So So Sad

Amanda Todd killed herself yesterday. She was fifteen years old. She was ridiculed, bullied and beaten because she made a mistake. She killed herself because of the social consequences of that mistake. She was FIFTEEN. My god, the mistakes I made at fifteen years of age. Were they ever enough to cause me lasting psychological damage? No. But then again, they weren't haunting me in a teen's world of online living and expected (and apparently accepted) online retribution.

Some of us think, her poor family! Some of think, blast her family! Some of think, move on. Some of us think, how would we move on were this our child?

I don't know why this girl has affected me so, she just has. At fifteen, I was exploring my boundaries. I was writing and writing and writing in the hopes, that so many of us writers can say we had at that age, that my writings would free me from the adolescent angst I felt at every turn.

I was breaking curfew, and often. I was making new friends, and removing myself from the ones I had that I no longer wished to have. And I broke those ties with civility. As they did with me. And even the jerks respected that. There was no face book bashing back then to fear. There was no humiliating photo of myself cast about the online world for everyone to laugh at.

Teen aged angst is bad enough, without feeling bombarded by your silly mistakes over and over again.

Amanda Todd, however, was bombarded by her mistake, over and over again, by kids who remain nameless and faceless to the rest of us now. Lucky for them. ALL OF YOU, YOU CHILDREN....SHOULD FEEL GUILT and REMORSE and horrible, horrible SHAME for allowing yourselves to become a part of the collective group who forced this girl to kill herself. You girls, who beat her up, you girls who watched, you, the nameless boy who threatened to expose and then did....you should ALL consider yourselves lucky. Lucky that when you were making your own silly, adolescent mistakes, no one took a photo, and no one advertised that photo, and no one sent you spiralling downward on a path of self-destruction and humiliating self loathing until you saw death as the only way out.

You are children, still, like she was a child, but you are on the cusp of becoming adults. Let your horrific deeds not be in vain but become a part of what makes you now thoughtful, warm people for the rest of your lives

http://www.torontosun.com/2012/10/11/vancouver-area-teen-kills-herself-after-posting-youtube-video-about-her-being-bullied