My Experience as A Bullying Victim

Several days ago I read in some news stories of several news portals that a senior high school student stabbed his classmate because he was so mad that his friends always bullied him. As he could not stand again with that, one day the victim bullying student come into the classroom of the perpetrator by bringing a knife. CCTV at the class room showed that the bullying victim's student walked slowly and stabbed his friend at his back several times. He did it among the other students at the class. His friend was dead and the stabber was arrested by police.

This news story reminded me of my bad experience in my junior high school days in East Jakarta from 1977-1980. At that time, I have no father. He passed away in 1974. Previously my father was a journalist. Even though my father was a former ANTARA News Agency chief bureau in Tokyo, Japan, in 1968-1970,  after he died my family fell in a poor situation. My mother at that time worked as a supervisor of a dormitory for  Fuji Film manufacture workers in Bekasi.  She stayed every day at the dormitory. At home, I just have my brothers and sisters who did not care about the psychological development of my teenager age.

At school, I felt inferior to my friends. My pocket money is just a little. Not many people wanted to be my friends. However, I had got some friends who were in the same situation as me. I have no girlfriends. I almost could not join the party events as my friends were reluctant to invite me. 

The situation made some friends happy to bully me. They laughed after mocking me. They mocked me for everything, such as my ugly dress uniform, pants, shoes,  my hairstyle, and everything. One of them,  the worst one, we can call him   "X". He always mocked me and made me so mad. However, I did not dare to fight  X as he was bigger than me. So, I just accepted my fate bullied by my friends, especially by X, until I pass junior high school.

Years by years after graduating from junior high school, I still have such inferior feelings. I  have always a bad dreams when I slept. In my dream, my friend mocked me . In my dream, I punched my friends who bullied me, specially X.   I still have this bad dream until I studied at university. After I graduated from university, the bad dream was slowly disappearing. 

About 30 years after my bad bullying experience, my friends from junior high school conducted a school reunion. I was also invited by them. Then, I came to the reunion event and I met X, the guy who bullied me severely at the time we were studying in junior high school. X talked to me that he has married and worked as a manager in a shopping mall.  He apologized for what he had done to me in the past time. I shake his hand and said that I had forgotten the past. I forgave him.

Two years after I met X, he passed away because of a heart attack. I was so startled to hear that but unfortunately, I could not give my last respect because the body had been brought by his family to his hometown in Central Java province. One year later after he died, I heard from my friends that his daughter would be married. So, I came to her wedding in Purwakarta City, West Java province, with my junior high school friends. When I met  his daughter at the wedding, I smiled and whispered to her: "If  one day you experience something bad and hurt your heart, believe me, time will heal that." ***