“I just can’t take it anymore,” she cried as held onto her stuffed dog. “They’re so mean to me.” The forth grader had once again been bullied at school. She was smart and showed great potential, but she hated school because with school came recess and with recess came bullies.
“I don’t wanna cry anymore,” she said as she looked into the eyes of her favorite stuffed animal. “Please help me,” she begged the dog as she and her friend crawled into bed. Tomorrow was another day with another bully and another hurt feeling, but that little girl had hope that maybe someday it would get better, or that maybe she would get used to it, and that when they picked on her, she wouldn’t be able to feel the pain.
Luckily for that little girl, things got better as soon as she got out of elementary school, and by the time she reached the ninth grade, you never would have guessed that the social butterfly in Honors English was the same little girl who would sit at the back of the playground by the soccer nets and hope that one of her classmates wouldn’t bully her.
She’d always been told that things would get better, but as a nine-year-old, she couldn’t believe those words of encouragement, but a freshmen in high school, she couldn’t believe that she had let those people stand in the way of her fun. She couldn’t believe that she had let those bullies force her to cry herself to sleep in self pity.
That girl had drifted through friendships picking up companions all along the way. The people who had teased her were either no longer attending her school, or they were at least in none of her classes.
Today, that girl is a sophomore in high school. She’s taking classes that suit her accelerated needs, and she’s getting together with her friends almost every weekend to go see a movie or to simply hang at someone’s house.
Along with excelling in her academics, she’s a varsity athlete in two sports. She’d always been teased as being a boy because she’d always had a knack for sports, especially running sports that didn’t involve physical contact.
Currently, she has her friends transfixed by her “mad skillage” of putting her thoughts on paper to tell a compelling tale. Her friends ask her how she comes up with these ideas, but the truth is, she’s been thinking about most of these ideas for years. When she’d come home after school as a little kid with tears stinging her eyes, she’d go up to her bedroom and think alone with her stuffed dog.
And that same stuffed dog still helps her write today. As some have guessed, that girl is me.
Yeah, there are still bullies who try to bring me down, but by now it’s too late. I’ll never shed another tear for them, and I’ll never let them keep her from having the time of her life.