A personal experience with bullying: the unwanted intimacy with a stranger

...with the Stranger who knows how to strip away appearances and ill-fitting disguises, cut wide open

An open letter to the downtown YMCA in Seattle

A woman who tries to beat off a man's insistent lewd glances (or gestures)...a man's uneasiness with and/or fury at another man's persistent, intrusive stares...a child's terror at the sight of...

"Dear S.,

Thanks for meeting with me this morning informally and offering to intervene to communicate with this member.

I apologize for appearing quite stressed out.  It's just that for the past three years I have been on the receiving end of unwanted advances disguised as (over)-friendliness from one particular member.

He has accosted me more than two dozen times in an overly familiar manner, including two occasions in which the smiles became intense, unblinking, protracted Hannibal Lecter sneers, jeers, and leers, which really spooked me.

Since then, he has never really let up.

(A few years ago he had exploded at me in the swimming pool because I had accidentally kicked him.  Standing up in the middle of the pool he screamed over and over again, at least a half dozen times "Do you know you KICKED me?!!"  I apologized profusely each time. The lifeguard did nothing).

I know that he will be clearly on his best behavior you and staff as well as most other members.  But just the fact that he persists in doing something that clearly annoys me is and explicitly asked him not to do is reason to believe he is intentionally harassing me.

Persistent, unwelcome overtures, social or otherwise, should not be acceptable behavior at the YMCA.   

Obviously, something about my being small, a racial minority, and "different" (e.g., solitary, quirky, timid, politically incorrect...) is triggering predatory behavior on his part.

(Pseudo-) Friendliness pushed to the limits is aggression and, it goes without saying, inappropriate and unhealthy behavior.

It's a variation similar to the situation where  kids (and occasionally adults) on the sidewalk will walk right into another smaller, more timid kid who is walking not in a straight line but but diagonally to avoid the first kid.

O.K., so I've been the victim of aggression before, so predators can smell "it" as if it were deeply scented musk, no matter hard I try to mask "it."

This member--pun intended--, I surmise, has a personality disorder, perhaps even psychopathic tendencies (compulsive lying, etc.).  Although he  appears to be effortlessly "normal" to most people, he saves the other side of his personality to show only a select few.

I don't know his name; he knows mine; I have no idea who he is.  And I have never had a real "conversation" with him.  Yet he acts as if he knows me well.

My sports don't include playing cat-and-mouse--while this member, on the other hand, obviously relishes stalking me as long as he can get away with it so easily.

He's playing a (mind) game, as if, "What's up with L. anyway?  No idea why she's acting this way.  I'm just trying to be friendly.  I smile and say 'hello' (O.K, for the 40th time) to L, what's wrong with that?  I get along with everybody here.  L. really must have a loose screw somewhere, ha-ha-ha."

(O.K., I admit I've somehow gotten the talent for attracting all the wackos).

Sad to say, bullying in various forms occurs at all levels in our society.  And sometimes lives are lost, people are broken as the victims' complaints are often not taken seriously, ignored or even derided, their suffering not believed, all while the bullies get their way.

Psychological bullying of this kind involves being able to instill terror into the victim that no one else will detect, observe, or believe because the bully will be able to find a moment alone, even if it's a few seconds, with the victim.  The leer of cruelty, the savage God will then appear like the moon from behind the clouds and then pass away.  The bully will make others skeptical of the victim's "version" of the "facts," his "sanity."  And others, well-meaning, will assure the victim that the bully harbors no ill will and that the victim is "mistaken," that it was really "just miscommunication."  Maybe, after all, the victim was "imagining" those "malicious looks."  Or "Isn't s/he being a bit paranoid?  The guy gets along well with other people, after all."

The bully knows the victim's "secret" very well, and uses that knowledge to exact and extract psychological pleasure.

I do trust my gut instincts on this one.

The problem is that, unless the victim is actually psychotic him- or herself, human beings possess "gut instincts" about what is safe and when there is a danger.  Of course, an association might trigger the victim's inner-wired sense of self-survival--as in the case of a rape victim who might after the incident associate all men with potential (rapists).

I don't think this is all the case the case.  Nature provided the human species also with what is known in the jargon today the faculty of "cognitive reasoning," as a corrective and as a balance to the associational triggers developed in the primitive centers of the brain.

The disbelief of others undermines the victim, who is often advised to see a psychologist, etc., which is not a bad idea in itself.  The problem with this approach is that we're talking about "a relationship" between two parties, two "strangers" who, oddly enough, "know each other" in that familiar/unfamiliar way that predators/victims do..  The bully meanwhile will revert, at times on- and off-again to his previous behavior towards the victim, almost a way of "flashing himself" in front of the distressed, if not hysterical, victim.

Anyway, I do hope you had a chance to talk to him and persuade him to respect my boundaries since I have not been successful in that regard.

I am not sure what constitutes the legal definition of "malicious harassment" is.  Nor am I sure of whether this man has a past history of similar behavior or what his psychological profile is.  But I am concerned.

In any case, if something should happen to me as a result of my attempts to get him off my back once and for all, I would hold the YMCA responsible.

Sincerely yours,

L.

Member of the downtown Seattle YMCA for the past 14 years."

The story had to be told.

To be liked by those whose opinions counted in a very real, practical sense, or to have my own self-respect was a difficult choice that I had to make.   Going along in agreement with things, just because supposedly "everyone else" had joined the bandwagon, was not something I could do without injury to my sense of autonomy and decency.