Story, bullying, just a thought

This is a lengthy story I made on a different site, but I'm copying it here as well. If you have a minute, you should really read until the end. It may give you some insight on bullying, and how pimd plays it's part. I will not talk about the correlation, because I know you are all smart enough to do it yourselves. It's just start a thought.

Let's pretend you're a fifteen-year-old girl. You go to a mildly populated high-school, you have a small group of friends, and you attend no extra-curricular activity classes.

One day, some boy asks you a question during class. A classmate overhears this boy talking to you and tells his girlfriend. Most teenagers lack the decision making skills to handle this correctly because that part of their brain doesn't fully develop until we're twenty-five. As an overly jealous girl, she wants to shut you down and make you feel like you are not pretty or worthy of talking to her boyfriend.

It starts off mild. She tells her group of friends that you're a slut and you like to sleep with a bunch of guys at once. Her friends giggle at you in the hallway. They'll mention it on Facebook a few times among themselves. They all have hilarious inside jokes just about you.
You start to pick up on the verbal abuse and maybe you tell an adult. Maybe you handle it yourself. Either way, she doesn't like that you want to defend yourself because it makes her feel like she's in the wrong for wanting to defend her relationship. She comes at you more aggressively.
They find you on Facebook and add you. You're probably thinking, "Why not just delete the add and move on?" Well, curiosity. You want to see what she has to say. Whether it's threatening to beat you up or saying they want to apologize. The first step is always engaging conversation online before knowing what the other's intentions are.
Before you can react, your Facebook wall is flooded with, "... IS A HUGE SLUT". You delete them, but you spend the next fifteen minutes slowly going through and deleting each cruel message from your wall. As you push the remove button, the word "slut" cycles through your brain once, twice, three times over and over. You have a slight adrenaline rush from dealing with the confrontation, but nothing to spend it on since the threat is gone for now.
It always groups of girls who do this. They'll laugh about how they wish they could have seen the look on your face when they posted those things on your wall. One of them comes up with the bright idea of searching your name into Google to see where else you are on the internet. Your name links you to a Twitter account called CatWhiskers98. Putting CatWhiskers98 into Google pulls up a profile for almost every account you have on the internet, because most teenagers use the same account name for everything. From here, they have access to your Twitter, your Xanga, pimd, your Livejournal, your Pinterest, your Reddit account, and maybe even some odd and end forum sites you visit from time to time. They have access to a whole other life that you live through social networking.
The frontier grows cold for awhile. You think they've stopped teasing you, but what they're really doing is reading through months of journal entries, old Twitter tweets, and forum posts about your hobbies, your likes, advice, and troubles.

After a few days, they find it. An old post you made admitting you have a crush on Johnny Triviani in your math class and you often have dreams about him at night kissing you. You talk about how much you enjoy your dreams and wish you could sleep longer to endure them.
Imagine going to class and sitting across the room from this girl. You didn't get a lot of sleep last night because you had an exam that morning. The teacher's monotone voice is lulling you to sleep, when all of a sudden, your hear a hand slam down on your desk, snapping you awake. You look up into your teacher's face and he asks you, "What seems to be the problem? I need you to stay awake." That's when you hear it, the girl across the room, yell, "It's cause she stayed up all night dreaming about Joooohnny." Maybe it doesn't sound like a big deal, but Johnny is sitting right next to you. Every thought you have ever had about him, every desire suddenly fills your face up with a strong heat. You feel like it's going to come busting out of your face and suddenly, he'll be able to read every emotion you have ever had about him and he'll hate it. The class all laughs at the joke, but you feel like they're all laughing at you. Johnny doesn't say anything and you can't tell what he's thinking. You feel sick to your stomach, but the teacher silences the class and doesn't allow anyone to talk. You now have to six forty minutes in class thinking about what everyone else is thinking and wondering if it's about you.

When you get home, you see a message on your Facebook from a friend. It says, "I think you need to see this." It's a link to a Facebook group for your school. Everyone can see it. You can feel a knot growing in your stomach, but you need to see what it is. Your worst fears are confirmed when you click on it. "Hi, my name is ___. You may not know who I am, but I just need the whole world to know how much I love Johnny Triavani. I can't hold back any longer. I can't hide it. I'm ready for us to be married, to have children and cats, and to spend the rest of our days holding each other. My favorite things to eat are beans, artichokes, and raw onions. My favorite color is green, like your eyes. I worship Satan, but I think we can get past that, and I might have syphilis, but that's what condoms are for. If you feel anything for me, please reply."

Your school removes it shortly after, but it's too late. A lot of students have already seen it. After it's removed, a new Facebook group is created with the same notes. A new hashtag is becoming popular on Twitter and now even people you don't know are joining in on the hate. The people who do seem to care about you are trying to send you links so you can remove it, but they don't realize the stress and depression it's putting you through just to see it. You stay up all night thinking about it. You haven't look, but you know it's there. You already know what it says.

This is where it gets worse. The school realizes bullying is happening and they start to step in. The students are brought in for a meeting and the girl is grounded. You think it would be happily ever after, right? Wrong. Now she feels like you're interfering with her home life and she wants to make you suffer for it. Now it's no longer about her boyfriend, it's about a personal vendetta she has against you because this is all your fault.

They start tracking your Foursquare. You don't even think their stalking is related to your check-ins. Every check-in you make, every tip or comment you leave, they start pulling up right behind you. No more long walks from school without having trash or coke cans thrown at you from passing cars full of her friends. No more sitting in Books-A-Million without getting dirty stares and giggling from across the hall. No more gym or library time because your every decision is being watched.
When you start staying inside more and they realize they can't reach you through their own screen names, they start making fake ones. They find your regular forums and make accounts, pretending to be attractive boys from across the United States. They either pretend to be your friend to coax personal information out of you or slander your Facebook wall before you have time to realize what's happening. You don't want to go outside because they've made outside miserable, but now everything you've worked hard to relate to online is slowly disappearing, too. They make fake profiles of your already friends and add you with things like, "Hey, it's just Katie. I made a new Facebook, so add this one." You add it just to realize they've made seven new wall posts for you.

Internet bullying is not just on the internet. It's usually followed up with real-life. The reason it's so hard on teenagers who are depressed about their school life is because they use the internet as an escape. When your escape because a means to harass you, you feel optionless.

 

Gee I'd hate to see what kids today would do with an actual book

Sorry about typos I was drunk when I wrote this