I think it's important to notice that there is truly no greater bully than the voices in our head.  The ones telling us we aren't good enough, pretty enough, strong enough, smart enough, etc.  Those are the bullies I face....the ones I cannot rid of.

Hi my name is Tenielle metlin rendle and I am a 19 year old female who lives in ns Canada. Ive lived in Canada my whole life, but lived in alberta for 8 years before I moved to nova scotia. A few days after I had moved to nova scotia and had started school in fourth grade, the bullying automatically began. It has not stopped since. Person to person bullying has stopped but not cyber bullying. I hadn't even been cyberbullied until about grade 10. Ive been called just about every name that you could think of, ive been beat up, used, threatened to be beat up more then ten times, had rumors spread about me and lost everybody who I thought was my friend. Even people who I thought were my friends spread rumors about me and called me mean names behind my back. People would also talk about me behind my back. I have cut myself before quite a few times and I do have depression not just because of being bullied so much, but also because of being abused,raped,molested, and sexually assaulted as well. I never could understand why people would treat me that way and I still don't understand why people cyber bully me to this day. But this is my story and am always here to talk if someone would like to talk or need a friend to talk to. your never alone as you can see with what I've been through. My email is [email protected] and my Facebook is Tenielle Metlin-Rendle if you'd like to become friends or talk or just so you don't have to feel alone. lots of love <3

Now that I am a nineteen year old, finishing my first year of college, I find that I am a far more compassionate person than I was in middle school. I know that there is no acceptable excuse to explain away my shame for the verbal abuse I have used in the past. However, I can explain why I did such shameful things in my pre-high school days. 

When I was young, I grew up happy and healthy as the oldest of five kids. I was very much the "model" child that my parents more or less would dangle in front of my younger brothers as the definition of success. With this in mind, it is easy to see how I started to develop a rather egotistical world view. While being an oldest child has brought me many good qualities, like a strong sense of responsibility, it also made me very assertive. Thus, I asserted myself in my nuclear family, and I began to assert my "better" self on my new classmates in a new school when I began the fifth grade. 

However, as the new kid, I felt some animosity from my classmates. On the playground, when I asserted myself to them, they turned me away. Or worse yet, they would call me names and otherwise tease me. Since I have younger brothers, this bickering wasn't new or strange, so I fought fire with fire. I would tease and call names back to the people who I didn't like or who teased me. However, I did eventually learn that being rude, even in groups, does not make anybody the best of friends. 

By the time I was approaching high school, my entire ideology had changed, so I no longer would verbally abuse anybody directly. I unfortunately would still be a mean person behind people's backs, but I knew that making people feel badly was only making me feel badly, too. 
The rest of my changes happened thanks to the abuses that my younger brothers endured. 

My brother, Henry (not his real name), was bullied in middle school, also mostly called names. His experience was being called gay, fag, etc. despite the fact that he was not and had never done anything to warrant it. He had glasses and was very excitable, so when he played soccer at recess, he would enjoy himself, up until the other boys would stop the game just to tease him. 
Once Henry got to high school, he had no friends, and even now, as a senior in high school, he is friendless. 

My other brother, Blair (name also changed), is still in middle school, and he is bullied for his admittedly strange mannerisms. Blair is different because he reads social cues poorly, so he has a hard time telling between jokes and teasing and additionally has a very difficult time keeping friends. Blair, like myself, chooses to fight fire with fire. To protect himself from the many, many, many types of abuse that he endures at school, he now immediately lashes out with violent behaviors. 

Seeing the varied effects that this bullying, this abusive behavior has had on three of the five children in my family already, I am more than ever concerned about the future victims and the bullies themselves, ashamed of my own past behaviors, and my outlook is forever changed by the drastic effects that bullying has had on my own two brothers, whose lives are better than many others'. 

 

I have always been on the shy side- never immediately making friends with people I meet, not the girl surrounded by friends everywhere she goes, not ever feeling confident enough to speak up in class or introduce myself to new people. Most of my childhood was spent playing sports or reading. When I was still in Elementary school, I was very involved in soccer. I had fun when I was at practice and at games. But, when I would go to school, I often wore my comfortable soccer shorts and t-shirts with my hair pulled back. I was what people might call a tomboy; I liked to play outside instead of inside with dolls and I loved sports more than I liked painting my nails. This all led to people thinking of me as a "weirdo" which is what they often called me in 5th grade. Many of the girls in my class refused to be friends with me because I didn't dress "cute" and I cared more about having fun outside than playing with dolls like they believed a "typical" girls should have. I had a small group of friends, about 2 or 3 girls I felt were similar enough to me that I could talk to them, but honestly, the only reason the group of us were really friends were because we felt like we didn't really fit in with any of the other friend groups. We were very different; one was a horseback riding lover, one loved to play the flute and piano, and the other loved to skateboard, while my passions were still soccer and reading. The group of us were friends, but due to the lack of common interests, we really just hung out because there was no one else who would want hang out with us. In addition to soccer, I was also a huge bookworm. A day didn't go by where I didn't read at least one chapter of a book. Often times, my mom would have to take my flashlight as punishment because I would stay up very late reading under my blankets using my flashlight so I wouldn't get caught. I was a Harry Potter enthusiast (which was uncool at the time), obsessed with Magic Treehouse books, and love the Little House On The Prairie series. Reading shouldn't classify someone as cool or uncool, but at my elementary school, it did. I was often made fun of for reading during recess because my friends weren't there or choosing to read instead of play a board game with my classmates when we had free time during the day because I was too excited to find out what happened in the next chapter of my book. More often than not, I was looked down upon and told I was boring and a nerd because I enjoyed reading so much. I will always remember a comment from a girl in my class who said I had "read more books in my year in 5th grade than she will in her entire life", and all I could do was sit and listen to her friends laugh at me for this. Reading shouldn't be something to be embarrassed about, but it was to me in 5th grade. The bullying only got worse when near the end of that year, 1 of my closest friends moved while the other 2 decided to break off from me and become their own close-knit 2 person friend group without me. Instead of just breaking ties and not talking to me, they felt as though they were above me and began to taunt me, walk behind me in the hallway laughing at me and making funny faces to make everyone else laugh too. I felt so hopeless, and even when I went to my mom, the only advice she could really give was that it would end soon because back then, bullying wasn't seen as such a big deal. Every day, I felt as though I was the weird one of my grade, the girl who had zero friends, the one who would grow up a loner and have herself and her books and that was it. It was a horrible feeling, especially when my low self esteem was especially tested when I moved towns and schools in the beginning of 6th grade.

Throughout the time in my new middle school, the taunting decreased, but I was still the "weirdo" and tomboy that was friends with the other girls who were seen as strange. This time though, the group of us were better suited to be friends and I felt much happier with them. However, the taunting changed to be making fun of me being a tomboy more than that of my bookworm habits. Every day, girls would show up to school with big bows in their hair, cute dresses, colorful and flowery bookbags, while I continued to show up in my typical t shirt and shorts with my hair in a pony tail, not really caring about how I looked because I was comfortable. It didn't bug me much until the taunting in 6th grade began. Lots of the girls acted as though I was gross and they couldn't come near me just because I wasn't dressed up for class. I couldn't understand why people that young really cared about what I wore to school, especially since my mom told me I could wear whatever I wanted to be comfortable and she didn't seem to have a problem with it. Every day, I felt the sting of people laughing at my tomboy ways. I attempted to dress cuter each year, the teasing was dying out, but the sting was still there. I would still occasionally receive nasty notes in my locker or hear boys making fun of me as they passed me in the halls. 

I grew up and a now in college, working towards a career, and succeeding in many different aspects of my life. I have many good friends, still exercise and read regularly, and still would rather dress in comfortable clothes than high heels and a dress every day. My bullying may not have been as severe as many people's out there, BUT, I wanted to share so that I could tell everyone that it DOES get better! You just have to learn to be comfortable with who you are and realize that if people don't like you for you, they're not worth your time at all. I distracted myself with sports and reading, and still had childhood fun. I don't view the bullying I endured as something that permanently ruined my life. Yes, it did hurt at the time and it was painful and sad; BUT, I found my healthy and safe escape from the world when it became too much by reading and playing sports, I used my faith as a reassurance that it will all get better one day, and have learned that no one is worth your time if they think you aren't "cool" or "normal." Everyone is different; you just have to find those people you get along with and move past all the hate from the people who still believe making fun of others will make their own lives better.

well i was bullied in 1st grade because of my habits like bitting on my hair, bitting on my fingers, and bitting on my skin they called me laura germs because of that and they kept calling me that till up to 6th grade i was cyber bullied in 8th and 9th grade in 8th grade i was trying to help out a friend not comit suside but her friend started calling me names like a bitch hore i was cyber bullied again in 9th grade my friend who was like a sister to me called me up on the phone and started saying that i took a prego test found out that i was postive and that i needed a comdom for it i wanted to comit suside but i chose to call up my friend to come and get me but i also ran into the kitchen and grab a knife and she got there in time she took the knife out of my hand and she confort me

well i was bullied in 1st grade because of my habits like bitting on my hair, bitting on my fingers, and bitting on my skin they called me laura germs because of that and they kept calling me that till up to 6th grade i was cyber bullied in 8th and 9th grade in 8th grade i was trying to help out a friend not comit suside but her friend started calling me names like a bitch hore i was cyber bullied again in 9th grade my friend who was like a sister to me called me up on the phone and started saying that i took a prego test found out that i was postive and that i needed a comdom for it i wanted to comit suside but i chose to call up my friend to come and get me but i also ran into the kitchen and grab a knife and she got there in time she took the knife out of my hand and she confort me

My name is Kristina ;) Bullying started for me in Kindergarten, yes, at the age of 5! Looking @ old photos, I was pretty average in size; but there were 3 girls that didn't think the same. I was constantly ridiculed and teased for (as they saw me) being FAAAAAT! In my eyes I wasn't, lol.

We would play on over-sized building blocks and when climbing on them, they would move there bodies around and say, "whooaa, Kristina's gonna make them all fall! hahahah!" During a learning session on our five senses, we did a blind taste testing; and that's right, as I was blind folded, I hear the main girl say, "awww, she's going to eat everything before we get some!" while the class laughed. My teacher did what she could to quiet them down, but It was horrible...

This continued every-single-day :( I began to tell the teacher that I wasn't feeling good, so that I could go to the office and be picked up; I would purposely strive to be an over achiever; so that I could win the Principle's award weekly and have lunch with the Principle, and not have to sit in the cafeteria with my class. I still always went to the nurse to say I wasn't feeling well, stayed on top of my school work, etc. ANYTHING TO NOT BE IN CLASS OR AT SCHOOL!

This carried on for quite some time and my parents finally tell me, "You can't keep leaving school. This has to stop, we can't keep having other family members pick you up..." *Remember, my dad was active duty military and my mom worked @ the base as well, so I stuck it out.

I thought that things were getting better, until story and nap time one day. We typically have our snack during the story, then take a nap. I woke up to laughter and whispering around me...the same three girls had put GOLDFISH  in my hair, and an APPLE JUICE box next to my face, saying, "Ahahaha! She eats in her sleep...AHAHAHAHA...!" HUMILIATING! I cried and ran out of the room to the office. Of course I asked to go home. Luckily it was a Friday, lol! I had time to recoup.

The Goldfish and apple juice incident was the worse for me...I never told my parents or family. Not until I was about 16 yrs. old and had the confidence to do so. Confidence, because by this time, I had become somewhat of a "mean girl" at times throughout high school. *I was the "popular girl" because I was new, at a new school (parents still in the military).* This behavior lasted for close to 10 yrs.

**THE TURNING OF A LEAF**

I would WANT to make people feel bad; I wouldn't just correct someone, I would purposely make them feel bad (at times stupid); I exuded an ARROGANCE, no longer confidence, based attitude. I excelled in EVERYTHING that I did: i.e. work, school, hobbies, etc. I made sure no one had any reason to say anything TO ME, about me.

Finally, at the age of 23 (I'm now 30), my family started to not want to hang out with me; co-workers would tell me (to my face) "no one wants to work with you..." Everyone thought I was just rude.

One day, I go grocery shopping and see the dreaded GOLDFISH. I buy a bag, along with apple juice. Something changed that day as I ate the cheddar cracker snack and drank my cup of juice...I felt almost empowered and had a sense of affirmation that I needed to NOT act as how I was treated when I was 5 years old. I knew I had to change my ways if I wanted to get along with my family, affect change @ my office, and feel better about myself day to day. 

Since then, Goldfish and apple juice are two of my most favorite things on EARTH, LOL! Ultimately, I want to THANK those three girls. I realized that I  had become what I never wanted to be, and had the courage to change into what I always knew I could be! Shout out to all those struggling day to day...whatever form your Goldfish and apple juice comes in, just know I hear you and will have snack time everyday for YOU!!! <3 Kristina Cruz

A self-proclaimed eleven-year-old "visionary," he brought every bully under one roof, established a corporate hierarchy, and then turned bullying into a systematic & scalable enterprise, which subsequently proceeded to terrorize hundreds, and later thousands as it spread from one school to the next… 

And in the meanwhile, this so-called visionary was hailed as a hero by the community, including many educators, who applauded his "vision" of "building a better school," subsequently promoting community-wide events, and a mass movement that propagated his vision even more as it spread from one school to the next, bringing communities together, hundreds of thousands of people… and all in the name of "charity." 

So what do you do? If you stand up, nobody will believe you. He was a hero. A "miracle worker." He was the only kid ever to stop all bullying in a school in a single heartbeat… and resume it at will. Again and again... the inspiration of reform, the voice of a movement, of building a better school… and the more suffering inflicted, the more his vision was loved.

This is my bully story. This is what I chose to fight. This was a long time ago, but its consequences still reverberate today.

Hi everyone. I just want to shout out to anyone who may be having a rough day because they are being abused. I will not use the euphemism "bully" in this, because I really think that softens it up and makes it easier for people to accept it and look the other way. But that is in no way a criticism of this site's goals, or anyone's for that matter.

I'm a 27 year old Canadian, and I experienced a decade of constant abuse from others when I was younger. I experienced it first at home, from my brother, then again at school. At school it didn't happen until about 5th grade, but at home it goes much further back. At school it was not only kids, but a few teachers too. One teacher in particular was very fond of putting me down. But the two worst abusers of all in school were Greg and Jason.

Greg would grip the back of my neck and squeeze, and if I fought back, he would kick me. He had been my friend from Kindergarten to Grade 4, but for some reason, in Grade 5, he started abusing me in this manner. I didn't get Greg out of my life until Grade 7, when my parents divorced and we moved to the other side of the suburb. But moving only seemed to change the people who were abusing me. By grade 8 I made a new circle of friends, which revolved around a guy named Jason. Jason was a great friend at first, but after knowing him for about a year, he basically turned the whole group against me. Just one day, out of the blue, he suddenly decided that he hates all white people. The group of friends was about 80% Southeast Asian, so me and the two other "white kids" of the group were abused and had our possessions stolen and basically pushed to the breaking point.

At this point I was 14, and my grades were in the low 40's, I was failing all of my classes, and, well I wanted an escape. Somehow, I managed to barely pass all of my courses. I spent that entire summer at my cousin's apartment 3 hours away from all of the people I needed to remove from my life. Then, when I got back to school for grade 10, I didn't talk to anybody for the first month of being there, and ignored everyone who tried talking to me. But in spite of this, one awkward, nerdy kid in my programming class sat next to me, and talked to me constantly even though I was ignoring him. And I suppose it's because I'm also nerdy (and proud of it), but we became best friends, and still are 12 years later.

The worst of the abuse was somehow over, and I could move on with my life.

I've dealt with some awful people since those days, but I've been able to manage, and prevent people from walking all over me as an adult. Continuing in high school, my grades went from 40's in grade 9 to 80's and 90's in Grade 12. I was accepted into the universities I applied to, where I studied Theatre, and did quite well.

Since then, I've been diagnosed with bipolar disorder, which made a lot of sense looking back at the emotional rollercoaster that my life has been. Right now I'm living on government assistance, and trying to figure out what direction to take my life in.

My advice? However bad it gets, don't kill yourself. There are great experiences ahead of you, and there is a lot of potential in you. Seek the help of others, as much as possible, and try to let go of resentment. I have a lot of resentment for people in my past, but I try to let go, and that's enough for me. I've long since forgiven my brother, and we are now friends as adults.

Peace and love, Josh

Hello everybody! I would like to share my experience for I actually haven't chatted about it with anybody, hoping that it is useful to you or to receive some feedback.

It all started when my parents changed me of school at the age of ten. I may consider myself a shy person at the beginning and that was combined with almost everybody in the class passively rejecting me, so I started having only one friend (fortunately he was really nice) and this unpopularity gave place to bullies of my class come to me. Since then I was known to be very easygoing/weak/fearful, ''bulliable'' I could say, and that is why I started being mobbed by people from other grades until I turned 16 (primary school and secondary school were joint in the same education centre, you may call me crazy but I did not change to another school). I received physical and psychological attacks but the worst is that I've been stolen lots of scholar material. Half of the times I've been bullied by girls. My conclusion is that I was bullied for being different, not practicing popular sports or not following the trendings at that time.

*Some advices: be careful with the social groups you join when you are bullied, bad people will offer you friendship just because they take for granted that you will accept it; sometimes bullies will simulate being your friends when they aren’t to get something from you; never try to cause bullies a good impression (maybe the worst thing you can do).*

Gratefully, this didn't last forever. I had to take Bachillerato at another centre (the two years to preparate for University in Spain). There I met new and good friends, met a currently ex-grilfriend and my marks were much upgraded.

One of the things that I would like to say is that you see how life goes on, you cannot expect to see everything fixed by itself, it depends on your attitude how to overcome your past as bullied, it can make you cry or it can give you the ambition to do the best of you (it is to be known that lots of celebrities have been bullied in the past), I don't find worth to show your one time bullies that your life is better than theirs, you just have to enjoy what you are doing without caring about that bad people because you do good things for yourself not as a revenge.

Miguel