If they don't see me they can't bully me either

A happy eight-year-old girl with a new pair of red metal glasses on her nose stands hesitantly on the threshold of her classroom in the middle of the school day. Her classmates are working in groups. When the teacher sees her she claps her hands and says to the class: 'all pay attention, Nicole is here again, she has glasses and it’s not permitted to bully her with them.  

A frightened ten year old girl has been bullied for years. Paralyzed like a rag doll, time after time she found herself in the middle of a group of bullies who waited for her in the street, locked her in, pushed her and called her names. They pulled her off her brand new bike, locked it and threw the key in the water. Her parents looked for another school, but that didn’t solve it. The bullies kept looking for her. 

A withdrawn girl of twelve is quiet, sits bent over to look smaller in a corner and avoids contact with the others in the first year of highschool. If they don't see me they won't bully me, she thinks. She wrote a paper about loneliness, even when you are not alone.  It was about others and secretly also about her. 

A liberated fifteen-year-old girl walks upright again, smiles and speaks her mind. As if by a miracle, a few months earlier she had been persuaded by a couple of upper school boys to play the lead in their musical. They were kind to her and gave her back her self-confidence.  Fully in the spotlight on stage in front of the whole school she bowed to the applause. A huge burden fell from her shoulders. 

A confident forty-five year old woman tells a tearful story one evening during a leadership program about how her bullying past has shaped her. A grown man looks at her 'I'm afraid I used to be such a bully. Sorry on behalf of all the bullies.' He has a lump in his throat. 

A fifty-year-old woman is again not accepted by her training group. The pain and sorrow of the past multiplies with those of now. Contemporaries painfully touch her and thus the group and thus themselves. Everything that she has ever hidden away deeply starts to move within her. She is now strong enough to take it on. She literally faces the majority of the group in the room and stays this time. She is no longer the girl who ran around a few streets in an - unsuccessful - attempt to avoid the bullying and who hid the pain as deeply as possible. She doesn't let herself be sent away, doesn't hide herself anymore, nor does she pretend it doesn't hurt.

The pain in her heart gives way to relief and she regains safety deep within herself. She feels whole because of this, no longer glued together, but melted together with golden edges and thus so much more beautiful and stronger than that unbroken eight-year-old girl would have been now without these experiences.