When I was thirteen, I had a falling-out with my best friend, after which she tortured me over the Internet for the next three years. We were so close that she knew the answer to my security question, so it didn't matter if I changed my password. Over the course of three years she would periodically go in and delete all of my emails, leaving only cruel notes for me, from my own account, as the sole messages in my inbox.
The worst part were the calendar reminders. Written in the first person, they notified me of my own plans to kill myself. I would be quietly browsing, then the reminder would pop up: "Throw myself off the ____ bridge." (There are a few rivers and creeks in my hometown, so she could be specific.) These reminders were always set for midnight, in the dead of winter. I was an imaginative child, so they would bring up the whole scene for me immediately: I would see my own hands on the bridge railing, the darkness of the water below.
I told few people about this and never any teachers or parents. One of the first times I talked about it to an adult, I was an adult too, almost 29 years old. I was cyberbullied in 1998. That's why it was over email and also why I didn't change my security question. Yahoo didn't even offer that option until I was in my late teens. At the time, I didn't want to get a new account and let my ex-bestie know she'd won.
More than ten years later, I got in touch with Amanda. (That’s not her real name. None of the names in this article are real. But it doesn’t really matter.) I didn’t want her to say sorry. It doesn't matter to me, either way. Instead, I thought about the strangeness of our young minds. How could I have suffered for three years instead of changing my account, or going for help? What kind of person sends suicide notes to another girl for three years straight? I saw on Facebook that Amanda had children now. Had she changed?
[For more of this story, written by Francie Diep, go to http://www.theatlantic.com/tec...-years-later/380888/]
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