Many of us were patient zero for a child, and the pattern was a friendship. That child was probably someone else's patient zero, and you ended up being their way out.
Taylor Swift recently used the phrase in a song about an ex. She tells his new girlfriend that she was the first case, that she knows the symptoms because she had them. Most people hear it as a song about a man.
Almost all of us have been someone's first case.
Often the first person who did it to you wasn't a partner. It was a friend, and you were six.
It starts when you get chosen. Out of the whole class, this person picks you for some reason. For a while it's the best thing that has happened to you, and you feel special. You introduce them to your friends, and little by little those friends start leaving you out. Your circle gets smaller. They tell you others talk about you behind your back. They act hurt if you go to a birthday party they weren't invited to. They start criticizing the way you are, the same things everyone else likes about you, so that you'll change. One by one the others stop inviting you. Now there's only them.
Then the rules change without warning. Some days they're sweet to you. Some days they ignore you in front of everyone, and you spend the afternoon trying to figure out what you did. You learn to read their face. You learn to apologize first. You try to make other friends and it doesn't stick, because by then everyone assumes you belong to them, and because leaving means having no one at recess. At seven, that's your whole world. They isolated you and started to shine, keeping you small and elbowing you aside. You feel trapped, with nowhere to run.
So you cry where no one can see. In the bathroom. In bed with the lights off. You don't tell anyone because you can't explain it. Nobody hit you. Nothing happened that you could point to. You don't have words yet for what you're feeling, let alone for what's being done to you. A child doesn't know how to hold that. They just carry it.
When adults noticed, they called it bullying, a phase, or kids being kids. Between adults, cutting someone off from their friends and making them depend only on you has a name. It's psychological abuse. Between children, it gets a shrug and the advice to go play with someone else. As if you hadn't tried.
That person grew up too. If you were lucky, you got out. But the behavior didn't stay in the classroom. It went with them to new friends, roommates, coworkers, the people they date.
You probably never got an apology. What's left is trauma, and the longer you were in it, the further it reaches. A lot of people end up in therapy just to get on with their lives and stop repeating the same cycle everywhere.
Why do we still call something this serious bullying? And why does no one explain to kids, early on, what this looks like when it's happening to them?
