16

DEAR BULLYING

I wish I could remember our first altercation. However, that would be impossible because I was still in my mother’s stomach. Before I even took my first breath. My mother’s due date was Halloween. People called me the spawn of Satan and questioned whether I would be born with 666 on the back of my head. I was labeled “Rosemary’s Baby” before I was even shat out. Being bullied was just part of my life.

I do, however, remember the first time I was violently bullied. I was maybe five years old, in the park, playing with my brother, on a roundabout. My hair was still golden blond then, and Jack and I were dressed in matching Ghostbusters costumes. As the other kids and I tried to get the roundabout to go as fast as it could, a boy standing on the sidelines said, “Is your dad Ozzy Osbourne?” I said yes, smiling with pride. I swung past him again and he told me, “Well, my dad’s Michael Jackson.” I was not sure if he was telling the truth or being a little twat, but it was confirmed that he was a twat as my face met his fist and he punched me in my right eye. I had to go to school with a black eye for what seemed like an eternity.

To be called a bully in today’s society is a very big deal. The term is often greatly misused to describe anyone doing something that someone else doesn’t like. The first time I was ever called a bully, it was in elementary school. It was because I’d told a girl in my class, Jenna, that she had a mustache when she was being mean to Sammy, for no reason other than the fact that Sammy was better at ballet than she was. Of course, she told on me and I got in so much trouble that I got toast. “Toast” was a way worse punishment than detention, because it meant you had to be at school at six A.M. to make toast for all the boarders. It punished the parents as well as the student, but Mum didn’t give a fuck and got up and drove me to toast without saying a word, because she knew I wasn’t a bully. I knew I wasn’t a bully; I just wasn’t going to sit there and watch Jenna, who, as it turns out, was a bully, destroy my best friend in front of the entire class.

If you are outspoken about your opinions, call people out, or stand up for yourself or someone else, you are not a bully. Bullying is when you choose to hurt someone, and your reasons have nothing to do with them and everything to do with you. Bullying is when someone makes it their mission to take their misery out on you so that they can make themselves feel better about their own shitty life.

•   •   •

The true definition of being victimized by a bully is when a person has done nothing to deserve it and the attackers are just showing off to make themselves feel better about their own inadequacies. It is jealousy and self-loathing in its most hateful form. Having spent so many years hating myself, I’m highly attuned to that quality in others. That’s what I see when I look at bullies. I can see in their eyes that they didn’t even really want to do what they did, but they had to, because their ego is in control. Ego can be both a beautiful and disgusting thing. You have to have a healthy ego to survive in this world, but the minute you give your ego too much power, you enter into evil, dangerous territory. Ego is a fragile little thing that lives inside you. It loves to be coddled, but if you’ve got a fragile one that’s easily offended, then watch the fuck out, because a hurt ego will try to mend itself by hurting someone else.

I’ve been bullied at every stage of my life. I’m not trying to make this a Kelly O pity party—I just want to be clear that being famous or being in the public eye doesn’t protect you from bullying. In my case, it actually invites it.

I had a grown man throw a bottle at me when I was just a teenager, and I’ve had girls bump into me, try to pull my hair out, or even jump me in clubs, all in an effort to impress their friends with how unimpressed they were with someone famous. One particular time, when I was about sixteen, I was bullied in a way that could not have been more textbook.

I was at Barfly in Camden, and Fleur and I had gone downstairs to use the toilet. There were two single stalls, and we were both having a wee when a group of girls walked in. They were talking a lot of shit on someone . . . then I realized that someone was me. “Isn’t it a shame that Kelly Osbourne is so fat and ugly when her mum’s so gorgeous?” one of them said. “If I were Sharon, I would have prayed for Kelly to be stillborn.” It was really hard-core.

Fleur and I unlocked our doors and stepped out of the stalls at the same time.

“Isn’t it funny, Kelly,” Fleur said, looking at me, “that people don’t think you have ears?”

“I know, Fleur,” I said. “It is funny, isn’t it?”

Then we washed our hands—good hygiene even with a looming pack of bitches!—and left. From the looks on the girls’ faces, I could tell they were shitting themselves. Since there were only two of them, I didn’t really think anything of it, and by then I had learned that this kind of pettiness comes with the territory of being an Osbourne (which I wouldn’t trade for the fucking world).

TRANSLATION

Black and cider

Any alcoholic cider mixed with Ribena, a blackcurrant drink

As the night went on, the bitchy bathroom girls had more and more friends join them, and it was a gang forming across the pub. I didn’t even notice it until I went to the bar to get a black and cider** and saw one of the girls from the bathroom staring me down. When our eyes met, she mouthed, “I’ll get you. What the fuck do you think you’re doing?” Still, I hadn’t done anything at this point aside from let them know that I wasn’t fucking deaf. I got my drink and went back to sit with my friends.

About an hour goes by, and one of my friends went to buy cigarettes from the machine right by the door. This was when you could still smoke in bars, and buying cigarettes was as easy as buying candy. I trailed behind her, not paying attention to anything other than what was right in front of me, because I was absorbed in playing Snake on my mobile phone. I was working on my highest score ever.

TRANSLATION

A proper lass

A girl who’s a bit drunk and who will fuck you up

Old Bill

The police

The girl in the bathroom was almost a foot taller than I was—she was a proper lass**—so with my face down, I didn’t even see her standing there until my shoulder hit hers. I looked up and knew instantly.

Oh God, here we go.

The girl reached out and wrapped her hands around my hair. I had these long extensions in at the time and thought, Go ahead and pull my hair, bitch. It’s glued in, it will fall right out.

My second thought was, Fuck it, and I punched her in the face.

The Bathroom Bitch Gang had now grown from two to six, and they all jumped in. I looked over to my right and saw that one of them was going for Sammy, who is the gentlest, kindest person you will ever meet and who had never been in a fight in her life. (For God’s sake, she went on to become a nurse and wipes the assholes of senior citizens for a living, because all she wants to do is help people.) Somehow, I managed to jump up and push myself off the wall to get around the girl I’d hit, and karate kick one of the other girls off Sammy.

In the meantime, three of the Bathroom Bitch Gang were on Fleur, who was defending herself to the best of her ability, so I jumped in to make it more of an even fight. That was when Old Bill** drove by, saw a bunch of girls fighting outside the pub, stopped, and put me in handcuffs.

The policeman who had stopped was a member of the K9 unit, who drove BMWs with sunroofs for the dogs. He’d just gotten off duty and was on his way home when he witnessed our scuffle, so fortunately for me, his sunroof was still open on the top of the car he’d just left me in the back of. I’m double-jointed everywhere, so it took minimal effort to slide my arms out from behind my back and under my feet, to allow me to climb out of the top of the car and run back into the club.

Inside, the girl who’d started everything was talking to the policeman and playing the victim.

“This is fucked up!” I told him. “She and her friends jumped me. I had six girls on me at once!”

The bouncers, who had seen everything, came to back me up.

The policeman listened for a few minutes. Clearly, he was wishing he’d never stopped and had just kept on driving. He took off my handcuffs and said, “Okay, I’m going to turn my back,” implying that if he didn’t see anything, he couldn’t do anything, and then turned around and walked out the door. The bouncer looked at me and said, “Go on,” then held the girl back and let me knock her one more time.

I could have been a UFC fighter, because when someone comes at me, all of a sudden I go mentally blank and feel no pain. As it turns out, my extensions had not just “slipped right out.” When Sammy, Fleur, and I left the Barfly, I realized the girl had ripped three 50p-size** chunks of hair out of my head, and that tickly feeling down the back of my neck was actually blood running out of my scalp and trickling down to soak my shirt.

TRANSLATION

50p-size

A little bigger than a quarter

Violence is a disgusting thing, and I do not condone it. I have never started a fight in my life, but I will stand up for myself and the people I love. That’s how I was raised. England is a scrappy culture, and you have to prove yourself in certain situations. You have to walk down the street like you’re not better than anyone else, but also like you’re not one to be fucked with. In certain parts of London, they can smell weakness. All of a sudden, you will start to see them circling. Trust me when I say that you should be scared of British women. Especially the Londoners. They don’t give a shit and they will knock you the fuck out.

Not all bullying is the physical kind, though, and at times, bullying with words or by exclusion can be even more hurtful than when someone whacks you upside the head. Especially when you’re an adult. Yes, adults get bullied, too, which is unfathomable but true.

Recently, I went through something where there was a growing divide between me and a group of girls I’d always been friends with in London. I’d known that it was happening, but what really drove it home was the realization that my so-called friends were inviting me along only to the events that they couldn’t get into on their own. While there, they would also make a point of bragging about all the events they went to together that I wasn’t invited to. After turning down a job that would have made me hundreds of thousands of dollars so that I could fly from Los Angeles to London for the wedding of one of my closest friends, I arrived for the ceremony to find out not only that I had not been invited to the hen night**—even though all the other bridesmaids, who I had introduced to the bride, were there and knew I was in town—but also that I was the only one who was staying on my own and not in the prearranged hotel with the rest of “the group.”

TRANSLATION

Hen night

Bachelorette party

If someone doesn’t like me, I don’t care. Just tell me, or don’t invite me, rather than putting me in a situation where I’m going to be ignored. What are we, twelve years old? What is the point? The whole time, I was sitting there thinking, Did I do something? Maybe it was something I said . . . , when in reality, no, it was neither. It can start to make you desperate, and you’ll overcompensate to try to fit in.

In this last situation, everyone was drinking red wine, because it was all there was. Red wine doesn’t agree with me and almost always makes me sick, but this night, I thought maybe if I just gave it a try and drank one glass, I’d loosen up and stop feeling so self-conscious. Maybe it’s not them, maybe it’s me. So I drank a glass, they still ignored me, and I threw up. Bullying by exclusion is a recipe for insanity. It truly makes you doubt yourself and leaves you wondering, Is it me? The answer to that question is almost always no, it is not you.

As adults, the workplace becomes our high school. We are forced to spend time with the same people over and over again, regardless of whether we like them. That new girl, the one who was hired for the promotion you didn’t get? Well, leaving her sitting at her desk alone eating a sad desk salad while the rest of you go out for lunch is bullying by exclusion. Consistently talking over someone in meetings, stealing their ideas, and trying to make them look bad in front of your colleagues or boss is bullying. So is trying to make sure the people who work for you feel worthless so they’ll never feel confident enough to ask for what they deserve or get a job somewhere that doesn’t treat them like shit.

The same goes for social media. People like to think that writing mean comments on a celebrity’s Instagram isn’t bullying, but no—it’s still bullying! People don’t understand the power of social media and the fires they fuel with their hateful comments. What we say and do online has consequences in real life.

Have you read the news lately? There have been an astonishing number of reports from all over the world about people who commit suicide after being bullied on social media. That does not even take into consideration the situations that go unreported or in which no one was brave enough to step forward and tell the truth.

Bullying always comes back to how the bullies feels about themselves. If you’re happy with your life, you won’t ever feel the need to go out of your way to try to make someone else feel shitty about theirs.

If you are the victim of bullying, you just have to keep moving forward, and you’ll see that the biggest people in your pond are really just plankton in the oceanic scheme of things. It is a cliché, but a true cliché. The nerd who got picked on for four years in high school could easily be the next Mark Zuckerberg of the world. And the pretty cheerleader everyone put on a pedestal could end up alone, without any love or magic in her life, filled with regret as she looks back and realizes she should have been nicer. Once you learn what really matters, nine times out of ten it is too late.

Something that people always told me, which I really only began to understand recently, is that things really do get better. I say better, not easier, because life only gets harder. It’s just that you learn to live life to the fullest in spite of this. Bullies will never go away—it’s just that we have built the skills and have the power to become more immune to them. If you build your life on positive things, like hard work, love, and trying to be a better person, you can only grow. If you build your life on tearing other people down, you’re only going to shrink. I know what I want. Which one do you want?

Love,

Kelly O