By Griffen Stabler
Assistant Head of Middle School; MS English; Grade 8 Dean; Coordinator of Equity & Inclusion
I have a confession to make that probably won’t surprise those of you out there who have heard me mention this before: I was a bully when I was your age. At the time, I didn’t see myself that way, but with the aid of hindsight (and the maturity and perspective that comes with going bald — seriously, I can literally see better now that my forehead has morphed into a five-head. I was rocking some heavy flow in high school. You can Google it), I now recognize the shortcomings and blind spots of my younger self.
“Bully” is a loaded word. For a quick definition, a bully is someone who uses their strength or power to intimidate or influence someone who has less of those things. Growing up, I always thought of bullying in the classical, archetypal sense where some stereotype of a nerd is getting an atomic wedgie from some galoot shaking him down for lunch money behind the bleachers. Since I never engaged in that sort of physical intimidation and actually actively looked out for my most marginalized peers, I grew up rejecting the notion that I could be seen as a bully. However, as I have grown up, my understanding of the concept of bullying has evolved, particularly once I started teaching and gained a front-row seat to adolescence.
I now believe that bullying need not be an active enterprise. Ignoring folks relies on the same abuse of power and has the same hurtful consequences. So does only seeing parts of people, or using them as a means to your own selfish ends. In my case, I was so caught up in the need to be cool that most of my relationships and interactions were filtered through that prism.
When I was in high school, I enjoyed all the markers of the definition of popularity we have been conditioned to care about by the world we live in. To my understanding of the world, cool dudes were athletic, loud, cocky and straight — as soon as I got to campus, I set out to prove to everyone that I was all of those things. In proving that, I began to view others as a means to an end — a way to make myself feel better about the inevitable insecurity that comes with growing up and figuring out who you are and what you care about. Some of the people who first welcomed me to boarding school and helped me through that transition were eventually dropped from my social circle when they didn’t fit into my changing standards. They had helped me through my most insecure moments in boarding school, and yet instead of embracing and owning that vulnerability, I let myself buy in to the easy reassurance of preconceived and entirely superficial notions of coolness and popularity.
Don’t let yourself get caught in the trap of self-absorption that allows you to look past people who don’t fit your definition of cool. Don’t let yourself make other people invisible by buying into the definition of social worth we’re given by pop culture and modern society. Trust that all the clichés you hear about getting to know new people and the value of diverse and varied perspectives and experiences are 100% true.
The older I get, the more shame and guilt I feel about the way I viewed the world as a teenager. By letting people’s value be a product of their role in making me look, feel, and seem cool, I turned beautifully complicated human beings going through the same struggles I was into stepping stones in some silly race to the top of an imaginary mountain. In the process, I missed out on the chance to connect. To learn. To grow. To embrace the fact that being a human is super freaking scary and if we could all just admit that fact to each other once in a while, it would probably be a lot easier for all of us.
So, I guess I’ll leave you with that: it’s hard out here to be us, no matter what your story. Own that. Share that. Support each other as we all try and figure out what to do with a brain, body, and heart that wants desperately to be loved but can never truly know if we are given our limited access to others very same brains, bodies, and hearts. That’s terrifying, but it becomes less so if we can go through it together in authentic community. I love you all — go out and live lives you can be proud of.