• I was a bully for myself. I bullied myself into believing I was not good enough. I was dirty. I was scarred. I was ugly. I was all these things. So I self-bullied myself into believing all the things that the emotions of discomfort and especially shame brought up.
• Look at you. Look at how you look. You can't run away from this face. So I dealt with that personally, and through my self-healing, I learned to unravel that. But on top of that, I was bullied in school as well because I had a lot of scars from being physically abused. I have hyperpigmentation.
• The scars do not heal quickly at all. It takes decades. So I had a lot of scars littered on my legs, and people would point.

My Mother and Bullying

• My mother would say to me, she'd hold my hands, her hands in my, her hands around my face. And she said, nobody's better than you. Don't listen to them. She said all the positive things, and that was so confusing to me, Bruce, because I was thinking, but you gave me these scars.
• But within her somewhere inside of her, she had the capacity and maybe the compassion, the awareness, to see I was doing something wrong. I don't know how to fix it. So there are some things in my life I have to clean up so that I don't give this inheritance to my child.
• So I'm grateful that she did that because that instilled a little window of, oh, I'm okay, I'm not ugly. I'm just different. And I have to figure out how to use a certain cream, or she'd help me buy something to deal with it. But bullying is very harmful because it tempts you to believe that everything they say, you are.
• And you don't have anywhere else to go but that state of being. So it's very difficult to get through that. For some people, it's surrounding themselves with maybe their animals, their plants, or a community of other people. Or finding a coach, finding a therapist, and just finding some creative resource. Sometimes music, laughter, or painting that feeds another emotion of joy, of hope.