Bullying victim frees herself
The title of a book at the library caught Ashleigh Harris's eye: Please Stop Laughing At Me*.
She had said those very words many, many times growing up. Still, she had no idea how closely the best seller would mirror her experiences growing up in Hamilton, where classmates hounded her from school to school, humiliating her to the point where she started cutting and burning herself.
Reading that book last summer would be the first step in a journey that yesterday saw Harris stand up and tell more than 1,000 people the story she had never shared, not even with her mother generating tears and applause and an embrace from the author who had helped her break the silence. Harris told the crowd about being hated, sabotaged by peers and enduring threats to stop her from telling anyone what she was going through.
In her book, author Jodee Blanco describes her own experiences as the target of school bullies who isolated, taunted and physically attacked her. The abuse set off a cascade of effects that remain with her 30 years later, despite her success as a Hollywood publicist, author and child advocate who has spoken to some 700,000 people since her first book came out in 2003.
Harris, 20, was stunned by the book's power and credits it with helping her process what had happened in her own life. She asked Marco Felvus, one of her professors in the child and youth worker program at Mohawk College, to read the book and think about putting it on the reading list.
He was so impressed that he applied for a special citizenship grant from the college and brought the author to Mohawk from Chicago yesterday. There, Blanco held the rapt attention of the crowd that filled the seats and aisles of the McIntyre Theatre speaking for most of two hours without a microphone.
The audience included students from the college's school of human services, supervisors from community agencies serving children, and members of the public. Many clutched copies of Blanco's book and some cried openly during the presentation. The emotional impact of the author's remarks had barely faded when Felvus called Harris to the stage to thank the author.
In a voice both nervous and powerful, the student revealed the depth of her own torment at the hands of her peers, who had told her everyone hated her, threatened to tape her mouth shut, sabotaged her crutches when she had a broken ankle and left rotting meat in her desk to emphasize their threat that she was "dead meat" if she ever told anyone. She told of deliberately acting up in class, hoping to be kept in at recess so she would be safe. Later, she said, she turned to cutting and burning herself.
These were facts she had never even shared with her mother, and from the podium Harris could hear her weeping in the balcony. Though she had planned to reveal her experiences from the stage, the emotion surprised even Harris herself as she was speaking. "I was OK at first, and then I kind of realized how completely personal it all was," she said later. "I wasn't expecting this many people to show up today. I was definitely nervous, but I felt it was important that I finish."
Her remarks prompted a second ovation from the audience, and a bear hug from the author who returned to the stage to embrace her a lifetime moment that Harris compared to coming face-to-face with a rock star.
Wade Hemsworth
24 March 2009
http://www.thespec.com/News/Local/article/535760
Please Stop Laughing At Me by Jodee Blanco is in our bookstore:
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