alltheavenueslookugly

she is not the first bullied teenager to commit suicide. it makes me sad any time i hear about one doing so, but for some reason her particular story has affected me more than others.

i know i have readers outside of the u.s. and canada, and if you aren’t familiar with this story i urge you to stop reading now and go watch her video. it will be the saddest thing you see for a long time.

i had been thinking of writing something about it, and while i have been putting together my thoughts, i noticed that the traffic to my blog has increased in the past few days. particularly to my posts regarding suicide. even more specifically to this post. this may just be a coincidence – i’m not sure. but it did help me make the decision to post some things that people might disagree with. if you do, or if you have any thoughts, i seriously would welcome the comments, either on this page or through email if you don’t feel comfortable posting them on here.

i remember how hard school was. i remember how those days seemed hours longer than any other days, how infinite the time seemed and just how impossible it was to imagine that things could be different when i was finally done with school and on to the next phase in life. when i was her age, i didn’t think i would live long enough to graduate.

the bullies at my high school targeted me because i was weird. and i was. whatever. it didn’t get unbearable until i was in the tenth grade. i spent most of that first semester locked up in a psychiatric hospital. when i went back to school in late january, the word had gotten out and there was a group of about four to five really heartless – and for some reason, mildly popular – fucking assholes that decided to devote a good portion of their days to making sure i didn’t forget what a sad suicidal psychotic waste of a fucking person i really was. as if i could have easily forgotten it. i was a kid, and i was medicated and confused and sad and scared and fucking tired already. that would have been enough to deal with. but then i had to go to school every day and these jackasses would just give me shit, call me crazy, pantomime cutting their wrists, tell me i should kill myself, make bizarre ghost noises at me, etc.

you know, it seems so easy to tell somebody who is being bullied to, ‘just ignore them,’ or insist on how ignorant these bullies are as people, and how you are so much better of a person than they are. but for certain kids, you’re honestly just wasting your breath. see, part of what makes bullies so good at their job is their ability to target and mercilessly taunt people with really low self-esteem. if you have a high self-esteem, it’s a lot harder for them to bring you down. when you have little to no self-esteem already, it’s easy for bullies to just reinforce every bad thing you probably already think about yourself. and because you already believe it, there’s no point in trying to ignore it. what made it so bad for me were that the teachers did nothing to stop them. one teacher – i’ll always remember this guy – was one of those younger, hipper, dudes who was popular with the students because he was just the ‘ young cool teacher.’ (and if any of you reading this went to my high-school, i would be more than happy to tell you who he was and shit all over your image of him.) one day during one of their routine shit-shows, he was standing there in the hallway laughing right along with them. it was then that i realized nothing was ever going to happen to these dicks, and i finally lost my shit. i started yelling at them to go fuck themselves and i would kill them (i wouldn’t really) and i probably threw a grandmother insult in there somewhere (i’m actually positive that i did) and suddenly mr. cool  teacher stopped laughing because apparently i had been the one to cross the line. i stormed off and was approached by one of the gym teachers who told me to stop and come with him. i told him he could go fuck himself too, and he grabbed me. i put up a good fight trying to get out of his grasp, but he was grabbing me from behind and he was strong and i really wasn’t. after that it was decided that i should be home-schooled for the rest of the year. i was a problem. apparently in my school it was perfectly acceptable to relentlessly taunt somebody into killing themselves.

fortunately for them, i wasn’t really a ‘school-shooter’ kind of guy.

but there are those people. people who have been pushed as far as they can go, and when they break they decide to take others out with them. and then there are those who take all of that shit out on themselves. i was one of the latter, and so was amanda todd. like her, i would cry and cut myself, and take too much of my medication and i even drank bleach at one point. i did this because deep inside of me, i knew those guys were right. i was that fucked up. i deserved all of it. this is who i would be forever. it was never going to get any better. i’m sure there were a few who told her otherwise. they tried their best, and that is all they could do. at that point, she was probably far beyond help, but kudos to them for their good intentions.

she showed her tits on a webcam. now don’t get me wrong, i’m sure that wasn’t her only mistake in her short life, and i am not claiming that she was a perfect little angel. but come on, it’s not like she kicked a puppy to death or gave blow jobs to the entire football team while dressing up like a nazi. it wasn’t her finest moment, but christ, it could have been much worse. and she paid for it, dearly.

reading a lot of the comments people have been saying has led me to assume that a good amount of folks out there seem to forget all the dumb shit they did when they were young that just didn’t happen to end up on the internet. seriously, there is nobody in the world who hasn’t at one point did something they weren’t too proud of, and hoped if they could just get through it without getting caught that they would never do such a dumb thing again. and most of them did get through it, and maybe it is that one little secret you carry with you. something that even years later  you are ashamed of or feel guilty for or just acknowledge in your head that it was so stupid and even now you would be mortified if anybody else ever found out about it.  just think about it for a moment…i’m sure you have it.

as i watched her youtube video, it was easy for me to forget she was still  just a child.

when i started to pay attention to the words she was misspelling and her errors in punctuation it really hit me. she was just a kid who was carrying all that awful stuff. she knew she messed up, and she was sorry, but it was never going to go away. and people weren’t going to let her live it down.

and i completely understand how that feels.

had i been able to talk to her, i wouldn’t have been able to tell her it would get better. that would have done no good, and i might have felt like i was being dishonest. when you are that deep in it, any thought of a calmer future can be  a fantasy as outlandish as the idea of winning the lottery. it would be a wonderful thing to happen, but chances are, it won’t. i never would have suggested that killing herself was the best option – because it wasn’t. but i cannot judge her for doing it. given the situation, i am honestly surprised she held on as long as she did.

everybody always asks, ‘what could have been done?’ that’s a tricky question, because we’ll never know. she made the decision as to what should be done, and for her to take that route meant she had reached a point where in her mind there were no other options. it’s hard to blame a person for that. that pain is a horrible thing that can only be tolerated for so long. she was strong. you can’t argue that. she was also human. and she suffered for as long as she could. i hope when people think of her they concentrate on her strength. the strength it took to wake up every day, the strength it took to go to school and be around people and know that at some point during the day she was going to be fucked with and no matter how good of a day she was having before that – it was all going to be turned to shit. if you’ve never lived through that, trust me, it takes a lot of strength. the best thing anybody could have done for her would have been to  just be her friend. be an unassuming, nonjudgmental, ‘i am totally here for you no matter what,’ friend. maybe one day she would have believed that there are good people in the world. people who she could rely on, could cry to, could share those feelings with. people who would help get her through shitty times. maybe that would have been enough for her to keep going.

maybe.

but it is over. she is gone, and the people who made her life hell still continue to do so by vandalizing her memorial pages with hateful shit. why? because to them, it’s just funny. it’s funny to get the reaction out of other people. and why the fuck not? these cowards are safe in their homes and the anonymity of the internet gives them the balls to be as brutal and disgusting as they want to be. there are always going to be assholes in the world, and eventually karma will catch up with them.

at this point, all we can hope for is not only an investigation that finds the person who was blackmailing her and posting her photo online but also for these people who are lamenting the fact that nobody stood up for her to be more aware in the future.

there are so many kids going through something similar right now. and honestly, they aren’t that hard to spot.

just look.

i hope that people start looking harder.

i hope that kids stop giving a shit about their high school reputations and start sticking their neck out for somebody on occasion.

i hope that if you are a parent, and this happens to your child that you don’t blame yourself. you love your children, and if you’ve done everything that you can do legally, then just support them the best that you can. unfortunately, you can only do so much. but make what you can do count.

i hope that if you are a parent, and your child is one of those cruel bastards who gets off on making other people’s lives miserable, that you get them some serious fucking help.

mostly, i just hope that girl has found the peace that she deserves.

~ by alltheavenueslookugly on 2012/10/15.

Posted in october
Tags: amandatodd, apologies, bullies, crying, depression, guilt, posts about suicide, self harm