You get up in the morning hoping that today may be a good day. Scared for what the day will bring, you tear apart your drawers looking for an “acceptable” outfit. You pray today’s the day someone says a kind word to you in the hallway, or joins you during lunch, so homework won’t be a bore. You fumble with the eyeliner and lip gloss your mom taught you how to use the night before. Now, your mom is yelling at you to leave; the bus will be coming around the corner any second now. You run out before it’s too late and you get teased for holding up the bus. You plop down in an empty seat at the front of the bus and play your old iPod to a band that nobody likes. The rest of the day is filled with sneers, presumably people laughing about your makeup. The same makeup that you thought would solve the problem, but only made everything worse. Big Pete comes up to you right after the lunch bell rings and pushes you against the lockers. “Yo circus clown!”he screams in your frightened face and walks away, high-fiving his friends with a smug look on his face. After a quick cry in the bathroom, you wipe your eyes and go to your regular lunch spot, silently hoping the rest of the day isn’t as miserable as it’s already been…


Defining bullying is easy. Dictionary.com says it is a “…quarrelsome, overbearing person who habitually…intimidates smaller or weaker people”; however, surviving bullying is not as simple. Bullying is a serious problem. Millions of children around the United States suffer through it, and people try to prevent it, knowing it is something that may never go away. Bullying hurts many people and changes so many different lives every day. Schools are trying to decrease the occurrences of bullying, but it is not something that can disappear in a flash, though that is what we desire.

Though bullying brings satisfaction to the bullies, it destroys the lives of the victims. One student I know is a constant victim of bullying, and one day it got so extreme and he was so depressed, that he cut himself with scissors. This boy faced so much pain at school and home that he felt he did not deserve to live. This is the unknown and often secret result of bullying, that bullies swear they didn’t see coming; all they wanted was a little fun. But that “fun” comes with a grave cost that nobody understands except for the victim.
There are workshops and programs around the United States that are dedicated to ending bullying, but does that really help? Bullying is not something that can go away all at once, it takes unimaginable time and effort to stop, but it’s worth every penny and every minute. Working together, as one giant force to stop it, bullying can be stopped in unexpected ways.