge it. Don't show any emotion. Keep it moving. And it works you get through it, but the cost is that you disappear a little. You pull back. You make yourself smaller.

You go to school and there's nobody around you. You go home and there's still nobody to tell. So you carry it alone, in both directions.

You try to fit in. You really do. But it doesn't matter how hard you try, because somewhere along the way you stopped being you. Not because you chose to but because you got replaced. Replaced by everything people said you were. Everything they told you. Their words moved in and made themselves at home, and now when you think about yourself, you're thinking in their voice.

You're not a person anymore. You're a product of what other people decided you are.

And the words that were supposed to be yours? They have their meaning now. Just not the one you would have given them.

They won't end up working a job they actually love. They won't get to be creative the way they always wanted to be. They won't find peace in their own skin. And I cannot justify that. I cannot find a single reason good enough to make that okay.

Because you made their world smaller. You told them "no" when you had absolutely no place to. You cut their chances in half by making them walk away from something that was theirs, that was always theirs before they ever got the chance to fully hold it.

You damaged the way they see themselves. So now every time they start to feel like they're worth something, every time they get close to believing in themselves, you're already there. You're the voice in their head that shows up uninvited and says "you're nothing."

You didn't just hurt them in that moment. You moved in permanently.

And in this day and age, it doesn't even stop when you walk away. It follows you home. It follows you online. It's in your phone, it's in your mentions, it's everywhere you try to escape to. There is no break. There is no safe place to land.

And that makes everything even smaller. Every possibility, every door that was already barely open — gone. You chip away at a person until there's nothing left. Until they're empty. And the cruelest part? They were never empty to begin with. They were full. Full of something real, something worth something — and you took it. Not all at once, but little by little, comment by comment, laugh by laugh, until they forgot they were ever full at all.

So no.

You are not cool because you have money. You are not cool because people fear you. You are not cool because you ran someone out of a room, or off a page, or out of their own mind.

You're not building yourself up. You're just tearing someone else down and calling it a personality.

You're not fucking cool.