CYBERBULLYING (Non-Fiction Post)

I am a victim of cyberbullying.

So are a lot of other kids my age, older, and younger.
It hurts, a lot. It hurts to log onto your page on an anonymous forum website after a relatively good day and see pure hate pouring out from your screen. It hurts when people tell you to kill yourself, or when people accuse you of something you did or didn't do. It hurts when people hurt the ones you love in order to hurt you.
You wonder why. Who posted this? What did you do to deserve this? Why do they hate you so much? Are they jealous for some reason? Angry over a long-held grudge? Or is it really just actual hate?
Whatever it is, it really, really hurts.
It hurt so much, I had to deactivate my account on this website for the fourth time.
The first time was because of a creepy Internet stalker. The second was because my friends were getting bullied, and I didn't want to be a victim next. The third was because my friends started to use the site to start fights. I guess I'm stupid for reactivating it every time. I'm not sure why I keep doing it.
This time I deactivated because I got over fifteen extreme hate messages in my inbox. Of course I've gotten in disgruntled arguments with friends online before, but nothing as extreme and graphic as the messages I got today. I was shocked, and so incredibly hurt. At school, off the Internet, I have many wonderful friends who I get along with, and I am not bullied and I'm not a bully. So it came as a bitter surprise to me that someone could hate me so much for reasons that were all but credible.

I decided to do my monthly non fiction post on cyberbullying because I guess I just wanted to pour my heart out on my own personal relation and experience with this topic. I chose the article Students Warn Peers About Cyberbullying by Dawn Turner Trice. In the article, Trice explains how one student, Tiffany Witkowski, deactivated her Facebook account because she was getting messages like ones I was getting, but these messages were not anonymous and not as extreme. I identified with Tiffany because I felt the way she did- "I never felt physically threatened. But I felt emotionally threatened. I said, 'Why is this happening to me?' I needed emotional stability, so I just got rid of Facebook," she said.

Cyberbullying has been proved to lead to many suicides and cases of depression. I'm not going to let this get to me so much, so I'm going to try and not be a part of that statistic. Tiffany says that one of her friends was the victim of cyberbullying, which was so extreme that it caused her to have suicidal thoughts and that it changed her forever.

I'm not going to let this ruin the rest of my day, tomorrow, the rest of this year, or my life. Cyberbullying is wrong, and it's something that should never, ever be done.