Dear NMJ has alerted her readers to a very interesting post by Caroline at INSEARCHOFADAM about bullying.
In all honesty, life at the moment is a real curate's egg --- good in parts. On the one hand I have the children who are all excited about Christmas and the joy of buying their presents and anticipating their faces in a few days time when they open them. I have the luck that two people have ordered sock monkeys which I enjoy making when I have the energy and I feel blessed and rather honoured to think that people who have seen my strange creations on this blog should want to own one for themselves. It's busy as ever at Christmas but it's all good.
On the other hand there is a lot going on in my head about 'the illness' --- the bloody illness from which you can never escape.
Now, at the moment, the way I feel generally is not terrible...it's just my usual state with the odd bit of nausea, headache, tiredness etc. thrown in: the gay abandon and pick 'n mix, selection box symptoms in the day of a life of PWME....but..... what's really getting to me is this bloody insurance business and the constant nagging pressure of being coerced into seeing a psychiatrist when I don't want to, don't agree with all the nonsense that the Insurance people spew out about my need to see him and all the phone calls, emails and letters that go into fighting Goliath. It's there all the time and it's beginning to drain me.
Reading Caroline's post last night signalled to me what this nagging feeling is all about and why it drains me so much: I feel I'm being bullied. I am being bullied. And though it's something I rarely talk about
because I'm 51,
because I have responsibilities,
because I have better things to do,
better things to think and talk about,
because it's in the past,
because I should be OVER IT BY NOW
is that I spent the whole of my secondary education being bullied and the feeling has never really gone away.
I can identify with everything Caroline says about the echoes of the past always ringing in your ears somewhere. There is always a part of me that is on the alert, waiting to be ambushed, waiting to be abused, denigrated, humiliated. I never really think what I've done is good enough, never really believe the good things will last. I do now feel I deserve the good things when they come ---- and it took me years to come round to that, but I still don't trust them just as I have taken years to trust people in RL.
Caroline is pleased she has achieved the goals she reached out for so as to prove her bullies wrong. NMJ, who was not bullied but who witnessed her kid brother being bullied, would like to form a Society for Kicking in the Heads of Bullies.
Me, I'm past wanting to kick in their heads. It's all too long ago. Part of me has given up the fight and just wishes it had all never happened, wish I could still talk to the other person who was bullied with me....the only person who really knew what it was all about. But that's too late too: that person was dead of a heart attack at 39, three weeks before our 40th birthdays --we were born one day apart.
The insurance fiasco is just another reminder of my past; the past I am always trying to escape but never will. I wonder if those bullies have any idea or any memory now of what they did. Do they realise how much their taunts still linger? When I see one of them on TV telling me about whether it will rain tomorrow or the sun will shine does he imagine me watching him and feeling a glimmer of hatred as the old film projects it's frames onto the back of my retina and I feel the fear and anger all over again. Bet not.
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And then, on the other hand, there is light in this darkness ----- for who should come forth with a candle, bidding it to shine with a pure clear light but my blogging chum Kahless who awards me with a Best Blogging Buddies Award.
Couldn't have come at a better time, my dear. Thank you once again. Gives me real faith that there is still kindness in the world and strength to carry on fighting
