I watched the newscaster bullying viral video the other day. Yes, it was profound and, with my daughter watching it over my shoulder, it opened up a great opportunity for conversation for us.

I have made the claim of being bully-ed before. I was harassed at work and eventually took the issue to human resources. I attempted to call my co-workers out about it, but was unable to resolve the work place issues on my own and eventually left the company.

But, I have also been called a bully before.

I shared a post about an altercation with a neighbor. My neighbor didn’t read my blog, I never named this person in the blog, and had a choice of many neighbors that this could have been about.  The altercation was on my feelings about something my neighbor said to us, it wasn’t actually about my neighbor.

At least, that was what it was intended to be about.

But here’s the thing. Almost a week after the post went up to my rarely read blog site, I was accosted on the playground by someone who was an acquaintance, not a close friend.   She immediately launched herself on me and accused me of being a cyber bully to my neighbor (she assumed she knew who it was as she knew the hood I lived in)

The next day (co-coincidentally, even tho the post had been up for over a week)  I was hit with multiple streams of comments all claiming the same thing, that I was a cyber-bully. Then I had my neighbor, yes, the one who never read the blog and didn’t even know it existed,  “blank” me the next time I saw her.

It crushed me.

To have someone misread a post was devastating. And then to have her make it such an issue that it created  mounds of hateful spam that called me out as a “cyber-bully”, well, that ground my soul to bits.  In the defense of one “innocent” these VOICE OF MANY, took down another one… maybe not innocent to them, but what I did was not meant to be hateful or hurtful.

To me the term bully is being overused.  Much as when you call someone out as “selfish” when they won’t think of you for a moment… how bass-akwards is that? Aren’t you being selfish just by forcing them to focus their attention on YOU?

I agree bullying is an issue, and I applaud this lovely lady for standing up for herself, but my heart does also go out to the man who wrote that letter. Maybe he really did think it was in good taste? Maybe the backlash on this “bully” has turned into a form of bullying itself.  Maybe this “voice of many” has turned itself into something that is no longer protecting, but only attacking?

So, in the end, we again learn to be careful about our communication, all of it, because in the efforts of defending ourselves, we can create chaos for another.