They Will Beat the Nature Out of You...if You Let Them

I was a super shy and sensitive kid. My family environment was much like a bit of a roller coaster. My parents had not healed their wounds and passed them onto my sister and me. I was super drawn to animals, always, and was a natural vegetarian, refusing to eat any meat since I could speak.

Years later in 7th grade I was walking down the street with my two best friends. We were walking to one of their homes to work on a school project. One of them asked me not to walk a certain path, and the curiosity in me had to see why. There I found a dead bird. I wanted to bury it. My friends began to badger me, saying we do not have time for this and this is not important. They made me feel so badly for such a natural instinct that I stopped there and went into my nana’s house where I cried for hours.

The next day the school harassment began. Overnight the two of them called everyone we knew, bad mouthing me. I had girls I never knew threatening to beat me up every day after school. At that point I was always in a fight or flight reaction space at home, and now at school as well. I was so ashamed. It made me feel terrible for being a ballerina, small and thin, and they all played softball, bigger and stronger than me. I felt unsafe, like I could not protect myself, and that everyone wanted to hurt me.

No adults at that time considered the lasting effects the year of abuse at school would have on me in social settings, in work settings, how it formed my personality in unhealthy ways to cope, or how long it would take to reestablish safety.

Here I am a grown adult, a degree and so many certifications in human health and wellness, and I still do not feel safe being in a group of friends fully. I still feel less than in most work environments. I feel like people will see me as they did, weak, an easy target, as someone who never deserved respect.

I do not know what their behaviors felt like to them, what became of them, if they even remember, and it does not matter. What matters is I remember that soft, angelic, and sacred being who did not understand how people could not care about life, about end of life, and showed more respect for a deceased bird than humans did other humans.

Now I have dedicated my life to helping others heal, to teaching adolescents the strength to manage situations of trauma more productively than what was available to me, and to never let anyone beat my nature out of me again.

Note: This was originally written in Spring of 2020