To the bullies

[cflage]

Since there were so many of you, I no longer remember you all. I only remember some of you. I remember how you knew my family's name, and how you assumed things about me, and how you immediately began grooming me to be a target from the moment we were in the same room together. Seeing how many mean names you could call out, seeing how many horseplay punches you could get away with without me trying to get help. I don't really care why you did it. I just know you did it. And I know you did it so you could launch into greater assaults later.

Maybe some of you don't even remember who you were. Maybe victimizing little kids is like breathing to you and you have never questioned it. That's just the kind of thing that irks me and makes me feel helpless, is that even if I had absolute power and could force you to be in a place where you would have to listen to me, it might not make a difference for any of us. So I have never demanded that you apologize to me or pay me back somehow, because I am convinced you wouldn't be capable.

But I do have things I wish I could tell you if you did give a rat's rear.

You wrecked a big part of my life and left me to recover on my own. I hope no one does it to you, although maybe some of you already know what it's like. For a lot of people, a lifetime isn't even long enough to work through these issues. I have painful flashbacks dozens of times a day. I sacrifice far too much in my relationships. For years I couldn't even speak in front of groups of people. I can't seem to keep friends unless they live states and states away, and am now extremely prone to invite exploitative people into my safe zone because they superficially appear to care. I wonder if any of you would have kept mistreating me if you could see this growing recovery time debt you were putting on my shoulders.

I wonder if you're proud of that. But don't give yourselves too much credit. Although you were certainly the people who chased me, tripped me, beat me, made me bleed, made my reputation questionable, made me fearful for my safety every day for years, it stands out to me that I don't see you in my flashbacks at all. Luckily I don't have waking nightmares about what you did. But I do have something else. I see proxies of you all in the life I've had since then, little reflections of the way you forced me to live in those years. Some very good people came into my life after you all left, and they wanted to be my friend, to be my partner, to be a colleague, and in almost every instance I have shut them out and chased them away. So now my mind drifts off into flashbacks dozens of times a day thinking about what I should have done differently, how I can stop ruining things, how I can stop inviting suffering.

And I learned that from you.

I learned that because I wanted to keep away from the danger you brought upon me daily. I now have a very full curriculum of un-learning that will take me years to work through. But I will get through it, because you don't deserve this much importance in my life. I've already started the work.

[saylor]

Welcome, cflage,

You've been through quite a nightmare, and I can relate to parts of what you've written, especially in terms of how the trauma has affected your life (e.g., the "proxies")

Sounds like your bullies would qualify as full-blown criminal assailants.

I hope that you can find some healing. Unfortunately, CPTSD can really wreck a life (I'm still trying to fix mine)