Thank you so much!

It is striking how similar this is to my own experience. When I was going through it, I often wished I was a girl because I thought girls didn’t have bullies. Imagine that! But in terms of when it started, the nature of it, and how long it went on I was blowing my mind with the similarities as I read. Elementary school, Junior High, High school, camp, all of it. In my case during my second year of high school I attempted a weird public suicide that got me pulled out of school and into residential treatment for a spell. When I got back to school I thought things could not possibly be worse but how wrong I was! The school psychologist (yes I was now scheduled for regular visits) perked up when I mentioned wanting to be a girl but when I told him the reason he disabused me of my notion that girls didn’t have bullies, and I figured he would know. He asked me if I wanted to join a group session he ran but I got him to tell me a little about who was in it. I recognized a couple of my most extreme bullies and demurred. Now I think it might have been a good idea.

Bullying ended for me during my third year of high school when by some unaccountable miracle of grace I had my first serious girlfriend. (I wrote a fictionalized account here. Don’t worry — in real life I didn’t burn any families to death!) Why did this put an end to it, at least as I recollect? You know how the adults tell you to ignore the bullies but it never works because you are only pretending to ignore them and they know it? In the throws of teenage love nothing else existed for me besides my girlfriend and so I actually was ignoring them. Effortlessly! She revealed to me that when we first started going out someone told her about the aforementioned suicide attempt and that her response was that I needed someone. I haven’t heard from her in decades but I feel like I know all I need to about the who she is.