By Shelby Pearson
Lake Travis View Summer Intern
I remember the first day of Kindergarten like it was yesterday. Goose-bumps covered my body from head-to-toe, nervous chatter hummed around the egg-shell white room, and my teacher stood in front of a dry-erase board with ambition in her eyes. Kids were running around with toys in their hands, some playing “house” while others played “doctor” or “G.I. Joe’s rescue mission.” I merely stood in a corner and watched quietly.

It wasn’t because I was shy. Heaven knows, my parents know, and anyone else that have ever met me know that I am anything but shy. Obnoxious, rowdy and hyperactive, maybe. But shy? No, not I. I was scared to move; I was scared to look anyone in the eye, for fear that they would see my bottle-cap shaped glasses and my height. Among normal buildings and regular shops, I was a skyscraper with large, noticeable windows.

That’s how it started though — being bullied. I wasn’t the most candid subject for said bullying, but the fact that it scared me half to death fueled the fire of those that were looking for a laugh. So they picked on me, took my glasses, made fun of my height and so on. It may not be that big of a deal now, but as a Kindergartner, your only want, your only need, is to be accepted and loved by those around you. Part of growing up is finding where you belong. But what do you do, where do you go and who do you talk to when you don’t know where it is you fit in?
We’ve all been made fun of, bullied, picked on and so on at one point or another in our life. It’s as common as 5 p.m. traffic in the middle of the week in downtown Austin. With age though, like everything else, it gets much worse. The insults become more complex, and the reactions to those insults become a bit more violent. What once was as simple as “sticks and stones may break my bones” suddenly turns into “those are fighting words.”
Around fourth grade I started gaining weight due to personal issues that were going on in my family. This weight stoked the already raging fire in my fellow classmates that had started just a few years before. Not to mention the fact that fourth grade is usually when your body starts to develop, so I was no longer a child, but rather a very awkward individual with hormones raging at the speed of light and a voice that could match the highest note imaginable sung by the Bee Gees. I was past the point of believing that kids were cruel and on to the subject of believing that kids were devils in disguise.
It’s hard to imagine what it might have been like for other kids my age. I thought I was being treated in the cruelest way possible, when in reality, it could have been a lot worse. I didn’t have a wheelchair, I wasn’t mentally ill, I didn’t have a learning disability (despite my AD/HD) and I made friends easily. But being overweight, having glasses, and being the tallest in my class made me feel like an outcast because of the things that kids said to me.
Words, contrary to popular belief, do hurt. Words are what make people go insane. Words are what cause people to commit suicide. Words, like knives, pierce your heart and leave a wound that can be opened at any moment of the day. Teenagers, some adults included, tend to use these words to get revenge on people that have done them wrong. Through Myspace, picture messaging or just regular text messaging, we have the advantage of bullying those around us into doing and saying what we want them to. It’s our way of making up for the things that were done to us when we were so young. The words and phrases and actions and reactions that we witnessed and took part in have left scars and bad memories in our brains. That is what makes a bully. That is what starts fights and wars.
I wasn’t always the one being picked on. In fact, there were times when I was the one doing the bullying on kids smaller than me. I learned later on that I did those things because I hated feeling like I was the only one out of place. I wanted to make sure that there were others out there that knew exactly what I was going through. I realize now, though, that instead of taking those feelings and using them for revenge, you can learn from them and use them to shape and mold the young minds of children. How else are they going to learn but through admiring the adult you have become?
Part of life is trial and error. If you make a mistake then you learn how you made said mistake and you fix it. You repeat these steps until you are finally able to complete something correctly, then you teach those that are on the same path as you once were, in hopes that they will take your words to heart and know automatically what to do and what not to do. The other part of life is growing up. It’s not easy, that’s for sure. But if it were, it wouldn’t take so long.
(Editor’s note: Shelby Pearson will be a junior this coming school year at Lake Travis High School.)