I am 61 years old, and there are things I remember about high school with extraordinary clarity.

Not my timetable.

Not what I learned in algebra.

Not what I ate for lunch.

I remember fear.

I remember walking through Columbine High School in 1983 knowing there was a group of boys who had decided that being gay made me an acceptable target.

They were athletes—the kind of boys who seemed to occupy a particular place in the social hierarchy of an American high school at that time. They knew, or believed they knew, that I was gay. More importantly, they made sure other people knew it too.

My life was threatened repeatedly.

Humiliation became something I anticipated rather than something that surprised me.

And eventually the bullying did something far more powerful than frighten me.

It taught me to turn against myself.

When the Bully Moves Inside Your Head

I knew I was gay long before I understood what being gay would mean for my life.

But understanding yourself and accepting yourself are two very different things.

The messages surrounding homosexuality in the early 1980s were often anything but affirming. Gay people were frequently portrayed as immoral, sick, dangerous, ridiculous or somehow less worthy than everyone else.

And then AIDS arrived.

The first official reports of what would later become known as AIDS appeared in the United States in 1981, initially involving previously healthy gay men. By 1983, the epidemic was accelerating. Scientists still did not fully understand its cause, there was no effective treatment, and people were dying. Fear spread alongside the disease.

For a frightened gay teenager, those distinctions were not necessarily visible.

I wasn’t analysing epidemiology.

I wasn’t evaluating public-health policy.

I was trying to understand what my existence meant.

Imagine being a teenager who is already being told by other teenagers that there is something wrong with him and then watching the wider culture increasingly associate people like him with a terrifying and fatal disease.

That combination mattered.

The bullying outside me reinforced the shame already developing inside me.

Eventually, I didn’t need another person standing in a school corridor telling me there was something wrong with me.

I could do that myself.

And I became very good at it.

Shame Is Different From Fear

Fear says:

Something bad might happen to me.

Shame says:

Something is fundamentally wrong with me.

That distinction has become much clearer to me with age.

I could escape a particular hallway.

I could avoid certain people.

I could try to disappear into a crowd.

What I couldn’t escape was myself.

For years I carried enormous shame about being gay. There were periods of suicidal ideation—not necessarily because I wanted life itself to end, but because at times I desperately wanted the fear, shame and internal conflict to stop.

I wanted to escape the person I had been taught to believe I shouldn’t be.

That is one of the aspects of bullying that I think adults sometimes underestimate.

Bullying is not simply about what happens during the incident.

Its real power can lie in what the person being bullied eventually comes to believe about themselves.

The bully goes home.

The words sometimes stay.

This Isn’t About Blaming Teenage Boys

It would be easy, more than four decades later, to write an article condemning the boys who bullied me.

But I don’t particularly want to do that.

We were teenagers.

They were growing up inside the same culture I was.

That does not excuse threats, intimidation or cruelty. Accountability matters.

But explanation and excuse are not the same thing.

I have no idea what those boys were experiencing in their own homes or lives. I don’t know what they had been taught about homosexuality. I don’t know whether humiliating someone else made them feel powerful, protected their own place within their group, or simply reflected attitudes they had absorbed without ever questioning them.

I can describe what they did.

I cannot claim to know why they did it.

And at 61, the “why” interests me less than it once did.

What interests me now is what happened next.

Desperation Can Become a Powerful Motivator

There is an uncomfortable truth in my story.

Some of the things that hurt me most also helped create an enormous drive within me.

I wanted desperately to become more.

More successful.

More accomplished.

More respected.

More interesting.

More valuable.

Some of that ambition came from healthy curiosity and determination.

But I can now see that some of it came from something much darker:

If I could become enough, perhaps nobody could ever make me feel worthless again.

Achievement became a kind of armour.

If I could prove myself professionally, socially or intellectually, perhaps I could overturn the verdict I thought had been handed down to me as a teenager.

There was tremendous energy in that.

It pushed me forward.

It helped me survive.

It contributed to the person I became.

But survival strategies often come with a price.

Because when achievement is being used to compensate for shame, there is never a completely satisfying finish line.

There is always another accomplishment.

Another reinvention.

Another opportunity to demonstrate that you matter.

Eventually you have to ask a much more difficult question:

Who would I be if I no longer had anything to prove?

Two Things Can Be True

One of the lessons I have learned is that we don’t have to reduce painful experiences to simple conclusions.

I don’t have to say:

“Bullying made me stronger.”

That risks romanticising something that caused real harm.

Nor do I have to say:

“Bullying destroyed my life.”

That gives those experiences far more ownership over my story than they deserve.

Two things can be true.

I was damaged by what happened.

And I grew beyond it.

I experienced fear.

And I developed courage.

I learned self-hatred.

And eventually I began learning self-acceptance.

I became desperate to prove my worth.

And over time I began understanding that worth and achievement are not the same thing.

The person I became was shaped partly by adversity—but he was not created entirely by it.

That distinction matters to me.

What I Would Tell That Boy Today

If I could walk back into Columbine High School in 1983 and find that frightened teenager, I don’t think I would give him a motivational speech.

I wouldn’t tell him that everything happens for a reason.

I wouldn’t tell him that suffering was necessary to make him stronger.

And I certainly wouldn’t tell him simply to ignore the bullies.

I think I would sit beside him.

And I would tell him something far simpler.

They do not get to define you.

I would tell him that being gay is not a verdict on his character.

I would tell him that the terrifying disease he is hearing about does not mean there is something inherently wrong with people like him.

I would tell him that fear masquerading as certainty is still fear.

And I would tell him that there will eventually be a life beyond those corridors.

A very big life.

Not a perfect one.

Not one without mistakes, grief, anxiety or struggle.

But a life in which being gay will become simply one part of a much larger human story.

Most importantly, I would tell him:

You don’t have to become extraordinary to earn the right to exist.

That may have been the lesson I needed most.

More Than Forty Years Later

Bullying is sometimes discussed as though it is a childhood problem with an adult solution.

Tell a teacher.

Tell your parents.

Stand up for yourself.

Walk away.

Those interventions matter enormously.

But we also need to understand what can happen internally.

A young person who is repeatedly humiliated may eventually begin participating in their own humiliation.

A young person who is repeatedly told they are worthless may begin gathering evidence that appears to prove it.

A young person who believes an essential part of themselves must remain hidden can become extraordinarily skilled at performing a version of themselves for other people.

And those patterns don’t necessarily disappear at graduation.

Sometimes they follow us into careers, relationships, addictions, perfectionism, people-pleasing, anger, anxiety and relentless achievement.

Sometimes it takes decades to recognise them.

I am 61 now.

I have lived enough life to understand that those boys in 1983 were never qualified to determine my value.

Neither was the frightened teenager who believed them.

I don’t tell this story because I want sympathy.

And I don’t tell it because I want revenge.

I tell it because somewhere today there is another teenager walking down another school corridor believing that what other people are saying about them is the truth.

It isn’t.

There is an enormous difference between what happens to us and who we ultimately become.

Bullying became part of my history.

It influenced my ambition.

It contributed to my desperation to prove myself.

It fed years of shame and self-hatred.

But it did not get the final word.

I did.

And perhaps that is one of the most important things I have learned in the 43 years since 1983:

Healing isn’t pretending the past didn’t hurt.

Healing is reaching the point where the past no longer gets to decide what you are worth.