With gratitude to my bullies
For those who’ve seen my earlier writings referring to being bullied at school from 4th through 8th grades, it might be surprising to hear that, in some ways, I’m grateful for the experience.
Being a constant outsider, with almost no friends at school for four years, taught me early to get comfortable with not having the approval of the in-crowd. If you already are not popular, and in fact you’ve been cast out, you have nothing to lose when you swim upstream against the cultural currents. It is easier to cling to the Truth you know, and even be persecuted for it, when everyone else clings to the comfortable conformity of lies.
You could call it the power and freedom of “unbelonging.”
Introduction to “unbelonging”
When I entered fourth grade, my neighborhood was split off from the overcrowded elementary school where I’d grown up and put into another school. I left behind the children with whom I had history, and was mixed into classrooms with all new kids.
That’s when I met the Mean Girls, who became my bullies through 8th grade.
Having grown up in a very loving and supportive family and church, I was completely unprepared for the cruelty and maliciousness that became normal and routine in my public school experience through junior high.
You can isolate someone without doing it physically. All you have to do is publicly mock and criticize someone you know won’t fight back. Or even if they do, you make an example out of them for others. This makes them “untouchable.” Meaning, if anyone else tried to befriend the untouchables, they themselves would become untouchable, vulnerable to the same abuse and isolation.
There were really nice, even somewhat popular, kids who left me alone. I knew that I had no reason to fear them. But I also knew that they were liked enough that they could have befriended me, at least casually, extending the aura of their "coolness" to include me. If they had stood up for me just a couple of times, it would have been enough to protect me from the Mean Girls. But those nice kids never took that risk. Since it had nothing to do with them, they ignored the abuse, leaving me vulnerable and isolated.
A lifetime of unbelonging
Perhaps it is because of what happened in these formative years that the sense of not fitting in has shadowed me my entire life. No matter where I have lived, worked, or who I have hung out with, I have never shaken an underlying sense of “unbelonging.”
There are various reasons for this, none of them bad—most of them, the natural consequence of growing up, leaving home, going to work, and moving to new geographical locations and cultures.
From workplaces where almost no colleagues shared my worldview, to being an American expatriate in two European countries for almost 10 years, to returning to my home country where culture and family had changed significantly while I was gone, I have spent my adult life feeling that I am on the outside of every group and place I have found myself.
Even among the local churches I have attended, I have never felt totally in step, either because of cultural differences, or divergent life experiences. Where political leaning might exist, I never feel entirely comfortable with either left-leaning or right-leaning congregations; the left lean farther left than I do; the right lean farther right.
These are all natural and even good situations to find oneself in. But moving frequently, especially internationally, or working in businesses where most people do not share your deepest and most precious values or beliefs, you never escape feeling a little like an alien no matter where you are or who you’re with.
The pressure to conform
It’s not that I don’t give in, from time to time, to my desire to hold my tongue for the sake of receiving or keeping someone’s approval or avoiding conflict. I still react this way, more than I would like. I still catch myself worrying what a colleague or long-time friend thinks of what I think. I still feel the pressure to say the “right things” or not say the “wrong things” in order to maintain approval or to avoid criticism and even the loss of relationships. Sometimes I even keep silent out of concern for job or other professional opportunities. It’s a weakness that I – and we all – must constantly guard against, and carefully weigh the risks and benefits, as well as discern the right time and place to speak, and the right time and place to remain silent.
But, when we give in to temptations and pressures out of fear, we collude with creating a “total cultural environment” as described by Professor Robert Boyers, in The Tyranny of Virtue. In this environment, the objective is to squelch all diversity of thought and ideas, enforcing complete sameness. In participating with this by remaining silent, we also inadvertently steal courage from others who think more like us, but who may lose confidence or courage to speak their thoughts because they believe they are alone.
In a nation that historically fears the encroachment of government oppression, social tyranny is a far more dangerous and insidious force, because it preys on our hardwired human instinct to maintain inclusion with a group for anthropological reasons of survival. In the misty, early beginnings of human history, someone excluded from the collective, whether it was the extended family, clan, or tribe, had little hope for survival in a world plagued by hunger, disease, wild animals, and exposure to extreme temperatures, not to mention the possibility of violence from other groups of humans. Inclusion in a group meant you lived; being cast out and alone meant you died.
Today we fear social death just as much as physical death. Perhaps more so.
Boyers cites 19th century writer Alexis de Tocqueville as asserting that “in modern societies, the greatest dangers to liberty were social rather than legal or political,” where “the pressures to conform, and the pleasures associated with conformity, were such that these societies would not find it necessary to burn heretics at the stake.” Public shame, the threat of exclusion (such as from jobs and opportunities, or from social media platforms), and the loss of relationships, is often enough to silence people who don’t conform to the mainstream of thought.
Anyone who has experienced this in the formative years of adolescence knows what a powerful sway conformity can hold on the human mind. And yet, the powerful drive to belong can be dangerous. On October 31, 2020, as I was still editing this essay, Black fashion designer and cultural commentator Ayishat Akanbi began posting on Twitter my very thoughts about belonging.
Freedom and strength of unbelonging
The fact was that I had no choice in whether I belonged with the in-crowd when I was in junior high. The Mean Girls had made that choice for me. I was humiliated and excluded for what I looked like and the clothes that I wore, rather than the ideas I held. My looks and wardrobe, as a teenager, were things I could not easily change, and did not want to anyway.
Since there was little I could do to belong, I embraced my unbelonging. I watched what the 2,000 kids in my school were wearing, how they were doing their hair, what movies they were watching, and then I intentionally did the opposite. I figured if I couldn’t be accepted even by trying, I would do what I wanted to. There was nothing left I could lose. In hindsight, they gifted me an immense freedom.
The way I see it, you can be victimized, but you don’t have to remain a victim.
I am used to not fitting in. I am used to holding values that are countercultural. While I previously looked on my history of unbelonging with sadness and regret, I now recognize unbelonging as one of my greatest strengths. As the culture splinters around me, and the divisiveness of political idolatry even pervades the Church, I am more used to the rejection that follows nonconformity than if I were only accustomed to being an accepted insider.
Rejection can make us stronger
This doesn’t seem relevant, but bear with me. In January I bought an indoor, hydroponic gardening system that grows lettuce and herbs in any room of your house, even if there is no natural sunlight.
When it was time to prune the lettuce to make my first salad, I read an online instructional site on how to do so. It mentioned that indoor lettuce tends not to be crispy, but might have a soft, wilty texture that we’re not used to if we’ve been buying outdoor-grown lettuce at the grocery store.
“You can point a fan at your lettuce, however, and as the plants have to resist the wind blowing at them, they will toughen up and form a more typically crisp texture.”
Interesting. So, having to stand up against a constant wind helps the lettuce to toughen, to grow crisp.
Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff argue in their book, The Coddling of the American Mind, that humans are “anti-fragile.” By this they mean that we are resilient, that we can develop deep inner strength as we grow up, and that childhood and teenage years are the crucial window of time when we can do this. But only if we are allowed to encounter pain, obstacles, conflict and rejections.
With gratitude to my bullies
I guess that’s what bullies did for me. No, I’m not saying they gave me a pleasingly crisp texture. They proved that I am anti-fragile. That I am resilient. The pain of rejection imbued me with the strength to stand alone in my convictions. It got me comfortable with being isolated by clinging to what I know is right when everyone else is in love with being wrong.
And although there were no nice kids who defended or stood up for me in solidarity, today I look for people who are wrestling with the pressure to not speak aloud their dissenting thoughts and questions. And those who are pressured to speak aloud words and ideas they don’t believe. Especially those under pressure to question their very worldview and sanity, and their morality or the quality of their religious faith. There is power in encouraging one another to resist social pressures to conform.
In Live Not By Lies, Rod Dreher writes of Christian dissidents in the former Soviet Union who lived the truth, even when it brought them pain, poverty, persecution, and death. By living their truth in front of others, they presented a powerful and compelling contrast to a world of lies that tried—but failed—to extinguish their light.
The wisdom they offer to us now?
“You will be surrounded by lies—you don’t have a choice. Don’t assimilate to it. It’s an individual decision for each person. If you want to live in fear, or if you want to live in the freedom of the soul. If your soul is free, then your thoughts are free, and then your words are going to be free…. You have to live in a world of lies, but it’s your choice as to whether that world lives in you.” (105)