Throughout high school, there was a bully named Dean. He wasn’t the typical bully, though. Where so many bullies struggle in school and physically intimidate their peers, Dean was an A student. He was popular and athletic and smart enough to know which words would hurt the most.
Dean lacked a football player’s bravado, but in my district, it wasn’t typically the jocks that rose to the top of the high school hierarchy. Social intelligence seemed to play more of a role in our standings than our status as sports captains. But Dean seemed to have it all. He was a skilled basketball player and honors student and a focal point of seemingly every lunch table he sat at.
Dean and I had mutual friends. At times he even reached out an olive branch to me as well. But each time I felt as though we’d finally become friends, he’d retract his peace offerings in public and humiliating ways. Dean was an effective manipulator. At times, I watched him use less popular kids as pawns. He’d capriciously tell them to do things in order to get a laugh. And wanting to win the good graces of his more popular circles, they often complied. Sometimes I tried to win his favor myself.
Dean made me fear the class that I loved the most. He made me feel as though my love of words was suddenly a source of shame. I felt embarrassed to know the correct answers to questions, and I was petrified of the little jokes and sneers he’d make each time I’d raise my hand or present a project.
One day after school, I sat in my therapist’s office and lamented all of the things going wrong in my life. I talked about school and fears and my crippling inability to consider the world beyond my high school doors. I talked about anxieties, inadequacies, and bullies. He was a receptive listener with a sophisticated stubble appropriate for his profession.
As the 45-minute session came to a swift end, we scheduled another appointment. When I once wondered how I could spend the better part of an hour spilling my soul to an old psychologist, I found after only a couple of sessions the sheer quantity of unexamined thoughts I harbored — and the value in systematically unpacking them with a wisened, old stranger.
I stood up, checked his sofa for any lost belongings, handed him a check with my father’s signature written across it, and made my way to the door.
As I opened it, though, I found myself face to face with Dean, meekly waiting to check in for a therapy session of his own. We exchanged petrified pupils before he clumsily skirted out of frame. I fled the office in terror — the only barrier between us was a wooden door and the perennial droning of a white noise machine through a room of stifled coughs and undissolved self-doubts.
I walked free from the office shell-shocked. Whatever solace I’d gleaned from my session evaporated at the sight; Dean was so much of the impetus for why I’d started booking there to begin with. At first, I wondered what terrible way he’d find of shaming me for going to see a psychologist. I expected I’d walk into school the next day to a student body chomping at the bit to ridicule me for struggling.
But they didn’t.
In that abrupt and apprehensive exchange of glances, we’d reached a democratizing moment. I saw my predator in a new light. I saw in one single instant that he had inadequacies of his own. I saw that he had fears, pressures, and uncertainties. I saw that he was struggling enough to book sessions with the very same therapist as me.
In one fell swoop, Dean’s torment stopped completely. And as the week went on, I began to realize that he feared his facade crumbling even more than I did. I stood on shaky ground and anyone who watched me tremble through a presentation could plainly see it. But for him to make fun of my therapy session would mean he’d spent time in a therapist’s office. And as a royal of our hormonal jungle, a session with a psychologist was a far deeper blow than he reasoned he could endure. He would have sooner let Prom King dreams fall to his feet before admitting he’d spent time in a soup of neurosis that was the waiting room of our shared therapist.
As time went on, I learned a little more about Dean’s personal life. I learned that his parents weren’t that kind to him. I learned that they shamed him for his failures in sports — that they pushed him to rigorous extremes to be the very best in everything. I learned that he lived in his older sister’s shadow. I learned that his house burned down and that an entire childhood’s worth of memories turned to ash in one single night.
Years after high school, Dean is one of my best friends. After those tumultuous times in the town of our alma mater, we both became different people. And each time our paths crossed again after graduation, I saw more and more similarities between us. I saw someone pursuing dreams and breathing in life from different cultures. I saw someone finding himself.
There was no underlying tension coloring our interactions, and the feuds of our high school days fell happily by the wayside. By the arrival of the pandemic, whatever hostility had lingered between was a lone echo in a room we’d both shut the door to.
The last time I saw him, he looked at me with awe-inspired eyes and eagerly pushed me to begin exploring the world myself. And as I write this piece from a rural corner of Belize, I can’t help but be reminded of how radically people change.