Unbreakable Movement
Posted: 2/1/2019
When she was 15, Sarah Ball was cyberbullied by several close friends. This experience caused a lot of emotional pain, but Sarah turned her pain into passion for helping others. She now travels the country speaking to groups of students, parents, and teachers about bullying and how to prevent it. She wants to make sure every student knows they are not alone and that they are strong.
Sarah writes:
I guess once you’ve felt all the pain and torment you don’t want anyone else to feel that way, not even those who put you through all of it. It’s a bitter loneliness, that slowly sprawls through your body into an immense depression. It took a lot of me to crawl out of it, but it took almost nothing to know that I had to do something to help others. Bullying isn’t just words on a page, it’s not just a voice being used to harm someone, it’s a misfortunate and devastating event someone goes through. The world can believe that people “fall in love” online, people make a fortune creating new social sites to “find your mate”. However when the opposite happens online, when people show hate online to someone, and that person becomes enormously affected by it, the mass don’t understand.
Imagine losing someone you truly love, and never being able to feel them close to you. Bullying is extremely similar, except you lose a piece of yourself that you can never get back. However, getting myself back together seemed impossible until the idea of helping others came to mind. Unbreakable was built after I was cyberbullied when I was in high school by those closest to me. My life was in complete disarray. I never thought Unbreakable would help me, I was too individually weak to see that. I was on “versus sites” that were created by peers, some my childhood friends created, begging for people to attack me even saying “no light punches”. There was so many of these versus sites in my county, literally hundreds of my peers were on there, all with hate and ridicule being poured out on them. I took copies of these sites and sent them to anyone who would listen to show what peers in my county were doing online. It worked, my voice although weak to me was strong in the county. And Unbreakable grew, branched out.
I wanted to protect those without a voice, show them they have a way out. I love to see the hope in a person’s eye when you tell them they are never alone, strengthening someone’s voice when they felt they couldn’t speak. It’s almost just that simple. Giving words of kindness, spreading awareness, and sharing hope with others really make all the difference. We as humans hate the feeling of being alone, so all we have to do is be there for one another! Loneliness and rejection are the worst feelings someone can go through, and in order to wipe out those feelings we have to show support to one another. Showing public support to victims of bullying is a huge way to let bullies know that victims do not stand alone.
