Earlier in the year 2016, I had received a wonderful set of comments from a middle school student after one of my presentations on long term impact of bullying. I wanted to share her comments here:
“Thank you for coming to our school last Friday at C-I. I believe most of us did learn a valuable lesson. I have been bullied by a group of girls at my school because I decided not to do basketball this year but do dance. Every time I would go into the locker rooms they would yell at me and call me a traitor. They stopped bullying me, and they stopped ignoring me. Now they even let me be a starter in volleyball. People have talked to them about bullying before, your story stopped everything, maybe we are not as best of friends as we used to, but now I am not being bullied. Thank you so much, now I can actually have fun without them following me and taunting me. Also other people in my grade have injured themselves because someone was bullying them, now those people who were bullied are actually happy for once. Now they don’t treat each other differently because they are different. You also influenced how people talk. Now at practice we banned the can’t word, ugly word, and any other word that would hurt someone’s feelings. I don’t know how many times I can thank you. I hope you keep influencing people’s lives.”
Comments like this keep me going and keep me working hard to prevent bullying and child sexual abuse. It’s always good to know that all the efforts you put in do make some positive impact on people.