The Wounds of a City

I grew up in a city that knew how to wound.
In the alleys where I played, cruelty was not an exception but a language.

Children laughed at me not only for who I was, but for who my father was.
“Your father is crazy,” they would say.
“Your father is fat, strange, different.”

And those words cut deeper than any stone or fist.
Because when the world mocks your father, it is mocking the blood in your veins.

A Father Misunderstood

My father was a doctor.
A man who healed many of those very same families, often without asking for money.

He mended their wounds, delivered their children, comforted their sick.
He should have been treated with respect.

But the world rarely rewards kindness.
Instead, it twisted his difference into an insult,
and passed that cruelty onto me.

The Weight of Shame

To be bullied by strangers is one thing.
To be bullied for the man who raised you—it is another.

Their laughter followed me like shadows,
carving shame into my young skin.

And yet, in that shame, I began to ask questions no child should have to ask:

• Why do humans reveal their ugliness so early?

• Who teaches children to be cruel?

• Where does innocence go when it dies so quickly?

• Why do children bare their claws and sharpen their tongues before they even understand the cost of pain?

Becoming the Mirror

At first, I fought back the only way I knew.
For every insult, I learned to throw one back.
For every tear, I learned to make another cry.

Bullying turned me, for a time, into a mirror of my tormentors.
But in that dark mirror, I discovered something more than cruelty:
I discovered reflection.

The cruelty they gave me became the reason I plunged deeper into the human soul.

The Forgotten Names

History is filled with names of the once-bullied who became extraordinary.

• Abraham Lincoln, mocked for his appearance and awkwardness, grew to lead a nation.

• Thomas Edison, dismissed as “slow,” gave the world light.

• Albert Einstein, ridiculed as a child for being different, rewrote the laws of the universe.

And in our own time, countless voices—artists, scientists, leaders—were once small children laughed at by crowds that history has already forgotten.

That is the truth about bullies: time erases them.
Their names rot in the gutters of memory.
Their laughter fades, their cruelty vanishes like smoke.

But the scar they leave becomes something else—
it becomes strength, insight, empathy.

They thought they were breaking me.
In truth, they were shaping me.

The Painting

This painting is my childhood:

• The strong father at my side, misunderstood, mocked.

• The child—me—crying under the weight of shame that was never mine to carry.

• Behind us, the laughter of the cruel echoes—hollow, empty, forgotten.

It is the sound of those the world will forget.

To the Bullied, and to the Bullies

To those who were bullied: you are not broken.
You were chosen to see deeper, to feel sharper, to understand humanity more than the shallow ones who laughed at you.

Their cruelty gave you the eyes to see truth, and the heart to endure it.

And to the bullies—time has already written your ending.
History does not remember your names.

It remembers ours.