When Time Goes By (Sophie)
I found out the other day that the girl who tried to set my hair on fire in Year 7 dropped out of school and had a baby.
Her partner in crime did exactly the same.
I’m still known back there…I was only at that school two years yet I’m still remembered because of that incident. I find that so funny. If my name is ever mentioned it goes along with “Oh my god! Was she the one who had JK try to set her hair on fire?!”
I ran into a girl at uni the other week, a year below me from that school who also remembered me; my name and all. I had no recollection of ever meeting her in my life.
On the whole, I find it quite strange to be remembered yet somewhat honouring. It is so easy to think of your life as having an effect only on yourself and those you know most closely. Almost in a sense it gives me a sign of the bigger picture – that one person can affect a group, a school, a community; and if you try hard enough, your country or the world.
Right now I think of those two girls and their current predicament with a bemused sense of satisfaction.
For when you are victimised over a long period of time, sometimes the only think that gets you through the days is the pure faith that one day you will climb mountains and they will be left down in the depths below.
You will prevail.
-S.
Disclaimer: This is not a judgement of teenage mothers who I think can be quite capable of raising children.
Disclaimer 2: Ultimately my intent of this post is not to show vindication (i got over what those girls did to me and others a longggg time ago). I want this post to be a lesson to bullies – that they do not have the ultimate power….that those who have been victims in the past (and I know so many), or even right now, are valuable human beings who can contribute so much to the world, despite the intent of a bully to tell you that you are nothing. THEY are wrong.
Sophie it saddens me to hear you say and think of such things:
“Right now I think of those two girls and their current predicament with a bemused sense of satisfaction.
For when you are victimised over a long period of time, sometimes the only think that gets you through the days is the pure faith that one day you will climb mountains and they will be left down in the depths below.
You will prevail.”
I don’t know, maybe it was the way I was brought up… I would never be ‘satisfied’ by the failure and misery of others, no matter what they did to me in the past. I would pray and hope that they would learn from their mistakes and become better people. I don’t want to sound judgemental but I think you might be regretting having such feelings and creating this entry.
“oh but SamSam1987 you never had someone bullying you and trying to burn your hair off (and possibly killing you), so you don’t know how it feels! Get off your high horse and welcome to the real world”.
The lad has a point.
It is never our place to look down upon others for we are all mortals cast from the same mould. The only thing that separates those that ascend from those that mill at the foot of the mountain of life is a difference in opportunity.
You will come to realise in time that that particular way of thinking breeds elitism garners contempt. Speaking from the perspective of a person who was ‘bullied’ quite considerably, I can tell you that harbouring ill feeling towards the perpetrator(s) accomplishes nothing; venom poisons, it does not heal.
Though success is grand, to be humble is a virtue 🙂
PXW
hi samsam
thank you for your comments.
perhaps my post came across sounding just a little too vindictive (which was not the intention).
overall my intention was to convery the fact that people who are bullied can in the end succeed and ‘beat’ the bullies.
when you are in a circumstance where you are being bullied, more often than not, the only way of getting past it is to just ‘deal’ with it and not ever show that they are getting to you.
i know for a fact these girls put misery through so many other people at that school, not just me and my best friend at the time.
ultimately i want this post to be a lesson to bullies – that they do not have the ultimate power….that those who they bully will more often than not, simply get a greater determination to prove those who have treated them as nothing, as wrong.
my post is about the value of a human life.
we are all valuable, we can all create positive energy in this world…and it is our choices, and ours only what we do with our life and how we treat other people.
i am someone who has boundless amounts of compassion, but you almost knew my response before i went to write it- i do not believe in sympathy for the devil.
like you said…sometimes you just have to face reality…i think one should move on from their past and not let it control them…but accepting wrongful behaviour as “understandable” is a whole other matter.
I’m not trying to have a go at you but your original entry sounded quite bad. The strongest theme that came out of it for me was one of revenge and vindication. I feel sorry for the victims and the perpetrators of bullying. It must make you think what drives people to try to burn someone’s hair and other related things. A significant number of bullies have been ‘bullied’ themselves in the past (e.g. sexual abuse, physical abuse) or have lived traumatic lives. I don’t believe anyone is born ‘evil’ but its your environment that influences your character and how you behave. Just remember that not everyone is fortunate enough to have good parents, a good family and a good socio economic position. (Yes I am aware that the word good is used three times in one sentence)
I kind of understand how you feel, a couple of the guys who bullied me in school got expelled for stealing calculators from lockers. I had to laugh.
Someone set my hair on fire a few weeks back… it was interesting. I seem to have bad luck with hair though, when I was in school someone decided to squirt tomato sauce in it (and over my school uniform).
Unless you’ve set yourself on the path to spiritual enlightenment and cosmic nirvana, there’s nothing much that is wrong with having a little chuckle at the ‘plight’ of someone who caused you grief at some point in the past. Some may say it’s healthy therapy. And it’s as if this plight we speak of is particularly tragic, nor did the chuckler have a hand in dishing out the circumstances.
Of course, we all know the right thing to do in the perfect world is to forgive and forget. But, you know, let he* (or she*) who is without hypocrisy cast the first stone…
*disclaimer – no I am not saying any of the people who have commented on this thread are hypocrits.
Thanks for such a wonderful comment mothgod!!!! I expected some bad responses to my post….but it is nice to have someone say “Hey…maybe it’s okay to have a bit of a laugh” – particularly since, like you said, it’s not like I actually enacted revenge on them or something.
Sometimes this era of political correctness Oprah-style really gets to me. It is frustrating having to write disclaimers on everything!! (Though I guess the internet is to blame for that to an extent as things can be so easily misinterpreted without seeing the person’s body language and hearing their tone of voice)
It IS all well and nice to say forgive and forget….but there is a lot of conflict out there in various self-help and psychology circles about whether forgiveness IS neccessarily a good thing. In my case…it’s been years and in the scheme of things – it’s not like I was scarred for life so forgiveness is cool….but if it was some major life-changing horrible event…
The one thing I know for sure is that you cannot tell someone else how to live their life when you have not experienced what they have experienced.
Thanks for your commetn Q – sorry I am so long to reply. Have been flat out!
I think that is hilarious he got expelled for stealing calculators!!! What an idiot!
That is awful about actually having your hair on fire. I hope you are okay and didn’t sustain any serious burns? :-S
I think hair is one of those things prone to facing problems in school environments, an “easy target”, from dying it some weird colour because it’s the ‘in’ thing that everyone at school is doing….to having fish oil thrown in it on year 12 Muck Up day….
-Not good!
so moth you think there is nothing wrong with having a ‘little’ chuckle at someone elses failures and plight? According to who? You?
‘The one thing I know for sure is that you cannot tell someone else how to live their life when you have not experienced what they have experienced.’
Oh believe you me Sophie, I have experienced a lot worse.
Moth, the easy and weak thing to do is to laugh. It takes a bigger person to forgive and forget.
Oh, I barely noticed, except for the smell :S My hair is rather far away from my head, and one of my friends sneaked up behind me while I was retrieving a large ball of ice from the freezer and set it on fire. XD
I guess my hair was the target because it’s the most identifying thing about me 🙂
samsam1987 said “According to who? You?”.
Well yes, according to me… who else?
As I was saying, in a perfect (and/or politically correct) world the right thing to do is forgive and forget, and I agee it should be the ideal perspective on life. But things aren’t always black and white.
It’s a little like making a blanket statement “Respect Your Parents”. While comments like that will win you votes at the Miss Universe pageant, it is not always applicable in the real world. There are many many incidences involving horribly abusive parents, deadbeat dads, deadbeat moms, people who absolutely do not deserve the respect of their children much less the rest of the community.
It’s a similar concept re the idea of forgiving and forgetting. Sometimes there’s a very long journey one has to take before reaching that point, and sometimes it’s much healthier and more therapeutic to be able to stand up and have a little chuckle first at the expense of your abusers without having someone accusing you of being weak and taking the easy road. In any case I don’t get the impression that Sophie was particularly traumatised in the long term by those past events, so it’s a moot point.
Sophie’s story does not contain an element of vindictive revenge. There’s a difference between that and having a chuckle. I’d say the easy and weak thing to do is revenge, wouldn’t you think? Although by the gods, the Count of Monte Cristo did a damn good job of exacting revenge on those who attempted to destroy his life. I wouldn’t say it was easy or weak of him to do what he eventually did, particularly since there was an added element of justice involved. It would’ve made a very boring (and highly dissatisfying) book if he had sat in his jail cell forgiving and forgetting the rest of his life away.
“so moth you think there is nothing wrong with having a ‘little’ chuckle at someone elses failures and plight?”
A comment in reply to yours above – a person’s ‘failure’ (however broad the definition of ‘failure’ is for every individual) in life can be entirely out of their hands. Or, as Sophie described in the story above, it is likely that the girl and her partner were responsible for their own circumstances. But maybe they are living happily ever after as a well functioning family unit? Who are you to judge if they are failures? I know some people who, all they wanted to do was marry and have babies, and they have been perfectly happy in life with their families.
That would make Sophie’s reaction a personal one in the context of her own perspective wouldn’t it. That, to me, makes it even less of an issue how Sophie chooses to react, whether to laugh or cry over it. Much less to have people condemn her for being vengeful and vindictive.
Samsam…i appreciate all feedback from readers (even comments such as yours that have in the past, challenged my writings – though in a friendly manner). Please however, avoid if possible inciting negative tension between my readers. I took a personal risk writing what I did in this post – in the process revealing that though I haven’t experienced some of the tough things other first years have, I am still human – we all go through various trials and tribulations at some stage or another.
I would like to again remind you that the point of my original post was not to celebrate ‘revenge’ but to merely show people that victims do not have to be victims forever – that we can rise above those who have put us down in the past and succeed in acheiving our dreams.
With that said, I would like to ask that even if you don’t agree with what I have written, that you respect commentors who may have agreed with me/understood where I was coming from.
In my belief, we are ALL entitled to our own opinions, each formed by what we have personally experienced. And I believe that no one can ever truly understand what another person has experienced unless they have lived as that person.
I cannot know what you have exeperienced…for your experiences are your own, so I have no response in that regards.
It may be your opinion that it takes a bigger person to forgive and forget and that is fair enough….I don’t think either Moth or I ever said that forgiving and forgetting was a bad idea (and I never said that i hadn’t forgiven or forgotton).
Anyways…I hope you see through my words that I respect your comments and I am not trying to provoke an argument but I did feel the need to reply to them, and to defend the rights of other commentators to comment in peace.
Cheers,
Sophie
Oprah rules!
*runs away*
Samsam – lol!
Cheers 🙂