Lee Suckling: How kids of the 90s coped with bullying

Exposure to certain pop culture was an escape from being bullied. Photo / Getty

When you think back to the kids who were bullied at school - and I was one of them - most of us seemed to have a very close relationship with pop culture.

In lieu of friends, social gatherings, and sports, we often turned to TV, movies and music as an escape; a way to feel included.

I came of age in the late 90s when the then-new genre of teen horror was all the rage. We're talking the Screams and the I Know What You Did Last Summers and the Buffy The Vampire Slayers of the era.

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Supernatural baddies and serial killers aside, these films and TV shows showed an idealised form of the high school experience.

The protagonists were always outcasts; the cool kids always met untimely demises. Everyone did engaging, creative classes like film studies and photography.

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The scripted quips were sassy, the alt-pop-rock soundtracks were fresh, and the school buildings on screen were gleaming Pantheons; a far cry from the dreary concrete blocks that were my actual high school.

Put simply, I was drawn into a fantasy of what my 13-year-old self wanted but would never have.

When I speak to friends that had less-than-ideal high school experiences, they all seem to have had similar affinities to pop culture. Some were obsessed with Star Wars, others it was Death Cab For Cutie, or even The O.C.

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We had no social sharing outlets, save for MSN Messenger and our parents' landline. Our existences were a lot more introspective than those of 2017's teenagers. Having a "friend" in pop culture stood in for a lot of the social interaction we yearned for.

I'm not going to make this a sob story, because my experience has lead me to a lifetime of appreciation of the creative arts. It's probably the reason I became a professional writer. I still love movies. I listen to hours of "alt-pop-rock" a day.

I actually think exposure to these kinds of pop culture is what made me grow up so fast, too. When you're a bit of a loner, you become really independent from your parents. You figure out how to do everything for yourself. Instead of asking Mum and Dad about sex, drugs, and rock n' roll, I learned it all from Sarah Michelle Gellar and Ryan Phillippe.

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I don't know if there are many people out there immune from schoolyard bullying of some degree. I think we all got it somewhere along the line - even the bullies get bullied, right?

But not everyone had that same relationship to TV, film, and music. So perhaps its a combination of personality type (i.e. self-examining, introverted, quiet, considered) and bullying that herald this affinity for the silver screen and a pair of headphones.

Maybe it's even a "kid of the 90s" thing? We did grow up straddling this pre- and post-digital world where adolescence was both new and exciting, yet old and boring, at the same time. We knew the future was coming, we just didn't know what it was yet. So we turned to pop culture to try and find out.

I can't surmise what this experience must be for the teenagers of today. The Insta-driven world is so much more complicated than it was 15 or 20 years ago. Do they still watch films over and over like we used to, for lack of nothing else better to do? Do they still listen to the same 12-song album on repeat for three weeks, until they know the meaning of every word?

Bullying is certainly more pervasive (and more easily-facilitated) now than it was in my day. I hope bullied kids are still enjoying pop culture like I did, otherwise their always-on social media-connected world may never give them an escape.