Heartbreaking: Jamey Rodemeyer, Bullied to Death

I first heard about Jamey taking his own life via Twitter. I didn’t know him, but neither did a lot of other people. Quickly after the news came out, a RIPJamey topic was created and hundreds of tweets went to it.

It was absolutely amazing to see how many people came together for someone they didn’t even know, on a social networking site! It was heartbreaking that it had to be for this reason, though. Instead of all of us coming together to say ‘hello’, we were saying ‘goodbye’.

Jamey was a big Lady Gaga fan. In his last tweet, he said “bye mother monster, thank you for all you have done, paws up forever”.

Truth be said, he’s been trying to talk to someone for a while. “I always say how bullied I am, but no one listens,” he wrote on September 9th.

Although he was seeing a therapist, sometimes people just need a friend to talk to. Even if it’s over the internet. For many, it feels safer, it makes it easier for people to open themselves up and talk about what they’re going through.

Jamey was a freshman in high-school. He has been questioning his sexuality for about a year, but he seemed to be getting better at coping with bullying. In fact, in May, he had posted a video on YouTube for the It Gets Better Project, encourraging young people to stay strong and be themselves, because it does get better as you grow older. In his video, he also shared his experiences with being bullied: “And they’d taunt me in the hallways and I felt like I could never escape it, and I made a Formspring, which I shouldn’t have done, and people would just constantly send me hate, telling me, ‘Gay people go to hell’.”

For him to get to the point of taking his own life, I can only IMAGINE what he must have been going through.

Bullying is wrong. And I know you may have already heard this a million times before, but I feel like I have to say it myself to state my point.

For those of you who have been bullied before, you KNOW what it feels like. You know how much words can attack a person. And for those of you who played the bully role at some point, THIS is how far the consequences can go.

People die because of it. Actually, KIDS die because of it. And I don’t see how this is a tolerable issue. And I don’t see how some people can say that “bullying is natural” in any way. Being mean is not a condition in life. You can just as well NOT be a b*tch.