It has been a very long time since I concerned myself with the idea of popularity among peers, well over a decade for sure. So, after much time not agonizing over why someone is doing 'better' socially than others, here I am again, trying to figure it all out. I suspect that this is futile, but I am wrecked about it anyway.
I never spent any real time in the popular crowd. There were a few times I could have, but the dorkiness shined through too brightly for those small windows of opportunity to remain open, I guess. Often, once it was determined (at a meeting? I still don't know how...) that I was actually not very cool, whichever popular girl had befriended me for a minute (usually in the first few days of "new-girl-dom"), quickly turned her back on me and it was clear I was no longer part of their system.
Most of the time, this didn't bother me, because even if I wasn't one of 'the preps' (as the in-crowd was referred to in Camden AR... yes believe it or not, rural Arkansas has an in-crowd... something that still baffles me to this day) I still had solid friendships. They were not numerous, but we had each other, and for the most part, the preps didn't waste time making us feel crappy. They were just a larger and wealthier group, with cuter boyfriends. That's all. Not really vindictive, aside from the occasional mockery of our Walmart shoes. So I guess I didn't really have it so bad. Some girls had it so much worse looking back. There were the overweight girls, the generally ugly girls, the one with warts and scoliosis (poor thing), the girls who were really poor, the girls with weirder hair than even I, the smelly girls, etc. There was something about them, whether controllable by them or not, that the rest of the kids picked apart. I am so ashamed to say that I wasn't exactly above that sort of behavior at the time. There's no need to quantify -- making fun of people is shitty whether it's once or every day.
All of this back-story leads me to the now. When my only child, a beautiful and amazing ten year old girl, who does not possess even one of the qualities that I have witnessed in my life as being a catalyst for mockery and bullying, is bullied every day. She's skinny. She has straight teeth thanks to braces. She is clean. I am insanely jealous of her hair. She dresses in new clothes pretty much quarterly. Her parents make pretty good money. I never shop at Walmart. She is bright and all around awesome. She has style. But she has been mercilessly picked on since Kindergarten, and with age, it's getting worse.
I have seen these other girls, the ones who think they're better than her and put her down, and i don't see how they think they're so special. Some of them have the qualities found in the previously mentioned mocked girls. I don't think it's jealousy, I think that is something people say because they don't really know. I mean, I don't recall making fun of anyone I was jealous of. Except Britney Spears.
When we were kids, and others made fun of us, it didn't really extended past the school, or even that school year. But now, kids are making Facebook hate groups, posting lies, embarrassing stories, pictures etc. online, and there it exists forever-ish. Some may say that bullying is no worse now than back then, we all lived through it, not so bad, kids these days just need thicker skin, etc. But it is worse, because of the permanence and public forum for such things. And this is why I don't think bullying should be tolerated as part of growing up. But it is tolerated, and sometimes advocated by parents and other adults in a child's life, and they don't even notice that they're doing it. So I implore everyone, with kids or without, to watch the things you say about other people around kids. They pick up more than you think, and learning that its okay to be a bully is a lesson that should never be taught.
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