“Only upon coming of age do they lose this innocence and the protection it confers” – Anon
Children from the age of 0 to say 10 have yet to build an intrinsic value of empathy and have yet to form a sense of individuality. This is where for me the mob mentality truly begins and how I first found out that not everyone had nice things to say.
I spent my early life as an outward looking child but there was always something not quite right. From the age of 3-5 I was fine (no bullying), I decided on my best friends and I also had children I avoided but for no real reason (I was a boy and at that age you hated girls).
Building things with blocks and painting were my things, I just wanted to build and create things.
Someone to play with…
I started to see things differently early on in pre-school and some of the things I was saying to my friends didn’t make sense to them. If I turned to a fellow 4 year old “The tower will always fall over if you add too many blocks” it made no sense to the child I was speaking to, but made perfect sense to me. I feel this is my first introduction to frustration. At this point I picked the people I would play with religiously as I wanted someone who would understand the ‘rules’ of how to create something. I also at this point created a role for myself, which was to control everything around me when possible to prevent that feeling of frustration and this is still part of my life today.
Above all, don’t lie to yourself…
As the year(s) progressed I became firmly stuck to the idea that I was in control and I was the 4 year old that was right. I became so involved in this that I sat on my Grandmother’s living room floor and drew a picture that was purposefully awful to show to my Mother and the result was what I expected. I just scribbled in Crayon on a piece of paper and showed it to my Mum, she exclaims how wonderful it is, when in my head I know she’s now a liar in my life. I had a habit of testing people’s genuinity. There is another segment here where my brother lied to me about scribblings on a piece of paper being ‘joined up writing’ but that’s too superfluous to include.
In the beginning…
Finally made it into primary school which would be ‘Elementary’ in the US so about 5 years old. Sadly this is the beginning of the roller coaster of life events and it may seem a little darker from here.
My first thoughts were ‘awesome, I’m going to school with my best friends’ but the reality is quite different, as yes you’re going to school with your best friends but people who are not your friend vastly outnumber them. Everything started as well as it could but then we started to get older and children start to bring their emotional baggage with them. It started when the children were trying to figure out their standing in school, so who they can control and who controls them. At this age it’s less about who is more willing to fight, or who is the better fighter, and more about who is the biggest, at this stage I was more or less the same size as everyone else but that wasn’t to last.
Growing pains…
All the children started their growth spurt at around the same time except me, for whatever reason I was staying the same height whilst everyone was beginning to look down on me, literally and metaphorically. The further I fell behind in height, the further I fell down the proverbial ‘pecking’ order of things; and somehow I knew that this was the start of something that I would carry for a long time. As a child, however, I vastly underestimated that timeframe.
Things escalated as you would expect, first it was being ignored or left out of games then the name calling starts which would then lead to odd minor acts of aggression and violence. As you would imagine the name calling was not very sophisticated and generally centred around my height, but at around 7 years old I would take everything to heart.
OK, that hurt…
My first experience with actual physical bullying outside my family, beyond a shove and a push, came when I showed up a popular kid because he was wrong. This was one of the many occasions in my life where my intelligence brimmed to the surface and I forgot my somewhat misguided need to hide said intelligence. The comment from popular kid was made whilst we were playing some game on the playing field and immediately I stopped, looked at him and without thinking just blurted ‘you’re wrong’. This then escalated into a full blown argument between popular kid and me, whilst popular kids friends were all laughing and popular kid was right up in my face screaming. To be clear, when one person within a discourse starts screaming, they’ve already lost the argument regardless of how frustrated they may be. Seeing things escalating beyond control I turned and started to walk away, where I was followed by popular kid and his popular friends and then suddenly I felt a thud and a pain behind my right ear. He’d actually punched me from behind as I walked away. I turned round and just saw the most angry and frustrated face I’d ever seen up until that point and something dawned on me, people who can’t think, fight. I’m not talking about people who fight as a form of sport, I’m talking about people who fight someone because they feel they have to prove their point. It took a second for me to have this revelation whilst staring at the face of frustration and I did the only thing that made sense, I turned around and walked away followed by a chorus of laughing and high fives as popular kid was venerated.
A lack of direction, not a lack of time…
It was around this time that I lost focus when it came to my school work, I wanted to be in with the cool kids as in my mind it was the simplest way to stop the bullying and being clever was not cool. At this point I focused more and more on being the person the other kids would want to hang around with, and less and less the person I was meant to be.
This led to some minor and not so minor questionable events, such as breaking windows with stones and starting fires as I continued to try and impress my peers. This on the whole led to lots of groundings, smacks and looks of disapproval from my family as they tried to work out why I was sliding.
By the end of primary school I was regarded as a child who had lots of potential but seemed reluctant to apply himself and also someone who questioned everything.
My Emotions
It’s difficult to attribute any emotions to that stage of my life, as it is with most children, emotions are chaotic at best and excessive at worst. I was certainly confused and was trying to find my place in the world, even if the world consisted of my house and the school for now. I’m surprised to this day how little I remember of my emotions back then, as you will see, my emotions took on a life of their own later in life. Not as much an emotion but I believe at this point I was firmly in the house of ‘if you can’t beat them, join them’.
What would I change?
Knowing then what I know now, obviously things would have been different. I would have applied myself in school and forgot all the children I was so hell bent on making happy. But, I don’t believe it’s fair to think of what I would have done differently at this stage of the story because I was a child after all, and how do you get into the mind of a child as an adult?
Any Advice?
Again this is very difficult as you’re dealing with a child’s mentality. I would suggest to myself at this point that you need to stop thinking of short term gains and look at a bigger picture. I had friends, real friends, and I should have spent more of my time making them happy and not pleasing people who just don’t understand me.
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