Day 29: The Lasting Impact of Bullying – 30 days, 30 episodes

I'm Matt Gilhooly, and this is the Life Shift. Candid conversations about the pivotal moments that have changed lives forever. Hello, my friends. Welcome to day 29. I'm almost there.

30 days, 30 episodes of the Life Shift podcast. This is a little challenge that I've given myself. And when I say little, I mean big.

And so here we are the day before the final day of this challenge.

And tomorrow I plan on just kind of talking about the challenge and what I might want to do moving forward and how can I utilize this experience and improve. So thank you for being on this journey.

I just had an idea of something that I was going to talk about, and I totally forgot what I was going to talk about, which is really fun. I love doing that. I wish I knew. Oh, I do remember.

Okay, so this is, like, not a super exciting topic and not a super uplifting topic, but it is a topic of something that I think kind of still sits with me and something that I think about every once in a while. And it probably creates some inhibitions and some things that I'm afraid to do just because.

So I mentioned this early on when I was talking about, you know, eating, disordered eating, and those kind of things in one of these episodes.

And I think it might have started earlier than that, but bullying was such a thing growing up, and luckily I haven't really experienced that as an adult, but growing up, it kind of all these deep seated emotions come in from these bullying experiences. And so, you know, I was overweight, my mom had died. I was a little bit more sensitive, and people, like, preyed on that.

And I specifically remember in third grade, there was this kid, his name was Josh, and he was just a bully. And I think it was because he had some things going on probably at home, now that I look back on it, and was kind of just.

Everyone knew him as the bully, and everyone probably had experienced something from that.

But I remember there was this one time we were outside for, I don't know, recess of some sort, and I ended up getting pushed by him in the mud and just like, covered in mud and just so embarrassed and so defeated.

And I had to go, like, sit in the office and basically hide until my dad could get called, and then he could go home and get me a change of clothes and then bring me a change of clothes and all the stuff that went with it. But it was just so traumatic because it felt like the entire school had seen me fall in this mud. Everyone was laughing.

Now, I don't know if that's true. But that's kind of the memory that came and stuck in my mind. And for so long after that, I was like, how do I escape this?

How do I run away from this? How do I change myself so that it doesn't happen again? It didn't really happen too much after that.

And then fifth grade, I had moved to a different state. I was in a different school, so I could be someone new.

I think you go in trying to be someone new, and then you end up up just kind of falling back into who you are, which is, I guess, a good thing. But I don't really recall anything there. Definitely in middle school, when I had gained a little bit more weight, I was bullied.

But my saving grace for me, weirdly, was in PE in flag football. I was, like, surprisingly really good.

And people didn't expect it because I was a little heavier and didn't look like I was athletic, but I was always, like, the one that would get the interceptions or escape the. The flag football, like, them pulling the flags and stuff like that.

But middle school was rough as far as bullying went, but that was my saving grace. And then I remember high school, which just becomes like a whole, like, hormones thing. Everyone is going through some crazy teenage hormones.

And I think I had upset someone. And then. And. And we were kind of like, she and I had kind of fought in a way, obviously, just verbal and, like, we weren't talking.

But then she got upset and told her brother who was on the bas baseball team. And then the entire baseball team cornered me at my car. I think I must have been 16, 17, maybe I could have been 18.

And they cornered me at the car and, like, all had their baseball bats. And I was like, oh, this is. This is going to be something. So they were just violently threatening me.

And I'm not someone that wants to fight, so, like, I don't. I wasn't going to fight them. And so I, weirdly, was like, look, if you're gonna hit me, go ahead and do it, because I'm not gonna fight back.

And they. They didn't like that. They wanted me to fight back. And so they all eventually just walked away and left me alone.

But it was, like, a really scary moment. And I don't know that it changed me, but it. It put a little fear into me where I didn't want to upset other people.

So, like, you know, in my 20s, you kind of, like, cowtail to people and you. And you make them, you know, want to, I don't know, you kind of stay Friends with people, you don't need to for too long.

And now that I'm in my 40s, I realize all that.

But I can look back on all these moments and how these little bullying moments kind of just like broke me a little bit so that I did as much as I could to have the most amount of people like me growing up after that. And so bullying is just something that is so ingrained, at least in. In my generation.

It just felt like something that was always there and always something that I was like, looking around the corner to see. And I'm curious what life would have been like had we had social media or even really like the Internet.

I feel like that got bigger as like I was getting out of high school, but I don't know if it would have been worse or better or maybe the same. Maybe kids are always the same and that's just kind of how it goes. But I feel like maybe I lucked out because it's very isolated. Nobody really knows.

Nobody probably remembers besides me, probably not even the bullies themselves. But it is something that, that sticks with me. So I hope, if you're listening, you never had to experience that. I'm sure you have, though.

I'm sure you've had a moment in which people are like that. I guess as an adult, I had some. I talked about some of those people in management that were a little bit of a bully and kind of ruined things for me.

But it was different than those childhood experiences.

And I think because I was just so seemingly innocent and didn't really know how to address that, now I have the tools and the abilities and maybe those moments kind of shaped me into this version of me that can kind of handle those bullies. It kind of makes me think of early on in the Life Shift podcast I got.

I was getting like five star reviews and really kind comments and things like that. And then I got a three star review on Apple podcast and it said, it's just okay. And in that moment, it really hurt, which it wasn't bad.

Three out of five is like passing right, but it like hurt. And then I had to like, take back that power and say, no, I'm gonna lean into this and I'm gonna make it a joke.

And then I made T shirts and stickers and whatnot and. And that really served its purpose. And people kind of like that and they thought it was funny.

And then a friend of mine was like, I don't think you should put so much energy into that anymore because I think it's negative. And you're kind of bringing that on now. And since that conversation, I've kind of let that go.

I don't know if you've noticed, if you've been listening or paying attention to socials and stuff like that, but I've kind of let that one go.

And I thought it was a really good instance of someone bringing something to my attention where I maybe I was hanging onto it too long or I was trying to hold on to that power for too long, which was probably something from my childhood. So any case, today was about bullying. Don't bully people. It sucks. But if you were bullied, hopefully you're.

You've been able to reflect on those moments and see how it probably wasn't anything to do with you and how you can move forward or grow from those particular moments. And if you're listening this far and you're like, what the hell are you talking about, Matt? Same thing. I feel that way.

I 30 days into this, pretty much 29 days into this, I feel like, what am I going to talk about? Have I talked about everything that I could possibly talk about on my own, instigating these conversations with myself?

And it's very, very odd process.

And I spent a little bit of time looking through a bunch of lists you heard at the beginning where I couldn't remember what I was going to talk about. So it has been a challenge in that case of trying to figure out what I was going to talk about each day.

But nonetheless, I like showing up every day and trying to figure that out and challenging myself to just talk and let out thoughts and feelings and all those kind of things. I will be back tomorrow for the final day of this 30 days, 30 episode experiment.

Here on the Life Shift podcast, I'm going to talk about this whole experience and how it's changed me and maybe what I'm going to do moving forward with it. So thank you.

Hopefully you are done with your Black Friday shopping, you're all finished for Christmas or whatever holiday you celebrate and you can rest for the rest of the weekend. I know I'm very excited about having a couple extra days off to just chill. So I will talk to you tomorrow.

I hope you have a wonderful weekend, actually wonderful day because you're going to hear from me tomorrow. Bye. For more information, please visit WW the Life Shift podcast dot com.