A few days ago I found out that a girl I knew from Kansas since we were in grade school together had died a couple of years ago. It was a suicide.

It brought up a lot of feelings for me.

In elementary school she and I were kind of at the opposite ends of the spectrum. She was the pretty, popular girl, snobby and pseudo-confident and not very nice to me. I was the lowly nerd who got the good grades and was made fun of by everyone (or so I felt). We tended to be at odds.

I lost track of her in middle school and into high school, though occasionally I would notice her. I remember the last time I had any significant contact with her, which was in sophomore or junior year at my high school. She was running for some class office and she came up to me and asked for me to vote for her — in kind of this overly, insincerely sweet way that disgusted me. I got away from her as soon as I could.

But now I look back and wish that I had acted with more compassion. I know that it is not my fault that she suffered what she suffered, but I wonder if had been a more secure person, if I had acted with more compassion on that and other occasions, would it have changed anything?

Really, there are two separate issues:

On the one hand, she had her own karma, those lessons and responsibilities that were part of her experience of living in this world in her own unique way. My actions and feelings about her are not her responsibility, and hers are not mine. So in that regard I have no blame or guilt. She had her own life to live out, and her own influences, and I had very little to do with those, just as she had very little to do with me. She chose her end and that was her life.

But the other issue is what I see in myself when I think of her.

For all those years that we were classmates, I never saw in her anything other than the image of a superficial “popular girl.” And I loathed her and everything she represented, because to me she was the quintessence of the bullying, the judgment, the snobbery of public school politics. She symbolized (and sometimes literally caused) the pain of being taunted and hurt. To me, if there were a poster girl for superficiality and materialism and the judgment of others who weren’t as popular or in the “in-crowd,” it was she.

I saw her hardly at all after grade school, other than to hear racy gossip about her, or to hear about her eating disorder and how she had to drop out of school. Things like that. Then that one quick interaction in high school.

And then I found out she died two years ago. And when I read the obituary, part of me just thought, in a detached way, “Well, that just fits.” Because it does fit, because she molded herself to fit this image she thought she had to live up to, and everyone else responded to it.

But what about my responsibility? … Because I do have responsibility, no matter how little. Because I too was involved in treating her the way other people did. I have, in my turn, been mean and nasty to others who were lower on the totem pole than me. If I heard that one of those people had committed suicide because of low self-esteem or something like that, I would feel a direct connection between their death and my own actions. Though my fingers didn’t pull the hypothetical trigger, though my mean comments were only a few out of thousands from dozens of people over the years, still I put in my two petty cents. I was a participant.

I treated this girl similarly. I shunned her and despised what she represented and who she was. And she in turn was (I speculate) struggling not to be despised and shunned, to be loved in the only way she knew how: by being popular, by seeking the affections of other popular people and stepping on the unpopular. But we were part of the same cycle, the same dynamic, despite having different places in the hierarchy: she the victimizer to my victim.

I hated her and what she represented. In doing so I gave up my power to her and chose victimhood. That was my responsibility: I played into the role of victim. A victim is someone who has already given up power. No one can make anyone do anything except by making that person desire to do it. You can manipulate the desires by threatening their lives or families or something else of worth, but the final choice — and the ultimate responsibility — still lies with the “victim.” And so victims like me (and I think all of us have been victimized to one degree or another in our lives) learned to repeatedly give up power to bullies and victimizers.

Thus, we victims are responsible for our victimhood. Not for the act of being victimized, but for maintaining an emotional and psychological identity of being The Victim. It is a way to control and avoid deep woundedness and weakness. But in doing so, it maintains the exact same balance of what has gone before; it preserves the psychic status quo. Victimizer and victim, they are the opposite halves of the same attachment, both having roots in deep inner pain. Both seek to escape their pain, one by inflicting it on others, the other by capitulating to it.

Victims end up being victimizers. It’s a phenomenon well-known in psychology and social work, in cases such as child and spousal abuse. Quite often abusers were themselves abused as children. And why do we like to perpetuate these damaging cycles? Because it’s all we know. We stick to familiar patterns because they are known, sure ways to squeeze a little power and self-worth from a situation. And I, as a human being, am certainly not exempt from this. I hated this popular girl because she was one of those who stepped on me. And I in turn not only stepped on other kids when I got the chance, but I perpetuated the cycle of pain by directing my pain back at my victimizer. I externalized it. She was the enemy, and I hated her.

But now, how do I hate a girl who hated herself so much as to kill herself? She took it upon herself to end the cycle of pain in the only way she saw open to her.

The one thing I did not do and, to some extent, still have not done is to heal myself by escaping this cycle of pain. To learn how to be as open as the sky, to learn to love and feel compassion despite petty acts of degradation.

If this girl were still alive and I met her today, and she was essentially the same, I would still dislike her, because I have not healed from my own victimhood.

So my point: What can I learn about myself and my responsibilities from this news of her death? How can I use it to inform the way I treat other people who haven’t yet died, even people who are mean and nasty to me? Moreover, how can I use this to heal myself from my habit of giving up power to tyrants and bullies — not by “beating” them at their game but by being secure in myself and in my power to love?

We are all on our way out. Life’s like a board game, except no one “wins”; no matter how long it takes to get around the board, we all end up in the same place, and then, game over. I want to make sure that what I pick up along the way is worthwhile, and make it fulfilling for myself and for other people too. What I don’t want is to pass along bullshit and baggage that other people passed along to me, and continue the cycle of pain and violence. I want to learn how to stop it. There’s enough of that in the world without me adding to it.