Bullying Damages Peoples Lives!

In my previous post I talked through some of my feelings regarding finding that the man I had been dedicated to for the past 5 years had been cheating on me. I shared how I was bullied as a young girl in school by people playing with my heart and feelings by pretending to be interested in me,  and then finding it hilarious when I believed what they were saying. In that post I was beating myself up for once again playing the fool like I had back in then, all those feelings of being the stupid fool had come flooding back and I kept telling myself how dumb I was to believe someone could love me. Those are the same lies that I was taunted with back then, and here a good 25 some years later those messages are still very deeply ingrained in my mind. They were my "truth" as I was growing up and that "truth" effected my whole life and it is what I struggle with now as I work to replace those lies with actual truth.

I have been pondering all this lately after I finally realized where the anger at myself was coming from, and I will admit I have been simmering with a little bit of anger. No longer am I angry at myself I am angry at those kids who found it so hilarious to play with someone elses heart and lives. I am angry that they felt it was ok to treat me and others who didn't "measure up" as third class citizens who deserved to be treated like crap. I am angry at all those people who will sit back and say bullying is harmful and that kids will be kids. I am really angry at the ones who say that "you have to be cruel to be kind" and that talk about tough love and try so desperately to hide the fact that they are just mean concern trolls. A comment on one of the blogs I read in the past few weeks (I can't remember where so if it was you give me a heads up) has really stuck in my head. They were commenting about tough love and said if that is the way you love then go love someone else. That was huge for me, I thought oh that is so right on, they go on and on about tough love and having to be mean in order to "save" someone, but does anyone ask the victim if they asked to be "loved?"  I dare to wager that the majority would gladly pass on that kind of love, and would be better off for doing so. I honestly don't care how good your intentions are, if the person you are pointing them at doesn't invite you to share them, then shut your mouth, cause you aren't an undercover superhero.

Another thing that has me angry is how the adults I tried talking to when I was being bullied would react or respond. Most of the time I was told "You just gotta ignore them, they are just trying to get a reaction out of you and if you don't react they will stop" then the other thing that would happen was I would be encouraged to go on a diet, lose weight, change myself. Here is the deal folks, when a person, especially a young kid is being victimized by a bully or bullies, it is so not cool to put the responsibility for stopping it onto the victims shoulders cause lemme tell ya, they have enough to shoulder. That is the #1 reason that I stopped speaking out about all the stuff I went through, because it always became my problem, I would have to change myself or my reactions, I was the one in the wrong, not the bully. It wasn't until my late twenties  just a few years ago when I was in a group counseling session at a clinic I had gone to in California for eating disorders that I actually shared some of the stuff I went through. To me it was just my childhood, it was my normal, all I knew but my counselor looked at me seriously and said "Teresa that was ABUSE, you talk about it as though it was your fault and that is was ok but that was ABUSE and it is not ok that that happened to you and I am so very sorry you had to go through that."  That was the very first time in my life that I ever heard someone 1)give it the name of abuse because that is what it was and 2) tell me that I didn't deserve it and 3) that they were so sorry that it had happened to me. The first time I had EVER heard any of that. It honestly shocked me and I started to disagree because I was still holding the feeling of responsibility for it, then I just went silent for the rest of the session. I didn't know how to process not just that what was my normal, was actually abuse, but I also struggled to process that it wasn't my fault and that someone said they were sorry... to me...for what I have gone through. That counselor still holds a very dear place in my heart, he opened my eyes in such a profound way and I can still hear his voice and see his face as he spoke those words.

SleepyDumpling wrote a post on Fat Heffalump the other day Bullies – You Don’t Get a Cookie for Feeling Bad that had me nodding my head in agreement the whole way through. I am so sick of bullies getting a pass for their abusive behavior, and the thought of people feeling bad for them because "oh they must have had such a hard life" yeah well life is tough for everyone and that doesn't give us license to abuse others because of it. We need to not only stop bullying, and teach our children that bullying is bad and wrong, we need to give real consequences to the bullies not the victims. We need to stick up for the victims of bullies abusive ways, and we need to teach our children to be NICE  and how to treat people with RESPECT even if you might not like them for some reason. The best way to do this is to model it in our own lives, treat the people we run across in life with respect. Yeah ok it might be nice to tell kids that "it gets better" but in the case of being a fat person that isn't always true and sometimes when you grow up the adults can be even worse than the kids were. It doesn't always get better and that cliche annoys me because it rings so much of the responses that I got from the adults that should have been protecting me in order to brush me aside. It might not get better, it might get worse, but I have found in the fat acceptance community that even if it doesn't get better you can find people who will stand beside you and tell you that what has happened to you is not ok and that they are so very sorry. They also help you replace the lies the bullies and abusers throw at you with the truth and that helps you to get stronger and stand firm when it doesn't get better.

So what do you think of "tough love" and people that think that abuse and shame is a good way to help people?  What do you think of the "It gets better"saying?  What can adults do when a kid comes to them and tells them they are being bullied, how would you react?

Getting to the bottom of my dislike/fear of exercising. -Part Two

Continued from this post

Even at a very young age, physical education was something that I dreaded to the point it would make me sick, and filled with anxiety. For example the track meet that a bunch of schools in our area had, my dad was a teacher at the time and so I rode with him in his car to the meet that was being held in another town. The closer it got the more panicky I felt to the point that I sat bawling in the car begging my dad not to make me go to it. To let me sit in the car for the day, I was terrified at the thought of having to do it.  As I got older I started noticing something that would happen whenever I was doing strenuous exercise, I would struggle to breathe and then I would start coughing, A LOT! I would cough to the point my eyes watered and I would gag, and what was worse that coughing would make me lose control of my bladder a bit and I would pee a little. Now I am sure you can imagine how great a thing that is for someone in elementary school? It wasn't like I would just pee my pants all at once, but a tiny trickle would leak out and since I wasn't allowed to stop I would just keep coughing, and well, those little trickles would add up. It was so humiliating and the thought of telling someone was even worse. I was way to old to be peeing my pants, and so I tried to keep it hidden. It wasn't until I was in grade 9 that I finally tried telling my parents, and then my gym teacher at the time. Hoping beyond hope that they would understand why I hated exercise so much. 

Now even though I weighed a whole lot less than I do now, I was still on the chubby side and had been on diets since I was 7. My complaints were written off as some fat kid just trying to get out of exercise so she can be lazy, and instead I was made to do more exercise and put on a stricter diet. It felt like I was being punished for telling the truth and so I stopped telling them and instead did everything I could to avoid or get out of gym classes and other strenuous activity. This lead to me having to lie, and fake illness or pain, just to avoid that feeling of breathlessness, the coughing, and consequences of said coughing. I hated having to do it but the alternative seemed worse to me, and so physical exercise became an anxiety filled experience for me. 

Fast forward a decade or so to a time just a  few years ago when my mom and I went to a Women of Faith conference. We had floor seats at the same end of the stadium that we had parked on, the "shortest" route to the car was going up the stairs to the second level and then down again and out to the parking lot because they had the exit on floor level blocked because there was something else going on in that area. The other way out would mean walking to the other end of the stadium and out the floor level exit there and then all the way back the length of stadium to get to our parking lot. I tried to encourage my mom to go that way because the thought of taking all of the stairs through a crowded arena to get up to the second level was something I wanted to avoid. My mom however was having none of that and headed up the steps, telling me I could go the other way if I wanted to but I could tell from the tone of her voice she was upset and disgusted and so I followed her. I kept up with her pretty good but by the time I got a little over halfway up the steps I could feel that familiar tightening in my chest. I was wheezing and by the time we got outside I had started coughing. I could not stop coughing as I drove us to the hotel and was still coughing when we had gotten into the hotel room. Of course with the coughing came the trickles and I was so ashamed, upset and frustrated. It was the same feeling I had back in school.

I haven't been able to get that out of my head as I read about people who love to exercise and move their bodies. To me it is a terrifying feeling and I can't fathom it being something joyful, and it confuses me why even when I was much much thinner I still struggled and felt that way because isn't being skinnier supposed to make it easy to move?  Anyway I was talking to a friend about this a while back, the first person I had told about the troubles I had with exercising and how I didn't understand how people could love that, they mentioned that what I was describing sounded a lot like the asthma attacks her brother gets. I kind of brushed her off by telling her that it couldn't be because it only happened when I was doing something strenuous and that it didn't look like the ones I see on TV. She mentioned about something called Exercise Induced Asthma, so when I could I researched it and was dumbfounded at how much of it sounded like what I have been dealing with my whole life.  Now I haven't been to see the doctor about it, me and doctors are not on the best of terms so I keep putting it off. I can't help thinking though, if I had been taken seriously all those years ago in elementary, if the doctors I had seen, and the adults in my life had taken it seriously and not just brushed it off as a lazy fat kid excuse, that maybe I could feel that enjoyment of physical activity. Maybe, possibly, exercise wouldn't be an anxiety filled experience. 

Now I need to figure out where to go from here I would love to see a doctor about it and maybe see if I can get it in control so that I can have a much better relationship with exercise and movement. I just gotta take it one step at a time for now.

Getting to the bottom of my dislike/fear of exercising. - Part One

I have been thinking a lot lately about exercise. I read some incredible blogs about fatties loving exercise first there is Shaunta  who inspires me so often as she blogs about setting realistic goals and find ways to move her body that she loves.  Then there is Ragen Chastain, she makes me long for a fat friendly dance studio around my area because I have always loved the idea of dancing and would love to learn how in a safe space.

Both of these women are inspiring and they are making me want to get my body moving more in ways that I love but in thinking about that my brain hits a dis-connect and I have been pondering why. The thought of exercise fills me with this sense of dread, fear, and failure and it is so deeply instilled that I am realizing it is something that has become ingrained in me at a young age. I was never really an "athletic" person but the more I think about it the more I realize somethings were very off.

Of course back when I was very young I was not as fat as I am today but even back then I remember always being the slowest one, the one struggling. I can vividly remember walking with the rest of my family through a parking lot or mall and crying cause I couldn't keep up to everyone, and being scolded or prodded to hurry up. Even at that young age I my stomach would churn and i would be filled with anxiety when thinking about having to walk a long distance or do something strenuous like walking up a very steep hill. I find that very puzzling because I could do it fine when left to do it on my own pace, but there was just something inside me that fought against it.

My first memories of sports and exercise was in kindergarten/first grade where the dread, failure and ultimately fear started. I remember having a gym teacher who was very competitive and into winning. His idea of motivation was to yell, scream, and ridicule any student who did something wrong.  My first memory is of being up at bat and due to the fact that I had severe astigmatism which means I have very little depth perception so keeping my eye on the ball was pretty much impossible. I kept striking out and therefore getting yelled at by my gym teacher and then insulted and ridiculed by the other kids. We were thrown into games without really being taught the rules of how to play them, and so if and when I made  mistake it was a repeat of the same thing. People would get so focused on winning that if you messed up or didn't do something right you were yelled at and made to feel like a failure. Often times I didn't really even know what I had done wrong because it was never explained to me. I would see other kids being made fun of or ridiculed and I hated it but I couldn't do anything cause the teacher was just as bad. I still hate competition, hate it with a passion. I hate what it does to people and I hate the feeling of being competed with. Competition is such a frustrating thing for me that I will willingly take myself out of it or in the words of my awesome nephew "choose to lose" so I can avoid it.

I realize that some people really do like competition and they respond well to insults and getting yelled at, but I am not one of those people. Even when I am playing Online Role Playing Games I prefer going through quests and conquering bosses rather than competing with other people.So that is one thing that has cultivated my lack of enjoying physical activity. Next post I will talk about the other main reason, and then maybe I can figure out how to find enjoyment through movement. See you in the next post!