A Bully to Bullies: Why Silence Was Never My Middle Way
A Bully to Bullies: Why Silence Was Never My Middle Way
Recently, I was reported on LinkedIn for using the word “bully.”
It seems that naming toxic behavior publicly—especially when the person doing the naming is a woman—can still make people deeply uncomfortable.
And so I found myself asking:
Am I a bully?
Maybe.
But if I am, I’m the kind this world needs.
Because I’m not here to bully the vulnerable—I’m here to be a bully to bullies.
For years, I was on the receiving end of bullying behaviors from managers and coworkers who smiled to my face and stabbed at my character behind closed doors. I was dismissed, gaslit, undermined, and—perhaps most damaging of all—expected to take it with a smile. I stayed quiet longer than I should have, swallowing disrespect to keep the peace, convincing myself it was just part of the job or that I was being too sensitive.
But here’s what I’ve learned:
Containers can only hold so much.
Eventually, the mental and emotional trash others dump on you overflows—and if you don’t deal with it, it spills into every area of your life.
When I left my corporate sales career, I finally had time to sit in the stillness.
What came up was decades’ worth of emotional debris—dismissals, gaslighting, microaggressions, and moments I had buried so deeply they felt like someone else’s story. But they weren’t. They were mine. Some of that pain I could repurpose. Some I could transform into wisdom. But some of it? It had to burn.
And the more I excavated, the clearer it became:
Staying silent in the face of bullying isn’t strength. It’s complicity.
There are moments I still regret—like the time I experienced inappropriate sexual behavior from a doctor during a routine OB-GYN visit. Or the time a spa attendant on a cruise ship crossed a line. These weren’t just awkward moments or misunderstandings. They were violations. And I said nothing.
I didn’t report them.
I didn’t cause a scene.
I swallowed the discomfort and left quietly—just as I’d been trained to do, over decades of learning to shrink myself in the name of politeness.
But I wonder now:
How many more women did those men go on to harm because I stayed silent?
I no longer have the luxury of silence. Not as a woman. Not as a leader. Not as someone who has spent the past five years in deep introspection, peeling back the layers of my own complicity, fear, and false peacekeeping. What I’ve come to understand—through menopause, stillness, and spiritual fire—is that silence protects the abuser, not the abused.
And we will never build sacred systems—at home, at work, or in government—if we keep tiptoeing around truth to avoid discomfort.
So if I use strong words now, it’s not to be mean.
It’s to be clear.
It’s to call a thing what it is before it takes deeper root.
And if calling out bullying gets me labeled a bully, I’ll carry that label like a sword—not to wound, but to protect.
Because truth without fire doesn’t move people.
And fire without truth just burns everything down.
But together? Truth and fire forge something sacred.
So yes—I will speak. I will name the patterns. I will stand in the breach and hold the mirror. And when needed,
I will flip some damn tables.