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Adding my voice
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Like so many of all of us, I was bullied in school. My stories are neither the most horrific nor the mildest I've heard; that hardly matters. What matters is that it hurt then, and the memory of it, while blessedly faded in the intervening twenty years, can still make me hurt. And I know I'm not the only one.
If we're lucky, and survive it, sometimes we can put the memories to use. That Hogwarts Express scene in my current story? Taken from memory. And I dragged my feet about writing it, I can tell you, because revisiting those memories wasn't fun at all.
And a friend said the description of it made her teeth hurt.
You know what? That's good. If I can make someone else understand what it was like, from my writing, maybe I can make more than one person understand. Maybe I can even make someone who's never been bullied understand, and think twice before they do it to someone else.
If I ever felt a need to point to a redeeming purpose for my fanfiction hobby, that'd be it. I don't, usually -- it's a hobby. I do it because it's fun.
Which is why I'm so aggravated at the thought of things like Fandom Bitch and the Hate Meme. For someone with memories like mine -- and I suspect that a LOT of people out there have them -- that isn't fun at all.
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{{{{Rikibeth}}}}
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A good point. I imagine that on the whole, geeks have more compassion when grown than folks who missed more of the bullying... But some looked into the abyss and became it. With anonymity and self-righteousness on their side, they hack away at other's reputations in public.
A lot of the time people respond to admissions of wounds that can't be sewn up with "Just get over it" or "Let it go." I've recently started to wonder if those hurts aren't in fact more worthy of compassion, since our healing arts are so much less able to handle them.