The first and only time I cried in class happened on a December morning of my freshman year as I listened to my classmates’ final monologues in theatre class. The pieces featured a variety of personal topics — ranging from first experiences to ethnic and cultural identities and personal relationships — which, in my defense, made each particularly moving.

However, the one that made me burst into tears was not about summer love, family issues or body image. It was simply a story about one of my classmates' distressing memory of being physically and verbally abused throughout their childhood by a peer at school. The monologue described in full detail a scene in which the aggressor approached the actor before class and publicly confronted them with humiliating insults and physical violence, cruelly breaking some of their school material in front of all their classmates.

Bullying is a very sensitive topic for me, even today. Having experienced physical and verbal abuse by some of my classmates all throughout preschool and primary school, I wasn’t able to watch the monologue without each word opening up old wounds that I had previously thought of as healed. Every sentence revived painful images from the past that sped up my heart and tensed my throat in seconds — just as the reality I lived in my village in southern Spain managed to do several times a day since I was six years old until I was able to leave my school.

In particular, I was reminded of my most distressing experience with bullying, which happened on my 12th birthday. After deciding to leave the school where I spent the most unhappy years of my life, I invited my classmates to my birthday party in an attempt to make peace. Expecting this to be a nice closure with my peers, I asked my mother to buy a cake for all of us, and in an attempt to showcase maturity, I asked her to give it to me and leave so that I would appear to be in charge during the party. We had planned to meet later, so she could help me carry the gifts home in the car. I will probably never forget what happened after she hugged me and drove away.

As I stood with my peace cake waiting for my peers, I heard someone approaching me hastily from behind. A second after, I remember being covered — both my cake and me — by some sort of dirty water mixed with mud that had been thrown at me by some of the peers I had been waiting for. Their cruel laughter died off in the distance as they ran away, and I felt the highest level of humiliation I have ever experienced. That walk home on my 12th birthday, alone, covered in mud and shame, while trying to think of something to tell my parents to make them believe I actually had friends, was probably the hardest one I have ever walked.

In seconds, the images drilled through the cement layers I had built to separate such a traumatic part of my past from my present, until they reached my most vulnerable spot. And while my class started analyzing my classmate’s monologue, I couldn’t help but feel a mixture of shame and relief as I wiped away my tears.

Shame, because in a community built upon expected success, vulnerability of any kind is never acceptable, even if it stems from a past we have since left behind. Relief, because that had just been the first time in my life hearing someone else talk openly, emotionally, genuinely and in front of other people, about their experience being bullied.

When one thinks about it, that's kind of strange. Considering that I have had able ears for the past 20 years — and have listened attentively for the word “bullying” for the past 14 — and that in the U.S. alone, more than 20 percent of children reportedly suffer from bullying, it is almost incomprehensible that there has been so little conversation on this topic among my community. Despite the fact that I have generally lived in very supportive environments since coming to NYUAD, I have never had the chance to discuss the topic in full honesty and emotional scope, let alone with confidence.

Instead, I felt that until that moment — unintentionally or otherwise — I had been exposed to institutional and social expectations to perform well and to seem confident, happy and secure. The image of a broken childhood did not seem to fit in such narrative; so I decided to bury it deep, next to the memories of shitty breakups and the story of the day I forgot to lock the door of a public toilet, and pretend that I could move on without closure. This, of course, led me to believe that I was the only person in my community who had dealt with such issues, which only made my bullies' insults about the abnormality of my personality feel all the more true.

Thankfully, this temporary belief due to the lack of conversation on bullying didn’t cause much of a lasting effect on me, except for some confidence issues that I overcame a few years later. But often, this isn’t the case for a number of bullying victims. Many studies show strong relationships between bullying and depression, academic failure, anxiety, changes in eating patterns and suicide. In fact, in the U.K. alone, half of the suicide cases among young people are connected to bullying.

Moreover, not only is silence and lack of awareness on bullying detrimental to victims, but it is also destructive to bullies themselves. Youth involved in physical and verbal abuse — who may find their motivations rooted in psychological insecurities or social pressures — are also more likely to fail academically, develop abusive relationships, have other criminal convictions and abuse drugs-related substances as adults.

Today, I know that the line isn’t that easily drawn between bullied and bully. I have been both at different stages in life. Bullying is a struggle for power, which some would say is part of life, and in different contexts we can all manage to shift the balance from one side to the other — for example, when I react with pretentious surprise to someone's ignorance on any topic I consider essential —e.g. Almodovar — I'm also, in my own way, engaging in the power struggle game. In fact, from what I have seen, I would argue that people who have been on the losing side of the balance might try to overcompensate in later life stages and abusively gain their power back. However, the real danger comes when one side is able to completely dominate and crush the other, as it happens when the parties involved are only children or teenagers.

I believe there needs to be more awareness about the social phenomenon of bullying. It is only through openness of this issue that victims can normalize their experience and reconcile themselves with their past, as well as support others who are currently going through psychological difficulties due to having been abused. It is my hope that taboos on bullying — or any other form of vulnerability that is currently hidden from public conversation — will eventually be erased. In this way those suffering from bullying can seek help at an early stage, and those standing by can feel empowered to stop bullying at the first sign.

One day, after I finally shed most of my complexes and insecurities from being bullied, someone back in Spain told me that I should be thankful for the experience, as it let me become the kind of person I am today. “Excuse me?” I responded at that moment. But after thinking about it, I realized maybe they were right. Maybe going through such hardships has made me a stronger person in other realms, and maybe that is a good thing. I feel that after ten years, I have become the kind of person I want to be, and I am truly happy with the general direction my life has taken.

But I’m pretty sure that, even though I am happy now with the long-term results of this experience in me, I would still have liked to have the right to choose at the time. I would have liked to know what I would have been like had I not had to put up with such treatment. I would have liked to know what the average childhood feels like, so that when I'm a father, I can know whether I'm doing it right.

Thankfully, after having built and rebuilt my life at three different schools and countries, I still may shed a tear or two with videos like this one, but it’s very hard for me to think of this topic as emotionally I once did. For a while, I believed this was purely because I lived within an institution that promotes diversity in all its forms. However, my experience has shown me that life has become easier for me simply because my ways of not fitting the norm have become more socially acceptable, usually at the expense of other social perceptions.

While this is indeed very convenient for me, it still means that some people in our community — those who do not fit our norms — are in as much risk of losing the power struggle as I once was, and that scares me. In the end, eradicating bullying will never happen if we only focus on shifting the norm. For a world free of power struggles, we should not just attempt to change our norms to more progressive standards, but rather collectively smash norms altogether. Only then will we be able to pride ourselves in living in a bullying-free institution.