BuildU NOT Bully

by | Our Stories, Personal Development, Relationships, Self-Care

BuildU NOT Bully

BuildU NOT Bully by Allison Rose

Some days I feel the weight of the world we live in more than others. Today I write because my heart is heavy. I’ve recently experienced a level of negativity in my world that makes me believe in what I’m doing even more than before.

BuildU is not just another women’s empowerment group. The heart behind the Gang has much bigger aspirations then that. BuildU is a resource for women all over the world. Its vision and mission is simple, the Gang works to uplift other women by giving them a safe place to share their stories and read those of others. We live in a society where far too often, women judge each other’s appearances, their mistakes, how they parent and the way they live. And it has to STOP. None of us are perfect. All of us carry secrets of shame and hide from our ugly parts. None of us have any room to judge another woman. Yet, it seems to be an innate trait in many of us.

This year, I lost three women close to me. They were young, not living their best life and hid their demons from the people who loved them, and ultimately; it was these hidden dark parts of them that contributed to their deaths. They used social media to show the parts of their lives that they wanted others to see and most were none the wiser to their real daily struggles. This terrifies me. If we are all only showing the highlight reel, how will we ever really know, support and help each other?

In the aftermaths of my friends passing, many seem to have something negative and judgmental to say. How can one feel good about judging women who are no longer with us and cannot speak up for themselves or reveal the true inner workings of the world they were living in? How can we want to berate women who will never again kiss their children, experience love or any of life’s pleasures? Why are we judging the life they were living and fixating on their faults? Why aren’t we uplifting their memory and sharing the things that made them great?

In a world where our children are being shot and killed in schools by kids who have been bullied, are battling mental illnesses and are struggling in their homes, we strive to educate our children to practice kindness and grace. So why do we as women continue to bully and judge in our adult lives? Is that the example we want to set? My stepdaughters are often bullied and picked on at school, and I always tell them the same thing. Show the bully kindness, you don’t know what’s going on in their world, and it is those kids who need the most love. Well the same applies to all of us. Sometimes there will be women among us who live differently from us, parent different, make choices that hurt their families and cause their own destruction. These women need the most love.

We all grieve differently. Some wallow, some turn to unhealthy habits, some never accept the loss and some use the experience to create change. That is why I created BuildU. Not to idolize or create a false persona of those that we have lost, not to hide their flaws and create a grandiose perception of who they were, but to give life to the reasons why they are no longer with us. To show the detrimental impact of living a life that isn’t authentic and why we must uplift one another and create a community of women that aren’t afraid to share the good and the bad. I’ve been called naive, but I know better. I know many of the truths that my lost friends were living with, and it doesn’t make me love them any less. It makes my heart hurt to know that they were living with demons that they were afraid to reveal and that instead of empathizing with their mental states, we seek to tell others the bad in order to validate our own self-worth.

Allison Rose
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