Bullying And Trolling is eternal!
I was bullied even before “Cyber bullying” was coined.
Now I believe mistakes are powerful tools for transformation!
For they helped me shape my cultural and societal observations.
In my teenaged days this reverberated silly to me. At every mistake I jittered like demented old man’s head. Yes, like rest of the Sapiens, I was also prone to minting them. One like a deflated economy minting fake money. Consequently I was humiliated and shamed to death each time my mistakes took a public exposure.
Obviously my mistakes ranged from being below average teenager to being an outspoken, bold girl with “modern” values.
Mid Script- Those were the days where being modern was slut shamed.
I never realized that in the process of growing up you are required to have a manual that restrains your emotions, motor skills, brain, eyes, and reasoning from committing some. Well, I failed terribly to find such “make-no-mistakes-manual”, and kept the process alive.
Well as far as my rationale saw, a word M-I-S-T-A-K-E was further divisible, like an atom that before some decades was considered indivisible. Simply put, something that is ‘taken’ wrongly! That’s it!
To steer clear, this essay isn’t about SINS. There’s a darn difference between the two!
- For me a mistake is an action that can be rectified unlike a sin. A sin can be murderous, horrendous and unforgiving.
So, my nerve patterns were forming by repeated action of mis-taking my life, and then taking the humiliations as an appendix tail, that could’ve devolved as unnecessary extension. But pre-internet time was different and unforgiving.
Okay so let me paint a picture for you, a picture that many of you might resonate and feel the need to paint.
It’s pre-internet world. I am a teenager. On an outcast day I am caught of minting a fresh mistake. Sitting on a chair in school principal’s office, with my head casted downward, I am listening to the unpardonable mistakes.
I am shamed and humiliated. I listen to their versions of mistake. My brain fails to count them under the category. I listen. listen deeply. Trying hard to comprehend on what I’ve done. And take the trunk of shame on my downcast head forever. The weight is enormous.
After that moment of agreement, there comes another wave, called bullying, coupled with REAL trolling. I am bullied by unknown voices over late night landline telephone calls, which if happen today might fall under the definition of “Cyber bullying”. I am accused, shamed and threatened of exposure. My family out of fear, jails me in the house for months. I can’t sleep out of anxiety and guilt. I keep my bathroom latch open, while my sister sits outside, because I am lost and torn and scared of unknown.
The telephone calls are regular and unbending. I am threatened and ridiculed every night before sleeping. police complaint for a girl’s bully is a taboo.
Fast forward to 2016, there was a gory case of cyber bullying and moral policing where a boy hanged himself to death only because he was intimate with his girlfriend at a sea beach. He was shamed to death literally.
This opened my unhealed wound.
With the advent of internet there are revolutions and paradigm shifts on liberties and freedom of choice. That choices range from interfaith marriage to homosexuality. And this comes to me as an astonishment.
It pains me that how many productive years I wasted without understanding the meaning of trolling and bullying, even my family was prey. It also changed the trajectory of my growth.
Now that “Cyber judging” is seen as offensive, nobody did then. I was young and rebellious and wild, like any other teenager. And I was carpingly judged for being myself. Later I was judged for being depressed and inexpressive.
Re-contextualizing, I realize it was the matter of wrong timing.
Now that I look back, it all seems so trivial and worth a dime. But certainly I am a carping critic of bullying forever.
