The first time I was bullied, I was in second grade. It was a classic case. A kid my age with a scary, tough way about him stole money from me and then threatened to beat me up if I told anyone.
There was another kid, too, who was one of the class bullies. I remember being at a birthday party when he jumped on a big blow-up castle and then purposefully knee-dropped onto my back.
At the end of that year I transferred to a different school. I was too young to try to understand why I was bullied. Thinking back now, I must have been seen as a threat, or an easy target, and that’s why I was picked on.
When I was in fifth grade, I was bullied again. This time was more serious, because it escalated quickly. At first, I was bullied by a girl named Chloe. She was an exceptionally aggressive girl, and I wasn’t much of a fighter. When it started, Chloe told me to get off some climbing equipment — otherwise she’d force me off of it. That alone wasn’t anything I couldn’t handle. I had my “best friend,” Adam. He was considered the top of the food chain. I thought he was my friend because we had common interests and we played the same sports. Then Chloe started “dating” Adam. She made it impossible for me to spend any time with him or even talk to him at recess.
Suddenly, everything changed. I felt alone. My “friend” became cold and distant. The entire class started treating me like some kind of alien. They pretended I was from another planet. They actually gave the planet a name and created a whole back story for me, the class “alien.” They pretended they couldn’t understand a word I said, as if I were speaking a strange language.
At the time, I preferred reading to just about everything else. I also preferred playing on my own, creating a whole world in my mind based only on what I had read and seen. Maybe this gave them the idea that I was an alien in the first place. But fifth grade was the first time I was made to feel bad about being different. In fact, I had Asperger’s Syndrome, though I wasn’t diagnosed until years later. People with Asperger’s struggle with social skills and often have trouble making friends. Asperger’s is on the high-functioning segment of the autism scale. My classmates had realized I was different before I did.
The teachers pretended not to notice, or they blamed me for my problems. This was made clear to me by the way the teacher referred to herself as part of the class while excluding me. She and the rest of the class were “we,” and I was isolated. She took sides against me, as if she were another one of the 10-year-olds.
Another teacher made inappropriate comments about me, saying that I invited the bullying because the other students were “normal” and I was the problem. Meanwhile, the principal denied that there was any bullying going on whatsoever.
My classmates would chase me around the football field during recess. I was fast and they had trouble catching me, but there were about a dozen of them and one of me. I was caught a few times. They tied my hands behind my back with my own sweater. A couple of times they tangled me up in the end of a soccer net and kicked me.
Every time, I would get out and run, but I couldn’t get away until we went into the school building. The teachers and the principals turned a blind eye and a deaf ear. I went home depressed every day. I couldn’t get through a day without being insulted at least 10 times or being pushed around.
Perhaps the insults shouldn’t have bothered me. But I took everything to heart, and they cut me deep. It wasn’t until that year was over and we moved that I started to figure out how to change things so that I would never be hurt like that again.
I started taking self-defense classes in a dojo. I also started building up my emotional and mental armor, learning to ignore things and to not listen to everything others said.
At my new school, I was given a mentor named Mr. Logan. He was an amazing person. I could talk to him about everything. I saw Mr. Logan twice a week. We would discuss how school was going. In that school, there was far less bullying, but insults were commonplace. Mr. Logan helped me control my emotions, so I didn’t lash out at every insult. And he helped me stay more organized all through middle school.
The insults stopped hurting when I realized they were just words and held no power unless I listened and gave them power. Physical assaults were rarer. I tried to avoid fights. Martial arts were always a last resort, and I am happy to say I almost never needed to use them, but they are an effective deterrent in case defending oneself is ever necessary. It also didn’t hurt that in eighth grade I grew 11 inches, making me over six feet tall.
Every year, my family came to Provincetown during the summer. Provincetown was always one of my favorite places; no school means no bullies. I could just lie in the sun and let the worries of the school year disappear.
In high school, I started to learn to make friends. I began to surround myself with people who were like me. Of course, my friends weren’t exactly like me. No one is quite the same, but I made friends who had Asperger’s, A.D.D., or A.D.H.D. — people who felt like they were on the outside, like they didn’t fit in.
I also made friends who had no learning differences. In high school, my learning differences became a strength and a gift instead of the curse they felt like in elementary and middle school. I wrote short stories, and my friends read them and started asking me to write stories for them. If you find people like you, who accept you for who you are, you can never be hurt by those who don’t see you as one of them.
I still enjoy spending summers in Provincetown. My first cousins often come to visit, and despite them being much older, we are very close and have a lot in common. I always use my time in Provincetown to relax and refresh myself in preparing for another school year. It’s a place where people value you for who you are.
Daniel Le Goff Pollack is taking a year off from his studies at Keene State College in New Hampshire and is writing a novel.
