Abuse vs feedback

 I remember the first time I was subject to the kind of bullying where its as though youre in a circle and it feels like everyone around you wants to see you crumble. I grew up with brothers and in typical fashion we liked to wind each other up. family holidays with cousins consisted of us all taking the piss out of one another until it was laughable so i remember reading some of the online attacks and thinking about how generic they all were. "bitch" "slag" "rat" the general going insults of the day. They didn't know me, nor did they know a thing about me other than what I looked like. I remember actually asking them to try a bit harder because their efforts wernt even touching the sides and then boy was I insulted. I'll remember this insult for the rest of my days. "you've got a nose like a fucking mint card" At the time there was an advert for a bank that had a curved shape to the corner of their cards and they used to play on the shape of it with a woman who had a big curved shape nose.

Given how self conscious I was of my unique Jewish shaped nose I thought this was absolute genius. I was more impressed than I was insulted. Thankfully my friend and I used to joke about my nose too. When I used to get angry or passionate about anything my nostrils would flare and we'd joke that the whole world could get sucked in if I wasn't careful. So although a little stung, I remember congratulating her on the first decent insult id had that week.

Bullying did get to me in high-school though. I didn't like to conform. I never much cared for my appearance.  I would often get hand me downs, unbranded clothes and i was more or less Brought up like one of the lads. Think less, frilly skirts and pretty bows and more wellies and mud pies. I wanted to stay true to who I was but that meant recieving a lot of negative feedback. I even did the cliche thing of crying in the school toilets one day. It wasn't because of the words spoken either but it was because I could tell that they had totally turned their humanity switch off and Id never experienced that before. Funnily enough, that same guy was flirting with me in a nightclub in chester a year or 2 later as if nothing had happened. When I brought up his behaviour towards me he put his head down. 

I was part of it too, i was the bullied who became the bully. The hurt person, hurting another. I was loud and provocative and she was quiet. I couldn't understand why I got so much negative attention and she got nothing. Her parents threatened me with the police and that was the end of that. 

I didn't have the words to articulate it or label it but I thought perhaps  my behaviour  was a reflection of how i felt about myself rather than a truth of who she was. She was actually the type of person who wouldn't harm a fly and she was genuine and authentic and she didn't get a single bit of criticism for it and I envied that to the point of anger. The anger would over ride the empathy and guilt and id act out.  When the anger subsided, the guilt set in. That experience gave me an insight why i was bullying and why i was bullied.  

When my marriage fell apart, I took everything personally. It was tough, id be bed bound for days questioning who I was, questioning if the things said were true of me. I was convinced I was a monster.

I had to rebuild myself  and rebuild who i was without my husband. When i started to love who I was, when i started to see all my cracks as part of who I was and love and accept those ( however ugly I felt they were when i first observed them) , I started to realise that I lay on a spectrum of a lot of insults, if not all insults but the ones that really stung were the areas within myself that needed work.

One of the most recent sessions with my life coach went something like this:

"you're needy arnt you beth" 

"no im not" 

"you are. And you're Aggresive" 

"naaa i can be but im not an Aggresive person and I never act needy at all. In fact ill shut myself away before I ever act needy" 

"yeah because you're ashamed of being needy, because you feel it so much and you want to shut yourself off from it. You're also very Aggresive" 

"am i... For fucks sake... Naaa i cant be" 

"how does it feel when I say needy little Beth" 

"omg that's fucking gross. Don't." 

"see. Needy. Aggresive." 

I hated my life coach that day but she was right and as much as i didnt want to believe it she was right. My friend recently did a video magic trick he does in his shows sometimes and dedicated it to "needy little Beth." I loved him for that. It was like my friend joking about my flared nostrils again. Cracking jokes about my faults seems to be my love language. It's like someone's saying "this is where you're ugly but it's funny as fuck and we love and accept you" it can ofcourse go the other way and be passive Aggresive but you get a feeling for that and it hurts no matter how falsely funny someone is attempting to be, you smell the bullshit. the way to tell the difference is if the person cracking the joke has had your ugly negatively impact them regularly enough and they've previously acted pissed off about it. 

I started to wonder if I was ignoring important feedback. What if people's insults were a means of direction that I was ignoring? What if my ignorance is narcissistic?

The conclusion I came to was this:. When someone is coming from a place of love and light, when someone is wanting what's best for me, they will approach me with love and not with hate, abuse or insults. When I am approached with love, although it will be tough, I will welcome in feedback. otherwise, if it is driven by pain, I am recieving a description of how they feel about themselves.

It frustrates me, looking back on my experience in high school because there's 2 fundamental things that are never taught in that environment but are what should be taught. 

1. A teaching of how to sit with pain and work it through. 

2. A teaching how to self love.