Bullying. Empathy. Personal Responsibility. And Guts.

I have blogged about the act of blogging before. Blogging is a strange thing. A public diary. A style notebook. A recipe collection. A journal. Blogging can be many things. Those blogs that bare the heart and guts of the author are the ones that touch me most. A mother who recognizes the horror (and then guilt and then love) she felt when she gave birth to a child with Down's Syndrome. A soldier's wife who admits it is equally hard to adjust to her husband's comings as it is his goings.

And this week I was touched by my cousin's blog about being bullied as a teenager. Following the suicide of a teenager from her high school, my cousin blogged about the bullying she experienced in high school. Being told she looked like a mentally disabled kid when she smiled; being told she was a lesbian, because she had short hair; being followed home by girls who told her they were going to kill her. These are things I never knew about my cousin.

My cousin is one of the most genuinely kind people I know. She has always seemed to excel in athletics, academics, work, and social situations. I would never have known she was bullied. And I certianly would not have known she was carrying around that pain for years. Was I listening?

I recently completely The Landmark Forum. The only way I know how to describe The Landmark Forum is an intense self-improvement course. Jill Capuzzo said, "Other seminars may offer supportive hugs; this one hits you between the eyes." The Forum is completed by thousands of people around the world every year. The transformations can be so dramatic, some have referred to Landmark as a cult. People are so excited, they can be a bit salesy. You can do a Google search and read all sorts of reviews from different angles. For me, choosing to take The Forum impacted my life in ways I could never have imagined.

The Landmark Forum is one of many tools we can use to navigate life, but I think it is the Swiss Army Knife of self-improvement tools. It imparts a sense of empathy and personal responsibility that is never lost. The girls that bullied my cousin were afraid. Whether they were afraid of themselves, someone else, or both, I don't know. But if they were able to look at my cousin with empathy, maybe they would not have bullied her. If they had listened, they may have found bullies are not very different than those being bullied. Listening takes guts, because sometimes what you hear is scary.

When I was in high school there was a quarter when I didn't want to go to school, because there were some girls who were threatening to beat me up. Who knows why. Something about my ex-boyfriend. I have purged the details, because it is irrelevant to me now, but there was some pretty hard core harassment from a variety of angles that culminated with my parents getting involved. I never thought I was bullied, because my reaction was to become really tough. My reaction was to be more savvy than anyone else so I could avoid being the target again. And I was very successful. But, although, I admire my strength, I know I use it both as a tool and as a crutch. Keeping people at arm's length is easy and safe, but it does not require guts.

What if we all lived our lives with guts? With empathy? With personal responsibility? What if we wondered what must have happened to those girls to inspire them to bully another girl? What if we listened to our loved ones to hear the story they weren't yet ready to tell? What if we didn't see ourselves as victims of others, but them as the victims of themselves?

Some of the ways I have transformed my life post-Landmark sound a bit "woo woo." (My favorite buzz word for touchy feely things that don't seem particularly practical.) I see possibilities for myself and those people around me that appeared impossible before. I see people for who they are and why they are that way. This doesn't mean I am a zen master who has stopped thinking some people are jerks and that the government is full of self- interested facists :), but I am more in touch with the root and impact of those thoughts. I am committed to living with empathy and personal responsibility. I choose to live with guts. And I want to inspire people around me to live with guts.

Thanks to my cousin for inpiring me. And living with guts.