How Being Bullied Got Me Here (Or The Day I Became Joe Boyd)
I was bullied mercilessly in 8th grade and changed my name from Joey to Joe.
I was Joey for my first 13 years or so.
Little Joey Boyd.
Such an adorable, happy, nerdy little Kentucky kid.
Then something awful happened to me that happens to all of us.
Eighth Grade.
My family moved from Russell, Kentucky, to Worthington, Ohio, a suburb of Columbus, between my seventh and eighth-grade years. For me, it could have been moving to Brooklyn or London.
The culture shock was intense.
If you know the 1988 movie Heathers, it was based on my high school. I have plenty of good things to say now about Worthington, but for a chubby Appalachian kid with a bowl haircut and an accent as thick as his big brown glasses, it wasn’t a great place to be dropped into during the middle of puberty.
Though there were a few outliers, the kids I found myself surrounded by were rich, trendy, and largely entitled. And mean. Super mean. It was cutthroat, as middle school tends to be anyway, but I was easy pickings.
And I was picked on.
Bullied.
Mercilessly.
Daily.
Hourly.
Decades later, while doing a two-day Life Plan with my friend Bart, I discovered that this year was the most meaningful and shaping of my life. I didn’t want it to be. I tried desperately for it not to be partially because I don’t like to think about that year too much to this day. And also because who really becomes who they are at 13?
I did.
What I discovered in the Life Plan session was that I have a clear pattern in my life that goes back to the pain I experienced in eighth grade.
I always create surrogate families of misfits and outcasts wherever I go.
I did this in high school and college and through each expression of my unorthodox career. It just happens. I can’t help it, and I won’t stop it.
If you’re feeling part of this new community here, I hate to be the one to tell you this…
It’s probably because you, too, are a misfit outcast.
The details of my bullying that year can be triggering for some. I won’t go into great detail apart from saying that I was constantly told I was fat and ugly and a hillbilly. I was encouraged to kill myself more than a few times by some kids on the bus. It’s hard to find a corner to hide in on a school bus.
I know what I endured wasn’t the worst kind of abuse a person can face. I wasn’t alone all the time - only at school. I had loving parents who themselves were devastated that the move was so hard for me. (I don’t talk about this much - so Mom and Dad, if you read this, I’m so thankful for it now. It made me who I am, and I’m pretty good with me these days.)
While it took years to be accepted at school, I found solace in a church youth group. A twenty-nine-year-old youth pastor named Kevin took me to Dairy Queen for a milkshake one day. He helped me make friends at church. That probably saved my life in the end.
No wonder I became a pastor.
My instinct at school was to conform as fast as possible. I lost some weight. Got contacts and some trendy clothes. I shaved my head. I watched Tom Brokaw and Peter Jennings at night to learn to talk like them and lose my accent. (Though if I get too excited or upset to this day it will sneak back in.)
By my junior and senior years, I had a few non-church friends and didn’t hate going to school every day. I never felt “cool” or fully accepted, but I did feel largely invisible - which is all I had really desired.
But back to eighth grade.
I remember the moment as clearly as anything in my life. I was turning in an Algebra quiz and had forgotten to write my name at the top. I took my pencil and wrote…
J…O…E…
I couldn’t write the “Y”
…
I just couldn’t do it…
B…O…Y…D
Innocent, chubby, nerdy, four-eyed hillbilly Joey had to go.
Joe had to take his place.
At that exact moment, it was still about survival - trying to fit in.
WHY I did it wasn’t for the most mature of reasons.
I was still a little boy. I wasn’t supposed to be mature yet.
But it taught me something: that I get to decide who I am.
Even down to my name.
My identity was my own - not what others decided it was.
That was the day the best parts of me were conceived: in a conflicted, confusing moment.
I told myself it was time to freakin grow up and work myself out of this torturous existence so that I could create accepting communities for other outcasts like me. There is some revisionist clarity in what I just wrote. I’m not sure I would have said that quite that way at the time.
But I know I felt exactly that.
That’s the thing Joe Boyd could do that Joey Boyd couldn’t.
I could find the others like me.
And together, we could figure it out.
So I did.
And I still do.
It’s still not perfect for me, by the way. I still have days when I feel fat, ugly, or uneducated. I have moments where loneliness creeps in like a monster released from his cage in my mind. I have days when I want to disappear into that safe invisibility.
I survived some trauma. Like we all do.
And healing can take a lifetime.
But here is what I know and can pass along to you. It’s the thing I have waited until day 30 of this adventure to tell you.
It’s the truest thing I know about you finding your calling:
It’s in your pain.
Your deepest pain is the portal to your life calling.
Full stop.
That’s where you will find it.
The second lesson is this:
Joey never really left.
He is a stubborn little fella.
We’re all just little kids who have dropped the “Y” to survive but deeply know we aren’t really grown up yet.
But that’s good news, too.
Because, in the end, Joey has more to teach you than Joe ever could.
And your inner little kid?
They have plenty to teach you as well.
The part where you reassured your parents GOT ME. That's a deep, difficult area- to honor the good while sharing the difficult. Anyway- If you doubted whether to include it, I assure you that it spoke to more people than just your parents. It modeled something that I can't put my finger on. Thank you.
Misfit outcast? Yeah, that tracks. I've learned relatively recently that true change only happens in community as much as that ticks me off, so if that's the way it's gotta be.....introverts unite! Separately, from different rooms of course. Thanks Joe for giving this 50 something a bit of hope that I really can live in my purpose more often than not. Because there's nothing more fulfilling and life giving than that.