Month: May 2021

Bully

/ T Wayne Hicks / 1 Comment

“Get up, porky.”

I was incoherent. But I’ll remember those three words for my whole life.

My head had just been smashed into a metal locker. And I was bleeding.

“I said, get up.”

I wasn’t getting up. I wasn’t even close to being able to. I was seeing little stars in my vision. I don’t know if I had a concussion, but damn, if this is what it felt like, I didn’t want one ever again.

I was just a 6th grader, packing my backpack in a crowded hallway with my locker open, minding my business, when I was pushed and my head smashed against my locker door.

I felt a kick to my side. It hadn’t been as painful as the head injury I had just sustained, but it knocked the breath out of me momentarily.

I lay there, crouched in a crowded hallway, as everyone walked past a dude kicking me. I remember much about this exchange, especially the people walking by. I fully realized that they weren’t gonna help me, because they wanted to see me get my ass throttled.

It was middle school. I was the fat kid with glasses. With daily comments about my man tits, my fat cheeks, my thick glasses, and my muffin top, it was only a matter of time before I was going to get my ass kicked and today, I was on the radar of the biggest bully in my grade.

So to say I wasn’t surprised when I was bleeding in the hallway that day was an understatement. To say I was surprised on how he got me was. He waited until I was on the floor digging into my locker to push me into the door. Then he started kicking me when I was down. But that’s how bullies work. I did the hard work for him so all he had to do was take advantage. Before he could get another kick in, a teacher stopped him. But it was of little comfort to me at the time.

And while this horrific day still rings true in my head, I’m glad he did what he did.

Because some 4 years later, I grew to 6’4″ 210lbs. I had been bullied all throughout my middle school and early high school years. But one day, it stopped.

Not because I hadn’t gotten any less nerdy, but because I had gotten bullied enough that I had nothing left to lose, and I made sure every person that had bullied me understood that.

But here’s the thing. This blog post is not intended to gain sympathy for me in my awkward and sometimes downright shitty adolescence.

It’s sole purpose is to show why society needs a bully, and why when you’ve had enough, still the best time honored situation to dealing with a bully is to punch him back in his fucking mouth.

The Need For The Bully

Bullies have been around since the dawn of humanity. There was always someone bigger, meaner, and more ruthless to take your shit from you. And as we have evolved into a more civilized species, bullying has taken on other forms. Some 30 plus years ago, when my middle school days were littered with inevitable pointing, laughing, beatings, jokes, comments and other not so pleasant actions taken in order to douse me in shame, nowadays it’s more of the cyber kind, with the same types of insults being hurled through the computer screen as opposed to the hallways.

The need for physical violence to take on the bully went from fists to guns during Columbine. A terrible tragedy of two boys who didn’t have proper parenting and who decided to murder the bully, a cost that is still felt today as we see school shootings happening.

But instead of empowering the meek to go after the bully in more constructive ways, we empowered the State to sanitize the system so that there were no bullies or bullied, but the socialism of the school, where there is no empowerment, only ceilings.

So began the War on the Bully.

There was a huge movement in the early 2000’s that has culminated today with the attack by society on bullies of every type. The now systematized shame towards the bully has not curtailed the bullying, it has simply put the bully pulpit in the hands of our illustrious elected leaders, teachers, administrators, and other adults who make decisions to protect everyone, even when those decisions affect everyone negatively.

“We must protect our children from bullies” has become the rallying cry for parents who refuse to teach and parent their kids about the importance of the reaction to bullies being an important part of mitigating them.

I believe fathers have truly dropped the ball in teaching their kids about focusing anger towards positive activities.

As we moved through the past three decades, I have seen on alarming issue that continues to come up and that is that parents have willingly given up the raising of their kids to the State. With all of these cultural movements throughout the 60’s to the 90’s, the State has subverted the family structure, becoming the de facto bully in all of this.

In short, the bullies have become the bullied. And the new bullies have men with guns.

When I was bullied, as many children were, my mother tried to reason with school administrators and teachers that her son was being bullied. All this did was make the bullying increase, for I was the kid who’s mom tattled on the offenders. My father gave better advice. “Punch them in the mouth.”

So I did. Even if it wasn’t literal. I stopped taking shit from the bullies. I stepped up and either physically or verbally jabbed them when they came close. I wasn’t going to fuck around anymore.

Why Columbine was important was it showed that how kids were dealing with bullies, and how parents weren’t helping their kids, in a violent manner was not the answer that these kids were looking for. But without guidance for anger and frustration, all it did was boil over into violence on a large scale.

Killing the bully does nothing and has tragic consequences. Beating up the bully, gaining psychological advantage over him, is where the kids need to be directed. The bully provides a challenge to the child. A challenge of either beating them physically, or like I did, beat them out verbally and mentally. And when a child is challenged and they overcome the challenge, it’s a lesson well learned.

Taking the Power Back

Some of the best lessons I’ve learned are when I was getting my ass kicked.

I know of no person who didn’t have these sentiments that didn’t turn out to be a stronger individual after they got bullied.

It is empowerment to fight back and beat up the bully.

When we give kids real world challenges to overcome, as in life when they become an adult, something clicks. They understand through the harsh lessons that this is how to overcome and grow in life.

The problems with this is that parents stopped caring, and gave overreaching authority to teachers to try and be surrogate parents. I saw it in my days in my child’s PTA, when parents don’t care, kids have no where to turn but to teachers, who have no time for the kids because there are so many. So it’s left to school counselors, administrators, and other authority figures to try and reign in all of this, and they’re overwhelmed.

All because parents dropped the ball. As with the teacher who finally stopped the beating, they can’t expect to be parents at school with no parents working for the kids at home.

But it starts with the parents teaching their kids about overcoming challenges on their own with help from those that love them.

I didn’t start learning to ride my bike until my parents made me get on a bike and start peddling. I hit a mailbox and was broken and bruised, but I learned to ride a bike and I was off to the races for most of my childhood.

I didn’t learn to fight back until I fought back, with my parents watching me do it, and empowered myself to take control of a situation with an assertive move.

The world needs bullies. But more importantly, the world needs men and women to teach people that being bullied is not an excuse to act the victim, but a reason for action against an oppressive force.

If a child can’t stand up for themselves as a kid, they won’t stand up for themselves as an adult.

The pain of being bullied is gone when you fight back. I don’t feel sorry for myself for being bullied. In fact, it was a necessary evolution in the man I’ve become today. And I fought back against the very forces that we are trying to destroy.

We don’t want to remove a challenge from someone’s life just because it’s hard to overcome. We have to stop trying to save everyone and instead, give them a reason to FIGHT in life.

I see many people who’ve lost limbs in war, who’ve had diseases or defects overcome incredible odds to do amazing things. And that’s what puts the human in humanity. Overcoming difficulties, punching them in the face, and not wrapping the world in bubble wrap to protect.

People all need these challenges, but more importantly, they need parents who show them these lessons and let them fail.

It’s the only way to get stronger.

The bullies stopped as soon as I fought back. And fought back I did. I wasn’t bullied again.

The magic recipe? A commitment to yourself and to not being a victim.

It’s the way you grow to become a person who doesn’t take any shit.

And I think we need a society with more of those types of people.

Adversity is a necessity in life. And nothing is more adverse than a bully who you need to punch in the mouth.

Overcome and adapt.

Relationship Lessons – Part 1: Save Yourself

/ T Wayne Hicks / Leave a comment

This is part 1 of a three part series on lessons I’ve learned from my relationships.

Sometimes, the hardest thing for a man to do is walk away from something he knows he wants, but isn’t what he needs.

“It wasn’t right. It didn’t feel right. And it’s not her fault that it’s not right”, I sat in my car as it ran in the parking lot.

The wind was howling outside.

Everyone was gone from work.

It was just me, late afternoon sun shining over my car.

It was one of the most difficult decisions I’ve ever had to make, but I had to make it.

I’ve had to make this choice twice before. But this one was different. She had a ton of what I wanted in a girl.

When you are a man in a relationship, you are sometimes blind to what is good for you and what isn’t. Many a man has stayed in a situation where he didn’t belong, didn’t feel right, and this was just like that. How much time was I going to spend in a situation that didn’t feel good to me? At what point was I going to draw a line on what I needed in this?

And, as in a few of my past relationships, why was I giving more than I was getting?

I have had a tendency, especially if I find a girl I really like, of slipping into a role of driving, flying or meeting them in their area. And when I wasn’t? I was calling and texting like mad. Neediness.

I did it throughout 2019 and 2020, meeting girls on Twitter, flying to their area, having a fun weekend, then flying back hoping they would be persuaded to come live with me in Indy. In many of my past posts, I lament on this problem.

But this one was different. I thought she would come. And she didn’t.

I thought I had communicated it correctly. The ultimate goal for me, in my life, is that if I’m in a long distance relationship with a woman, is that she would naturally come here.

Indiana is my life. It’s where my kids are. It’s where my career, business, and family reside. There isn’t a compromise when it comes to this place. It’s my home.

But herein lies the problem: I was trying to be the exception to a rule that I knew wasn’t good.

Long distance relationships are not good, especially if they aren’t quickly turned into face to face relationships.

It cannot be stated enough that I was naive in thinking that I was different, I was special.

Most men do.

But I was kidding myself. Dammit I hate when I’m wrong, but I was warned, and I didn’t take it seriously.

When you meet someone long distance who you really like, you tend to gloss over the bigger deals because of the fact you like them.

I was trying to bring something that wasn’t going to happen and the lines should’ve been drawn sooner, but alas, my blindness to a girl I really clicked with precluded me from making those boundaries known early and often.

Hence why I was muttering in my car on that April day with frustration over letting it get this far.

Lesson – Boundaries Early and Often

I let it ride. I didn’t question. I constantly pushed off bringing it up.

But it was important.

You let it fester, you don’t push the issue, and it drags on.

I became, in essence, and emotional tampon for her. I was there whenever she needed me. I called at the same time every night. I was enamored with her from the start, but I didn’t reinforce my boundaries and tell her, over and over again, that this wasn’t going to work if we weren’t going to meet.

Until that April day, when I did.

Finally. I said something.

It was met with disbelief and frustration, as if wanting to meet in person was an affront to all that was decent.

I had finally, mercifully, put down a boundary that I had been playing footsie with for months.

Why not sooner? Because I was weak. I wanted it to work. I really liked her. I still did.

As a man, you let a woman you really like walk all over you, or worse, commit an abundance of your time to her, then you pull away, of course she’s going to be pissed. You were doing what she wanted, what she liked, and there was no risk for her.

I wasn’t consistent with my boundaries, and she had every right to be upset because I let it fester too long. But I had every right to ask her to come. If she truly wanted to be in my life, if she truly loved me like she said she did, it wouldn’t have been hard to come see me.

As a man, you MUST provide a strong frame and not bend or break on certain things in your life. I was not only bending, but certain boundaries were not-existent. All because I didn’t want to lose her. And I did anyway.

If someone is not willing to do what it takes to be in your life, then they really don’t want to be in you life now, do they?

The minute I put down boundaries was the minute the relationship ended. She couldn’t do what I needed her to do in the time I needed her to do it. You can’t be afraid to lose her. If she wants to be in your life, she’ll find a way to do it.

Lesson – Long Distance Generally is a Bad Idea

Rollo and the boys are right about long distance relationships. They are much like playing pretend.

Women can do long distance relationships better than men because they can get their emotional needs filled.

I don’t recommend long distance relationships for a man unless the women you really like is planning on visiting you SOON.

If you hit it off with a woman over the phone, long distance, as a man, especially an man who is established, she needs to come and see you.

Before, I had made it a bad habit to be talking to a girl for a month or so then be on a plane to see her. We’d have a great, sexual weekend, then reality would set in. She wasn’t moving for me. So I had to choose very carefully on who I was going to visit. And with my issues with my business and COVID, traveling wasn’t in the cards.

But here’s the thing. I could’ve visited her. But that would have led me to the same destination as all the other women I had gone to visit. I was making a stand this time that a requirement of this relationship, if it was to move forward, was that she had to visit.

This wasn’t on her, this was on me. And that’s okay. I have a specific requirement for relationships and if it didn’t work for her, it didn’t. I shouldn’t have prolonged this as long as I did.

Sometimes, bluntness is necessary. Sometimes, you have to put it out there to see if she’ll flinch. And I didn’t. I wasn’t honest with myself on what I wanted, I wasn’t honest with her, and I was afraid of losing her.

But what was this? Can something be classified as a relationship if you’ve never met face to face?

The answer? To women, it can. To men, it can’t.

But the bottom line. You can’t truly have a “relationship” that involves two people that haven’t met. There’s only so much of a connection you can make to a voice over the phone or a face over the internet. There’s only so much you can do because inevitably, intimacy must be created. Sex and intimacy are cornerstones of a relationship. And you can’t create that over a digital space.

It’s pretend. You are still not real to the other person nor are they to you unless there is physical touch. It’s not fair, but that’s the way it is.

Stop Being Afraid

What motivated me throughout this whole thing?

Fear.

Fear is a huge motivator for many things in our lives, and my fear of losing a woman I really liked was driving the lack of boundaries and the persistence of a long distance relationship.

We see men all the time give up their lives and move for a woman they love, only to be blindsided when all they’ve sacrificed translates to a whole mess of resent from her end. Then she finds another man who is solid and strong with his boundaries and his requirements and respects him more for those attributes.

I let fear dictate my actions. I was afraid of losing her. And that’s a risk as a man that you have to take. Your self respect is too important to let slide with a woman you really like. Hold your frame and let her know that you aren’t wavering.

I didn’t. And it cost me her, but more importantly, it cost me a bit of myself.

And while sad, I’m still glad I was able to enforce my boundaries at some point in this situation. I can only imagine how much longer it would’ve taken if I had just not said anything. How many more months or god forbid, years, would I have stayed on the line giving her what she needed while I got nothing of what I needed?

Know when to call a spade a spade. And know when to walk.

I’m sorry to her, but I’m glad I did what I did.