While each of this series can be read individually as there's no specific order of events. I do implore everyone reading to read The Prologue ahead of reading any specific part.
I always sympathised with bullies. It doesn't sound good, but I guess I never wanted to feel like the marks on my body and the scars on my face were "one of those things" that happen. There must be something behind getting shoved, punched, belittled, and demeaned, right? There has to be some meaning. That's why I sympathised, not even out of sympathy.
Long after I left Iraq, I had a whole other life. The issue is that people didn’t have as much understanding of my past as I hoped they would. I remember feeling abandoned. I remember being abandoned in a literal sense. Just seeing my friends walk away after knowing all there is to know about me. No sympathy. No search for the hidden meaning.
I think of that moment a lot. It is part of the movie by MyMind Production that plays for hours at night, preventing me from sleeping. Twitching and cringing in bed for endless hours to these horrible scenes. And that scene of my friends abandoning me ranks somewhere at the end of a long montage of getting suffocated, punched by my older brother, humiliated by my cousin Salwan, and constant harassment by my classmates for not being "normal."
Sean's mother told me that most of the time, bullying is just people seeking attention without having the proper tools to ask for it.
What's the proper way of handling someone hurting you for attention to their pain? "Oh, you punched me to the ground, I guess we should talk about how you feel." How do you respond to someone when their external scream is hurting you physically or mentally? By punching, humiliating you, or telling you they have cancer when they don't?
I often debated the thought of apologising to Anmar just in hopes of having a conversation with him. Like, I wouldn't have minded obliterating the whole of me so he would have been fully restored. I wonder if my friends ever thought of attempting to break into me in such a way.
"We hear you, we are here for you"
"What is really going on?"
The issue with sympathy for bullies is that it's never really sympathy. You can't have pure sympathy for someone who intimidates you, someone who scares you, or someone whom you just came to terms with the fact that you may have never really known.
Still, I have a twisted admiration for physical bullies, I guess. It must be hard being the obvious bad guy. I used to imagine apologising to Anmar as a kind of offering. Like, here's my throat anyway, you can put down the knife.
But the trick about bullies is that you never really know whether their actions are a scream for help or a song they dance to. At least with Anmar, I knew what he felt. He hated me. He blamed me. It was direct.
I was never able to express my naked self in all of its soul-dragging anxieties. The best I was able to do was some kind of pain equation. Like the chart doctors show you numbered from 1 to 10. 10, unbearable pain. 1, barely felt. I can easily express any pain that isn't mine because I have already done the mathematical work to know what feeling equals what feeling.
Thousands of memories haunting you, that's schizophrenia. Something eating at you from the inside, that's cancer. It's not a perfect system, but it helped me explain my hurt vicariously. I once heard a quote, "A person who doesn't lie doesn't have to remember what he said." I used to keep a notebook of what I said and to whom.
I think that's the difficult part, remembering my friends walking away, because from any other perspective but mine, it is nothing but a triumphant walk away from an abuser. The authority of friendship granted me the power to abuse them using stories from books, films, and TV shows that equal or are higher on my twisted pain chart.
Sean’s mother once told me, “Some people cry to be understood. Others cry to make you feel responsible. You can’t always tell which is which until you try to walk away, and one of them lets you.” And I never let them walk away without all the shameful baggage I could attach to it.
At least Anmar was a fist-first type of bully, obvious and shameless. I wrapped myself in a tragedy outfit that always felt off, and when others reached in, they found nothing that belonged to me. It was nothing but a low-budget production with no substance. A tear-jerker. A quick montage of the top 10 saddest moments.
It was then that I learned that not all bullies look like villains. Some look like victims. Some are just pathological.