Bullying can happen anywhere and at any time. When the word ‘bullying’ comes to mind, we often think of name-calling, pushing and shoving, or cyberbullying. However, there is a strand of bullying that we may not even consider true bullying. Gossip. We do it without thinking. We heard something juicy and can’t wait to share with our closest friends who then go on to share it with their closest friends and so on and so on. Seemingly harmless rumors snowball into something that can never be taken back.
I was a victim of this back-stab sort of bullying during the majority of my high school experience. Within the first week of my sophomore year, a boy I dated began spreading a rumor about me to a couple of our mutual friends. It started out just that small. But before long, the rumors grew and multiplied and changed and spread to groups of people I had never met.
What surprised me most wasn’t what people were saying about me. It wasn’t that someone I had called a friend had betrayed me like this. It was that people I had known for years and years believed every word they heard. Nothing was too far-fetched to be true. As soon as the words left his lips, I became every horrible thing he called me and I had done everything he said I had done. My best friends turned their backs on me, choosing to believe I wasn’t the person they knew rather than to believe that he was lying.
I learned to ignore what people were saying and live by the motto that you are not what they say you are, but not before I was diagnosed with depression and spent several months cutting the feelings away. Even now, four years later, I can’t help but flinch when people whisper. An irrational part of my brain warps every conversation I hear into my reputation being destroyed again.
I know I’m not alone in this. So what I ask of you is that you think before you whisper. Think before you pass something along. Being in-the-know will never be as important as someone else’s self-worth.