There is a sensation that I sometimes experience, maybe it’s familiar to you? The sides of my tongue pressed against the inside of my molars, my jaw hovering and semi-clenched, my neck straining to keep me out of a hunch. These are the physical symptoms of keeping my mouth firmly shut.
Now, I can talk while I’m cinching up my mandible. I haven’t fallen into Carthusian silence, because these symptoms are symbolic of the cage in which I keep all the words I’m not uttering.
And why don’t I utter them? There are a lot of reasons, but a key censor in my world is that easy archetype, the bully.
McFly!!
This is the guy who comes to mind when I think of a bully (but it doesn’t have to be a guy). Biff Tannen: a loud mouth power by a dim bulb, a seemingly privileged kid from an actually unloving home, a constant tormentor, a cheater, a ringleader, a thug.
What is it, really, that Biff is doing? He is demanding things that don’t belong to him, and when they won’t be given, he takes them with force. He escalates violence as he meets resistance. He takes a joyless pleasure in seeing other people’s fear or misery.
But some bullies I’ve known exert their power quietly, in code, behind-the-scenes, through a proxy, or through patience. They sit quietly enough, but as if they are presiding over the proceedings; people turn to them for their approval, even when they aren’t sure why.
Or they select the topics and guide the discussion by force – no one getting a word in edgewise – so that they are center stage, and everyone else has to keep up with or join them in forced frivolity… a kind of unspoken, “dance, monkey!” Often as they select these topics, their criteria rests on exclusion and inclusion: drawing clear boundaries between who is in and who is out. And occasionally they will condescend to offer a small nugget of praise on one of the outsiders trying so desperately to get in, though no one is quite sure whether the praise is sincere, or merely condescending.
This dividing – us and them, in and out, cool and uncool – this is what bullies do best. They make the rules, they enforce the rules – hell, they live the rules.
Obviously we could talk at length about the hurt souls inside these bullies – the damaged and flawed people who need our compassion, if not our company. Mostly though, I wonder why people are attracted to charismatic dominant personalities who turn out to be bullies. And by people, I mean me.
Anyway, someone I’ve known a long time and always thought of as the warm, gooey center has decided to turn himself into a bit of a bully. I know he wants control, to feel important. But he winds up forcing everyone to orbit him at the distance and velocity of his choosing. He leads people on aimless death marches to see who will stick it out. Frankly, he seemed to be working at depriving me of meaningful interaction with our mutual friends, when this was something he once so loved about our group. And while I understand – that is to say that I know – why he is behaving like this, I am simply too disappointed to be compassionate.