The following was shared with me by a colleague who participates in many of our Warrior Way activities.  She felt compelled to articulate how acts of bullying and torment have a way of staying with us.  Long after we have moved on physically, long after our self esteem and self worth have recovered, grown and matured, those memories can haunt us and come back around when we least expect it.  This makes it that much more important to speak with kindness, to treat others as you would like to be treated, to have compassion for the people around us.  Thanks for sharing!
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It’s been forty years since I last saw my best friend from high school in the cathedral city of Lincoln, England.  We had been through thick and thin – so many adventures, so many memories-in-the-making during our high school days.

We lost touch as soon as I left my hometown.  I had experienced a very difficult and tumultuous family life with an abusive parent, and as a result had very low self-esteem.  No doubt my outward demeanor communicated a dejected vulnerability – the perfect target for bullies.  At school, I was the victim of verbal abuse, name-calling, physical and emotional abuse.  Students would make false reports about me to teachers, and start false rumors that would spread like wildfire.  To make matters worse, I was bullied by the principal who took delight in caning me whenever she found an opportunity.  Needless to say, I was miserable.  When I left home at the age of 16, I chose to leave everything behind me, throwing the baby out with the bathwater – I abandoned my best friend in search of a place free of bullies. 

My journey took me through many places in Europe, the Middle East, and eventually brought me to settle in Oregon.  This week, through unexpected circumstances, I had the opportunity to reconnect with my friend with whom I had lost contact all those years ago.  I was so excited, so eager to find out what she had done with her life, to share my memories of her, and have her share her memories of me and our many adventures together.  My enthusiasm was tempered with nervousness, because of the way I left without telling her where I was going.  I wondered if she had ever forgiven me… or if she even remembered me.

I took a chance and sent her a message, wondering, hoping, I’d hear back from her.  She responded within hours, and I was overjoyed.  She was just as excited to hear from me, as I had been to find her.  She described her path in life since she had last seen me, and went into some detail of her memory of a particular weekend we had spent together.

That weekend, we had each told our parents that we were spending the weekend at the other’s house.  In actuality, we were headed to London on the train, to see “The Who” and a number of other bands at a free rock concert.  We were 15.  She wrote about her memories of us getting lost in a major metropolis, wandering through the dark streets in the dead of night, running into some shady characters and stumbling upon a jewelry store with a smashed window.  About how we were tempted to grab some rings, but were too scared we’d get blamed for the robbery.  About finding safety in the tunnels of the London underground, and realizing I’d left my new blue coat on the tube train as it rolled out of the station.  How we’d come up with a convincing story to tell my parents to explain the coat’s disappearance.  She asked me to write back as soon as I could.  She was just as eager as I to reconnect.

It’s been almost a week, and I have not yet responded.  Not because she’s a different person now – she’s actually just like I remember her.  She even looks the same in the picture she sent.  And it’s not because of anything she said, or didn’t say; done or not done.  Not because I’ve changed my mind – far from it, I am determined now more than ever to re-establish our relationship.  It’s because it is hard.  So very hard.

For every good memory that surfaces from my school years, another twenty bad ones arise.  Memories of being bullied, harassed, beaten.  They are inevitably intertwined by the sounds and smells and images of school.  It may well be that there were more good times than bad.  I honestly don’t know.  What I do know is that the bad memories overshadow the good, even now. In my mind, I know those days are long gone, and the ghosts of the past are just that – insubstantial, distant memories.  Yet at the core of my being, they are still as real as they ever were.  The pain from which I thought I had escaped is still there, and hurts just as much today as it did then.

I WILL reply to my friend’s email.  I WILL reconnect with her.  I may even save up the airfare to pay her a visit.  Now that I’ve found her, I don’t want to lose her again.  But it is going to be a tortuous journey; one that I must endeavor alone in order to dispel those ghosts and reach my original destination – that place within myself where bullies no longer reside.