Bullies/d
A collaborative archive + community resources
As somebody who has been bullied at different times throughout her life, usually during key developmental moments by people she trusted, Anderson knows how devastating and long-term the impacts can be. After a significant amount of research on the topic, she realized that, despite the negative psychological impacts (on both those bullying and those being bullied), many people are completely unaware that they are even engaged in the dynamic.
To that end, Anderson decided to create an audio archive of people telling their own stories of bullying in order to share human accounts of incidents and impacts, as well as create a downloadable zine which can be printed and distributed wherever you are.
Scroll to the bottom of the page if you are interested in participating in the ongoing storytelling archive.
The stories
These accounts were shared anonymously—a chance for people to tell stories they haven’t told before—in order to illustrate the broadness, insidiousness, and devastation of bullying. For ethical reasons, if you think you recognize somebody’s voice, please do not indicate that to the person whom you think the voice belongs to.
Trigger warning: Explicit language, mentions of suicide, mentions of rape.
Interested in participating in the audio archive? Please email Ryan-Ashley so she can add your audio to the archive. Submissions can include accounts of times you were bullied, you witnessed bullying or saw the impact it had on somebody else, or a time you bullied somebody. If your account is of a time you bullied somebody, it will be excluded from the archive if it carries an affect of nostalgia rather than regret. The aim here is not to sensationalize or glorify, but to humanize and educate.
The Zine
Click the zine to download the pdf and print one of your own
To learn how to fold this zine or to make one of your own, you can watch this handy found video. The QR code on the zine links back to this page.
the future
Ryan-Ashley Anderson is currently halfway through a chapbook—a bullying on satire—which she hopes to secure a publisher for in 2025.