https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ltun92DfnPY

Shane Koyczan is a perspicacious man, his poem, To This Day is breath-taking piece of poetry made from his experience that he uses to make insightful comments about bullying.  Shane takes his personal life and explains it through a descriptive poem for others to hear. There are numerous victims being effected by bullied. Shane illustrates his distressing past in the poem and connects his words to all the other victims that were compelled to go to their harrowing nightmare or so called school. Many people have lived this way, I have. Going to school was petrifying, waiting for the tyrant that either repeatedly hit you or call you names that pressures you to question yourself. Shane states” Sometimes being drug free is less to do with addiction and more to do with sanity”. I interpret this as Shane needing to escape his reality to keep himself away from the loathing and the suicidal thoughts. The kid you thought was a druggie and never talked to anyone could be getting beaten everyday after school, being called names or having to deal with a brawl between his family back home and just wants to escape that. 

Shane says, “if you can’t see anything beautiful about yourself, get a better mirror, look a little closer, stare a little longer, because there’s something inside you that made you keep trying despite everyone who told you to quit. You built a cast around your broken heart and signed it yourself. You signed it, They were wrong”. We’ve all been called names, most of them were just unacknowledged, but the insults that hit home make us feel insecure, irrelevant, stupid or useless. We’re important, we matter to others people look up to us and dream of being where we are. All this victims that have been bullied are powerful, independent survivors that are going to go places.

Bullying isn’t a temporary thing. If you’ve been bullied you would understand that the insults, bruises, etc. Shane states in his poem, “They taped a sign to the front of her desk that read, “Beware of dog.” To this day, despite a loving husband, she doesn’t think she’s beautiful because of a birthmark that takes up a little less than half her face. Kids used to say, “She looks like a wrong answer that someone tried to erase, but couldn’t quite get the job done” Bullying will impact a person forever, no matter what you said or did to them they’ll remember and it could haunt them forever. I hope everyone has a chance to read this poem because I’m sure it’ll make an affect on them as it did to me.