Growing Up Cyberbullied

This is a reply to Becky's post "Online Moratorium" and to some of the comments it has generated about cyberbullying. I have some personal experience with being bullied online as a teen, so I figured I'd write about it. I'm not sure if this post really has to do with media literacy, but on some level it does answer the question posed in our class overview of "How do young people in the United States engage mainstream and new media?"

There was a girl I became friends with one summer. We attended different schools, so it was only natural to talk online once the schoolyear started. But one day I accidentally found her public blog and discovered that she only talked to me in order to make fun of every little detail about my life with her real friends. And no matter how much I tried to talk her out of it, everything I said was just something new to mock on her site. She IMed me every night to tell me what a terrible person I was. Like Becky's post said, anonymity was what helped start the whole thing. Despite her words being in a public place, she assumed I would never find out about her online shenanigans or figure out that she was the site's owner. And when I stumbled upon it and deduced it had to be her, she had no reason to hide from me anymore and became a cyberbully. When I asked why she communicated with someone she professed to hate so much, she said just because she hated me doesn't mean we had to stop talking.

And like Mary said in the comments, you can't erase it and you can go back to it over and over. I used to check the girl's online journal every day to see if she wrote anything new about me. I was depressed and thought about her words constantly. A big part of getting over the ordeal was becoming strong enough to avoid typing in her URL ever again. I had to realize that she wanted me to read terrible things about myself and that she talked to me in order to hurt me. Like many kids are advised today, I blocked her screenname on AIM.

Obviously, this is not a very harsh example of being bullied online. I'm lucky we didn't attend the same school and I had friends who told me I didn't do anything to deserve it. But it ruined my life for a while. Sure, people had said mean things about me in person before, but it tended to come in short bursts from people who barely even knew who I was. This bullying experience really hurt me because (1) she used to be a friend, and (2) was doing this every evening for hours at a time in a place I thought was my personal space.

For the rest of my junior year, I went through a fairly intense period of self-reflection in order to understand what had just happened to me and why. I didn't know it then, but what I went through was a natural part of adolescence. The experience changed me as a person by making me a lot more cynical and giving me a much thicker skin. Did something like this have to happen to me in order for me to grow as a person? Yeah, I think so. I learned a lot about communication, what works and what doesn't work. I learned when to fight and when to let things go. I learned how to take care of myself. Based on my limited experience, I would say that to some degree cyberbullying is simply a new facet of the pained, familiar thing that is adolescence. Teens (as well as kids and adults) have to learn to become responsible as people, whether it's resisting the urge to take advantage of somebody or learning not to be taken advantage of. This responsibility is something that has to be learned both online and offline. I'm guessing one quickly follows the other.

(I don't know why, but every once in a while she messages me on Facebook.)