STEVEN LEVITAN
None of us grew up feeling like winners. So thank you to the bullies, to the popular kids, to the gym teachers who taunted us, who rejected us and who made fun of the way we ran. Without you we never would have gone into comedy. Steven Levitan, co-creator/Exec. Producer of ABC’s Modern Family receiving an Emmy Award
ANSEL ELGORT
“I went through a lot of bullying in middle school and it made me so upset all the time. I hated my life. I hated everything. I live in New York City in a high building with a little terrace. I’d go on the terrace and I’d look off the terrace and I literally just thought about jumping off because I hated living so much. It does make it so hard when your that age and everyone is being mean to you at school and you have to go to school every day and deal with people being mean to you. You feel like what you have to say isn’t important and that you’re not important. The way that I coped with it was making another group of friends outside of that group of people who were mean to me so that I had some sort of support system. Then I focused all my energy on acting and dancing and singing and music so that I felt like I had a purpose that sort of took me out of it and made me forget about it a little bit and it made it a lot better.” BystanderRevolution.org
DEMI LOVATO
“At 12 years old, I was bullied in school. Girls were calling me fat, so I thought,’That’s the reason I don’t have any friends.’ So I stopped eating. I became very weight-conscious, and I lost 30 lbs. I went down to 95 lbs. I’ve battled depression from a young age. I never found out until I went into treatment that I am bipolar [a disorder that causes dramatic and sometimes violent mood swings.] At first I was like, ‘What does that even mean?’ But looking back, it makes sense. There were times when I was so manic I was writing seven songs in one night…that’s why I wasn’t happy when everything in my life was great. I’m being treated for it with medication and therapy.” People Magazine
ANNE HATHAWAY
told a sympathetic Ellen DeGeneres that she couldn’t put the words she’d read out of her mind when she was being cyberbullied.
“And then I realized why I couldn’t was I hadn’t learned to love myself yet. I hadn’t gotten there. And if you don’t love yourself when someone else says horrible things to you, part of you is always going to believe them. So, then I was like, okay, I don’t want to believe these people. I don’t want to agree with them on any level. I want to figure out who I am. I want to learn who I am. I don’t want to feel like I’m fragile every time I leave the house because I’m so dependent on what other people think about me. ‘I just took a step back, and as Matthew McConaughey, my co-star in Interstellar, would say, “I just kept living.” And, it’s been a really cool journey. ‘I feel like I arrived in a place where maybe not every minute of every day, but way more than I used to, I have a tremendous amount of love and compassion for everyone else. ‘And best of all I have it for myself, which I never enjoyed before.” The Ellen DeGeneres Show
BLAKE SHELTON
“Don’t you just love bullies on line? Little chickens that have their laptops at home and they hide behind. It used to make me so mad. Now I know they’re the ones that we should feel sorry for.” The Voice
MARK RUFFALO
“When I was in high school I had cystic acne and was a little overweight.
People made fun of my last name all the time: Buffalo Breath, Buffalo Fart, Buffalo Lips. It was an ongoing buffalo joke.”
TAYE DIGGS – was called names?
“There was an incident where I was playing softball in gym class, and I went up to bat and the pitcher was a more popular kid in school. As he was pitching, he screamed out to the rest of the players on the field, “Nerd!” three times in a row, as loud as he could.” Jane
TINA FEY
“I was a mean girl. I had a gift for coming up with the meanest possible thing to say in any situation. Well, at my high school — a huge public school in a suburb of Philadelphia — there were a few girls who were kind of “famous.” Everyone knew who they were dating and what parties they went to. They weren’t the prettiest girls or the ones with money. They were just randomly anointed. I was an honor student, and I was in a ton of activities — the newspaper, drama club, the tennis team … My friends and I didn’t really date or go to cool parties, so we made jokes about those who did. To be honest, we felt kind of rejected, and when you don’t feel confident about yourself, you may look for flaws in somebody else to make you feel better. Looking back, I can see the mean-girl thing for what it is: a waste of energy. But that’s not much comfort if you’re the target. The hardest thing is to free yourself from caring what someone says about you. But it brings big freedom if you do it.”