This I Believe
I’m still not quite sure how it
started. I’ve been racking my brain lately trying to figure out when the first
time I was bullied was, but all the hundreds of memories of bullying just meld
together into one large miserable story. I have been through almost every type
of bullying there is: name calling, physical, relational, cyber, and sexual. I
was bullied consistently from kindergarten until I dropped out of high school.
However, I did not drop out of High School solely because I was bullied. During
a Basketball trip in December of my Junior year I quit the team because of
bullying by fellow teammates. It had been happening since my Freshman year, and
I had finally had enough. I loved, and still love, basketball, but they had
managed to kill my passion for it at the time. It was the first extremely
difficult “adult” decision I had made. More importantly, it was a major turning
point in my life. After leaving the team, I began noticing the harshness of
life around my school. So many kids were bullied terribly and it seemed to be
accepted as the normal way of life. Teachers saw and knew about the bullying
yet it never stopped. Most teachers and faculty ignored it because it wasn’t
their problem. Others would excuse it by saying things like “kids will be kids”
and “she [the bully] is a good student”.
I have always loved school and
learning, but I began to loath just waking up in the morning to go to school. I
eventually turned to looking for a way out. Any way out. When most people ask I
just give them the short “I dropped out of high school because of bullying” explanation,
but that is far from the whole story. My senior year I decided to let myself
“fail” trigonometry so that my parents would sign me out of school before the
grade was able to damage my GPA. My father, knowing me to well, made me give
him the real reason I wanted to leave. I told him, in tears, and the next day
he signed me out into independent home-schooling. I took the GED a few weeks later
on my 18th birthday. I took a semester off from school and worked.
In Fall 2014, I began my college career at Middle Tennessee State University.
My life has changed so much since I
left high school. I left knowing I had to do something to change the way
children are growing up in this country. It took me two years into college to
come to exactly how to do this. Most of this changed happened my Sophomore
year. I was finally in a position in my life where I could move, breathe, and
act without being judged and shut down by the majority of people around me. I
went from feeling alone to having staff members, family, friends, professors,
and a loving boyfriend that fully supported me. Just before my junior year
began, I created a social movement that I plan on converting to a
Not-for-Profit Organization when I graduate. The social movement, Through the Mind into the
Heart, has two main missions: Make the World Care and ProHelp Bullying.
It took me quite a while to make it
to this level of thinking. When I left high school, I left despising my bullies
and all of the individuals who refused to help me. I started college knowing I
wanted to help those children who were bullied, but I wanted to do so by
punishing and devaluing the bullies. It was not until just before my junior
year that I was finally able to let this go. I had been through many of my
Psychology classes already and I had learned an immense amount from them. I had
gotten the basic reasoning that there is a reason for everything. One teacher
helped to bring this to surface by telling my class of studies about aggression
and violent television and media. These studies showed that the aggressive
media was not the cause of the children being aggressive. It was the lack of
punishment for aggressive behaviors, or the actual or unintended reward of
these behaviors. Thinking back to this during the summer of 2016 I asked
myself, “what actually causes a child to bully?” It can’t be that they are all
terrible individuals. In fact, I know that’s not the case. Research has been
done showing that many terrible situations and ailments in a child’s life can
turn them into bullies. So why are we not taking this in to account when trying
to combat bullying?
ProHelp Bullying is a term most are
unfamiliar with, mostly because it was not a term until I started my movement.
The goal is to replace Anti-Bullying methods of handling bullying with a
ProHelp method. Think about middle school and high school. Who were the
bullies? Often bullies are victims of something else. Sometimes it is bullying,
but sometimes it is much worse. Bullies can be victims of child abuse, sexual
abuse, sexual assault, mental disorders, neglect, and much more. Even children
that seem to only have the problem of being “rich and spoiled” still need help
learning how to behave properly. It is our duty as humans to ensure the
children on both sides of this terrible occurrence receive the help they need.
Through the Mind into the Heart has
two main, intertwining missions. The first is taking the aforementioned notion
of ProHelp Bullying and making a ProHelp Bullying plan to be put in place in
schools nationwide. The second mission is ‘make the world care’. It is all to
prevalent that the vast majority of individuals don’t care about the pandemic
of bullying occurring in our schools until there is a tragedy (suicide,
shooting, etc.). It’s not enough to just care when these things happen. It is
the years of torment and pain before the incidents that need to be cared about.
Once this becomes an official non-profit we will pursue these missions in many
ways. One way will be through supporting student organizations that support the
movement. I have already started one of these organizations at Middle Tennessee
State University. The major objective of Through the Mind into the Heart will
be supporting research going towards the completion of a ProHelp plan. One way
in which research will be supported will be issuing grants to individuals
pursing research to put towards the ProHelp Plan. It will also create a very
large network of researchers across many fields, universities, and states. These
connections will be supported and strengthened through conferences held to bring
many researches together discussing and forming the plan. I know establishing
such a large organization will not be an easy feat, but I am prepared to do
whatever is necessary. This issue has gone over looked for far too long.
Bringing this change is crucial to improving the lives of our countries youth
and the future of America.
Making this change in the world is
my responsibility. This I know.
Written By:
Stephanie Elise Carpenter
Fantastic! Transforming personal pain into constructive social action is the very best revenge... but that's not the right word, is it? The point is not retribution but a preemptive contribution to improving lives by raising awareness. Thanks!
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