Tina Meier walked into her daughter’s room in 2006 and found the 13-year-old had hanged herself.
In the wake of Megan’s death, a twisted cyber plot unraveled with social media harassment culminating in her suicide.
Determined to educate teens and adults about the dangers of cyber bullying, Tina Meier started the Megan Meier Foundation and travels across the country from her home in Missouri. For two days this week, Meier spoke to students in Marion County, thanks to a sponsorship from the Junior Auxiliary of Columbia.
Middle school and high school students from Columbia, Columbia Academy, East Marion and West Marion all attended the sessions held at Woodlawn Church. On Tuesday, middle schoolers heard the presentation and on Wednesday, Tina Meier addressed hundreds of area high school students and their teachers.
During her nearly two-hour program, Meier addressed forms of bullying, including verbal, social/relational and physical.
“Bullying is often based on race, religion or size,” she told the crowd. “I want to encourage you to make your own choices and decisions.”
Meier’s presentation wove the story of her daughter’s tragic death in with examples of various forms of bullying as she told the students what behaviors to watch for.
“It could be the pictures they take of you that you don’t know about and they send out,” she said. “The text messages that they send consistently. It is the isolating you on purpose and tagging you to make sure you knew about something you weren’t invited to. It is the snide comments that happen – all of these happen for sure. But the biggest thing that we are seeing is truly the emotional part. You may not even realize it. Many adults don’t even realize why they get so tense and anxious.”
The bullying isn’t even necessarily intentional on social media in some cases, yet in others it is.
“On Snapchat, on Instagram, it doesn’t matter what you are on, you go through the day and you sit there and watch the stories,” she said. “You sit there and see all these posts. They act like life is just perfect. They live in Disneyland every day. ‘My boyfriend sent me this,’ ‘I got this on the ACT,’ ‘Guess what? I got accepted to this school.’ Life’s great, the world is wonderful – but that’s not life. What’s happening is as you’re seeing all this, you sit there and you start comparing. You think, ‘That’s awesome, they got accepted into this and I haven’t even filled out any applications yet.’ ‘They get a brand new car and I don’t have a car,’ the list goes on and on. It’s not easy. You take it in, take it in and hold it in. You get frustrated and mad. It’s hard.”
She spoke of how difficult it can be to see all of the stories and happiness when your life is not that way.
“I’m not going to say take your phones away, get rid of all of your social media. I won’t do it. But what I’m saying is that when you start getting that feeling inside and you get that knot in your stomach, you need to realize that a lot of the stuff people put out is a bunch of crap. You know that they put filters on, make themselves look 40 pounds lighter, they change everything and they say life is perfect, and you know in reality that it is not. Sometimes you have to realize that this stuff is not really real.”
Meier told the group that there has always been and will always be forms of bullying.
“My hope for you is this: I want you to truly think about it, put yourself the places of the individuals of the stories I’ve told you. Put yourself in those people’s shoes. What would you need other people to do when you are the one who is struggling?” she said.
She also offered the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline — 1-800-273-TALK (8255).
For more, visit meganmeierfoundation.org.
Pictured Above: Tina Meier speaks to high school students from Columbia, Columbia Academy, East Marion and West Marion Wednesday morning at Woodlawn Church. The Junior Auxiliary of Columbia sponsored Meier’s presentation about bullying, which was also given to middle school students from across the county on Tuesday. | Photo by Mark Rogers
