"Stand up for what's right, even if you're the only one standing."

I’ve dealt with a lot of emotional abuse growing up. Ever since preschool, I have preferred being alone. Dealing with things on my own. I used to sit by myself and play with my imagination and any toys nearby. For the longest time, my teacher thought something was wrong with me. My mom reassured her that I was okay and that I preferred being on my own because I was too shy. I was on a softball team as well, and the girls would always try to find ways to get me out, even if I didn’t break any rules. I made it through the season playing in the dirt outfield and letting softballs roll right past my feet. The girls probably hated me for that. Then I went into kindergarten and was also a part of Brownie Girl Scouts. The only problem was that all the girls were a grade above me (the same girls on my softball team), and they hated me. They didn’t have to say it for me to believe it. They would shoot mean looks at me and make fun of me all the time. One of the girls was nice, but whenever I would be invited to her sleepovers, all of the other girls would care less that I showed up. I would literally stand at the front door, ring the doorbell, listen to the girls on the other side all chant, “Who is it?! Who is it?!” excitedly, and as soon as they would open the door and see me, they would say, “Oh. It’s just Stephanie.” Then they would walk away, leaving me with rejection. I even went home one night because no one would talk to me. They just let me sit by myself and let me feel left out.  

First grade came, and that was no picnic either. There was a girl named Jordan who was the meanest little girl you could ever meet. She always used to scream and complain, and during snack time, if she forgot her snack, she’d ask people if they would share. Being the nice person I was (and also looking for acceptance), I would give her my snack bag, and she would return it to me with only crumbs. During recess, if we played any game that involved running and tagging people out, she was always the first one to go because she was too slow. And she would scream in your face for it too. I had a screaming contest with her once and won. It was awesome. She had hit me a couple times too. I don’t really remember her doing it, but my mom told me that I came home one night with a handprint on my arm, and I had told her that Jordan hit me. I never lied then, and I guess it’s hard to remember because I blocked it from my memory. But she always bullied me, all the way up until 3^rd grade when I moved. The only real friends I had from 2^nd to 3^rd grade were Chris and Jessica, and they always knew how to make me laugh or smile. I have happy memories from grade school too, but the bullying and the emotional damage really took a toll on me.

Grade school continued on after I moved out to O’Fallon. I went to another Catholic school. Little did I know that the kids would be worse. I fit in fine the first year there because I had joined the soccer team for some acceptance. This is when I was really beginning to find out that sports were not my thing, and I had no experience being on the field at all. I would show up at practice and be fine, but on game days, the coach would push me out onto the field and give me a certain field position. I would become confused and ask where the position was, and he would point and then send me out there. Now, I don’t know about you, but I think pointing can only do a person good if there is something you can narrow down as you point to it. He was just pointing in a general direction. So I would hold my breath, run out, and hope for the best. Once I quit soccer, I noticed at school that there were a small group of guys that fit my style. They could draw. They liked country music. They laughed at stupid humor. Yes. This was where I belonged. So, with eagerness, I befriended them, but then suddenly I became a reject. No one really had much interest in me, and no matter how hard I tried to be friends with other people, it never did me much good. Sure, I won’t lie when I say that there were a lot of really nice people. But that’s all they were. Nice. They didn’t want to be friends. They didn’t want to hang out with me because why would anyone want to hang out with a reject? The boys would ask me out for laughs, and they would make sure that I knew it was a joke. One of them was pretty persistent throughout 7^th and 8^th grade, and to this day, I don’t know if he was being serious or not, and it was because of the jokes. I could never tell real from fake, and by the time 7^th and 8^th grade hit, I was in a very dark place. I was never happy. I would try to give my two cents whenever we had to work in groups, but no one ever had much interest in listening to my ideas. I would sit by myself at recess and watch the other kids play because I felt like I would never fit in. I ate lunch by myself and separated myself from the students because I was tired of being the joke. I was tired of being an unaccepted person. Why try if you’re going to end up alone, anyway? I began to dress in all black when I would get home. I would lock myself in my room and talk to my friend Jake on the phone about how I felt. He was always the one to make me feel better, but I could never have that reassurance that I craved. This is when I began to write songs, and soon, my writing became my way out.

We had a scavenger hunt one day (I forgot when it was, I think near the end of 7^th grade), and I had shown up for it. But no group wanted me. I was singled out, waiting for someone to put me in a group. Once the groups were all sorted, I was still standing there waiting. Had my mother not said anything, they wouldn’t have put me in a group at all. I would have been left there, hurt and alone. Because I knew I wasn’t wanted, I didn’t even want to be in the pictures. All the girls in my group would pose and be goofy, and I would stand off to the side with my hands behind me, smiling. Unwanted. That was all I could think of that day. Unwanted. The only thing I wanted to do the whole time was go home.

I joined cheerleading in 8^th grade because it was a tradition. I would come home from practices and practice my cheers, and I was constantly clapping and chanting around the house. But even though I was in cheer and I had the trust of my flyer, whenever practice would end, a lot of the time the girls would all talk about going to McDonalds or Dairy Queen after. Most of them would go, but I was never invited. This was another emotional toll on my heart, and my feelings would begin to crush me again. Near the end, I quit the squad. The girls would all talk about me quitting, along with a few others who couldn’t get the dance down right away, but I stopped caring at that point, because there was no point in caring anymore. I was unbelievably depressed. By the time graduation hit, I didn’t get out on the dance floor. I didn’t dance with all my other classmates. I missed out on slow dancing with guys who could have been my friends had I not been the butt of their jokes. When everyone gathered with each other for pics, I stayed clear of them. And when they gathered in a circle for the song “Graduation” by VitaminC, I didn’t even think about joining in on their little crying fest. I was glad that it was finally over.

High school was a fresh start. But since I was so used to being ignored and being silent, I stayed clear of talking to people. I didn’t wanna make friends. I just wanted to stay quiet the entire 4 years of my life and do everything that I was told. However, the people there made the task impossible, and for the first time ever, I was starting to make friends. I even developed a stupid crush on a boy who didn’t care about me, and I ended up falling hard for him. I guess that was my bad boy phase. Thank God it’s over. But anyway, the guy I liked always let me down. He would be nice to me to my face at school and outside of it, but we never really did have conversations. He would always text me through my friend’s phone and make me think we were friends, and then he would let me down. I began seeing through his tricks after a while and stopped caring. It was one of the worst heartaches I’ve ever had to deal with, and I would go into details about how I felt through everything, but it would be too painful to go back and do that. I will tell you that one night I woke up having trouble breathing because I had a dream about him, and it felt as though someone had ripped a hole into my chest. I laid there that morning trying to breathe, and I was curled up, hurting. It was the worst I had ever felt before, and since then, I have completely closed up to the idea of falling in love, and really falling into it. I never wanted to deal with that kind of hurt and deceit again.

Sophomore year was probably the worst year for me. I had finally developed a nice circle of friends, but I was feeling really negative about one of them. This is when my empathy gradually began to increase. I just had a feeling that this girl was trouble, and sure enough, she was. I found out she was a liar, and she was always being mean to my guy friends or hitting on them. She lied about a lot of her bf’s because she was that desperate to be in a relationship, and I complained about her all the time to two of my other girlfriends at the time. When they got tired of hearing it, I took the dilemma to the bulletin board on Myspace (for those of you who remember what that is, I give you kudos). I never said her name directly, but she filled in the blanks and turned my friends against me. They stopped talking to me, and after a lot of apologizing, I decided to write said trouble girl a letter. She ripped it up and lied to my friends once more about what I said, and by that point, I was just done. So I gave up on them and began to involve myself in NHS. I also joined Environmental Club that year and kept finding things to keep me busy. I interacted with classmates whom I had never talked to before. By the time I learned the ropes to the whole communication thing, I was ready for junior year.

Junior year was one of my better years. I was communicating a lot more with my classmates, making friends and cracking jokes. I actually began looking forward to school each morning that I woke up, and what was even better about it was that my creative writing teacher revived my writing side of me. I began to chug things out like crazy. Poems. Songs. Stories. My thoughts. I was becoming a better person, and I realized that the only thing keeping me from being happy was myself. My barrier finally came down, and I was no longer scared of my own shadow. I could move on and deal with my own ordeals. However, the good Lord giveth, and the good Lord taketh away. My second semester of junior year consisted of my very first taste of cyber bullying. At the time, everyone was getting Formspring accounts. These accounts allowed people to ask you questions either signed in, or anon. Of course, it was always more fun to do it anon. But I soon found out that anon could be a bad thing too, because I started getting hate comments. People began telling me that I dressed like a hobo, and that I needed to clean myself up and stop talking about being fat on FB (which I wasn’t doing in the first place. I was just talking about me exercising whenever I finished up with it). They also said that I needed to get rid of my acne. These comments were constantly being found in my inbox, and at first I began answering them back. But eventually I just stopped. It was starting to take a toll on me, and finally I just quit logging into Formspring. The hate, after some time, began to die down, and it only died down because I kept telling myself to ignore what was being said. It was a difficult time for me, but I was grounded enough to know that it didn’t matter what people thought. No one was brave enough to tell me what they thought of me face to face, and if they couldn’t do that, then why should I care? I also thought it was pretty funny that I had haters I didn’t even know about. If it wasn’t for Formspring, I would not have found that out.

I also met a pretty amazing girl during my junior year. We shared a creative writing class together and became attached at the hip. She came over to my house a few times, and I went to hers a few times too. We mostly hung out at school, but we were constantly around each other. I began to get very unhealthily attached, and that was due to my empathy. By the time creative writing ended, she began to distance herself from me. This distance left me depressed for the longest time. I felt like I was losing one of my best friends. By the end of that year, I finally accepted the fact that our friendship wasn’t what I thought it was. Although I had been through a lot with her, I had to find my way and find myself. I couldn’t do that by knowing only one person. I wish I could explain to you guys how depressed I felt. It was horrible and miserable, almost like someone died. I again felt that heartache in my chest, the pain that turns physical on you and there’s nothing you can do about it.

My senior year was the year in which I felt like things were going downhill. Although I had developed some better fashion, I didn’t have as many friends around as I used to. I had a couple very close friends that I hung out with that year, but one of them stabbed me in the back in the end. I would wake up each morning not looking forward to school. I would go through the day feeling bored. Nothing was worth getting up for. That is, until I met Shane. He became one of my best and closest friends, and to this day, we still are. He always gave me reasons to smile, and he would come over and hang out on movie nights. We rode the same bus and always joked around in our Digital Art class. The more time we spent together, the closer we became. He was and still is the only boy who really cares about me, and I can tell him anything in confidence.

However, my other friend who I had known since freshman year began treating me like crap my second semester. I had written a song back in 7^th grade that I wanted to perform at the talent show, and she had agreed to compose music for it. However, she didn’t stick to her word and she never got the music done. I had to actually ask her if she wanted to do it or not in order to get a “no”. And then she said how happy she was that I had told her it was okay if she didn’t want to do it. However, it really hurt my feelings. I had been depending on her to pull through for me. My dreams for the talent show died after that. She started to develop horrible mood swings too, and would always bitch about pointless things that weren’t a big deal. She began to get too comfortable with me and seemed to think that it was okay to be assertive to my family. However, what really pushed me over the edge was that I told her I wanted to ask Shane to prom, and instead of letting me, she asked him when I wasn’t even around. I found out coronation night (which I went to just for her, cuz coronation is stupid, and Shane went for me cuz he knew I didn’t wanna go). When she told me she had asked him and he said he would go, I was in disbelief. I spent a lot of time in the bathroom, too upset to think straight. Shane actually had to tell her to check on me. Shows how concerned she was. She and I got into a huge fight about it and we stopped talking to each other. After a good two months of no speaking, she finally decided to talk to me, but it was only because she wanted to come with me and Shane to prom (I guess so her and her sister would have someone to hang out with). I agreed, and I knew she was being fake to me so she could get what she wanted. All of prom night, she stared at my corsage and was in a rotten mood, and I didn’t feel the least bit sorry for her. She had completely back-stabbed me and hurt me like no other friend has before. She even complained about the situation after Prom was long over, and continued to make up stories about it to get people on her side. She had told one of her friends that she was going to surprise me by bringing Shane to prom that night, which I knew was a lie because I found out on coronation night. One of the girls on my bus finally went off on her for her constant complaining, and she shut up. This was the girl I had been friends with for four years, and she was going to frame me for ruining prom? I guess that’s what hurt me the most, how she could never be honest with me. She always had to do things deviously. By the time I graduated, I only had a few true friends who had stuck by my side through everything I went through.

I’m in college now, and I’m beginning to realize that I don’t have to take shit from people. I’ve dropped a lot of my old high school friends because they brought high school to college with them, and I’m tired of being a kid. I want to grow up and be happy, and now, if someone tries to degrade me or tries to hurt me, I take control and tell them how it is. I don’t deal with shit that shouldn’t be meant to deal with, and just reading this, I can see that I’ve come a long way. I’m starting to achieve my dreams through what I write, and I am learning that I can change anything in my life that I want to change as long as I have the bravery to do so. If you want to lie to me or to other people, you can bet your ass that I’ll call you out on it the first chance I get. If you try to be sneaky, I’ll call that out too. I’m not letting people get away with shit anymore, and even though I can be a very nice and forgiving person, if you do something I don’t think is right, I don’t stay quiet anymore. I cannot stand injustice because I’ve dealt with it all my life, and seeing other people go through it is heartbreaking. I think that when it boils down to it, karma does bite you. You receive what you dish out, and I’m finally receiving the justice I was never given. I really hope that karma has bitten the people who have treated me the ways they did, and I hope those people have grown up and learned that it isn’t their world. Other people live on it.

I don’t stand for bullying. I don’t stand for racism. I don’t stand for talking people down. I don’t stand for hurtful actions or comments. But I do stand up for justice, and even though people don’t like me for it, at least I can achieve it.

I remember seeing a sign hanging up in my old school that said, “Stand up for what’s right, even if you’re the only one standing.” I finally have an appreciation for that simple phrase, and because of me standing up, I am changing the world and making it a better place. So, I challenge you to stand up. Stand up when you see injustice, and when you see what isn’t right. Make it right, and make it just. Stand up for the truth, for the silent do-gooders, for those who know pain and who deal with it without pointing fingers. Stand up for the people who are cutting, starving, or those who are silent and without a voice. People in this world need other people to show them that it’s okay to stand, because the more people who do, the more easily we can spot the problems and fix them.

Thanks for reading. I love you all, even if some of you were mean to me. I’m going to assume karma got to you by now. And if not, well, it will eventually. You just wait and see.

And if you're a bully, just keep one thing in mind. The bullied always come out on top. Always.