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There was a boy at my school who was deaf. A group of other boys used to mock him, shouting at him and throwing things at him. They did it repeatedly. Something about his difference had become, in their minds, permission to hurt him. They found something to entertain themselves with in a child who should have been able to come to school and be left in peace.

That was fifty-five years ago. Not a day goes by when I do not think about him and wonder how he is doing.

I wonder whether he found people who loved him properly. Whether he made a life in which those boys became unimportant. Whether he remembers them at all, or remembers them with a clarity he would give anything to lose. I hope there has been so much happiness in his life that those days occupy very little of it. But I cannot know. I have carried the question for more than half a century.

I do not know what he could hear. I know that being deaf could not have protected him from the meaning of what they were doing. You do not need to hear an insult to recognise contempt. Things being thrown at you need no translation. Neither does the discovery that other people have decided your distress is a source of pleasure.

What stays with me is the effort. They had to keep choosing it. They had to notice him, gather around him, invent things to do to him and return to it. They could have let him pass. They could have spent their energy on almost anything else. Instead, they worked at making another child’s life harder.

I have spent much of my working life trying to lift people up. It still amazes me how hard some people will work to push others down.

I was bullied horribly as a child, too. I was bullied for being gay, for being artistic, for being sensitive, quiet and creative. So much of what came naturally to me was something other people could use to hurt me. It showed in how I carried myself, in my walk, in my face, in the distance I kept. There was no simple way to put those things away and become someone they would leave alone.

What others saw as standoffishness was fear and self-preservation. I kept my distance because closeness could be dangerous. Being noticed could be dangerous. There is a particular cruelty in being hurt until you withdraw, then being judged for the withdrawal. People saw the distance without asking what had made it necessary.

I think of the emotional weather systems we grow up inside. As children, we have so little control over the atmosphere around us. We learn to read a face, a gathering of boys, a change in someone’s voice. We learn when it is safe to be visible and when to make ourselves scarce. Eventually, we can carry that vigilance into places where nobody means us harm. I wonder how often what people thought was my reserve was simply a child checking the weather before stepping outside.

There is a particular loneliness in discovering that an experience is ancient to everyone else and still painfully present to you. The people who hurt you may have forgotten. They may remember school fondly. Something that helped shape your understanding of yourself may barely register in their account of their childhood.

We tell children to ignore it, to laugh along, to stop being so sensitive. Somehow the child being humiliated becomes responsible for making the humiliation harmless. They are asked to find a way to endure something the adults around them should be working to stop.

Perhaps I would have become compassionate without being frightened. Perhaps I would have worked just as hard to lift people up if I had been allowed to grow up feeling safe. There is a whole version of a person that cruelty prevents us from meeting. We see the adult who survived and call the outcome character. We cannot see all the ease, trust and possibility that might otherwise have been there.

Research gives weight to what many of us have struggled to explain. A British study following people across five decades found that childhood bullying was associated with poorer mental health and other difficulties into middle age, even after accounting for several other childhood disadvantages. Those findings do not determine anyone’s future. They do challenge the comforting idea that school ends and the damage ends with it. The study found consequences still visible forty years later. That is a long time to carry something you were told to ignore.

I also want to understand why people do it. Calling cruelty senseless describes how it feels to encounter it, but does not necessarily explain how it works. For the person inflicting it, there may be a reward: attention, belonging, control, the pleasure of becoming important at someone else’s expense.

There is no single explanation for bullying. Some children learn aggression at home. Some act under pressure from their peers. Some pursue popularity or power. The familiar picture of the bully as secretly miserable is incomplete. A child can bully because it improves their standing, and because the people around them make it worthwhile. StopBullying.gov describes these overlapping influences, including the desire to gain or maintain social status.

We want to believe cruelty carries its punishment inside it. Sometimes it brings applause, protection and promotion. Sometimes the person who refuses to join in pays socially. Understanding that reward matters, because asking people to be kinder will accomplish little if we continue to make their cruelty profitable.

The audience matters, too. Bullying prevention guidance recognises the role of children who reinforce it through laughter and approval. Those who want to help can be frightened into silence, worried that defending someone will make them the next target. The roles around bullying extend beyond the person throwing something and the person being hit.

I think about that when I look at public life. The laughter is familiar. So is the calculation about whom it is safe to defend. So is the insistence that everyone is taking a joke too seriously, usually delivered by someone who has never had to endure the joke being made about them.

In November 2015, Donald Trump jerked his arms and altered his delivery while referring to journalist Serge Kovaleski, who has a disability affecting his joints. Trump denied that he was mocking Kovaleski’s disability. I watched the performance and saw a powerful man turning another person into an object of ridicule. The footage and subsequent denial remain part of the public record.

Kovaleski has a career and a life extending far beyond that moment. Neither should the boy I remember be reduced to what was done to him. He had a whole self, most of which I did not know. That is part of what cruelty steals from our view. It makes a person’s vulnerability so conspicuous that everything else about them disappears.

Those emotional weather systems exist in public life, too. What leaders say, what audiences applaud and what institutions tolerate all help establish the conditions in which we live. When humiliation brings a reward, people notice. Some become bolder about inflicting it. Others become more careful about showing who they are. I recognise that carefulness. I know how much of a life it can occupy.

Cruelty can become so familiar that we start treating it as atmosphere, something we must accommodate as we go about our day. It is there in the workplace where someone’s embarrassment becomes a recurring joke. It is there beneath a photograph, where strangers compete to produce the most devastating insult. It is there when a person struggles to explain themselves and the room grows impatient. Each encounter can leave someone a little more apprehensive about the next.

I do not want compassion to depend on someone presenting themselves in a way we find easy to love. People deserve dignity when they are awkward, angry, frightened or unable to explain what they need. Being hurt does not always make a person gracious. We should not require graciousness before we care.

When I began writing this, the midterm election was still ahead of us. I was thinking about what we were prepared to reward, and frightened of the answer. Now the results have given me something I had almost stopped allowing myself: hope that the appetite for cruelty has limits.

Michigan elected Abdul El-Sayed, the first Muslim elected to the United States Senate. New Hampshire elected Chris Pappas, the first openly gay man elected to that chamber. New Mexico chose Deb Haaland, the first Native American woman elected governor of a U.S. state. Minnesota elected Peggy Flanagan, the first Native American woman elected to the Senate. And Georgia elected Keisha Lance Bottoms, the first Black woman elected governor of a U.S. state. These were among the election’s historic firsts.

Delaware also sent Sarah McBride, the first openly transgender person elected to Congress, back for a second term. Her reelection means she will continue serving in a place where her very presence has challenged assumptions about who belongs.

These are people with records, responsibilities and ideas. Their identities cannot tell us everything about how they will govern. But those identities have been used, again and again, as reasons to frighten people, to question their belonging, to suggest that some Americans are less entitled to a place in public life. There is something profoundly moving about seeing voters entrust them with power.

For the gay child I was, that possibility reaches somewhere very deep. I think about the energy that went into making myself less noticeable. How carefully I tried to manage my walk, my face, the things that interested me, the distance I kept. I wonder what it would have meant to see an openly gay man elected to the Senate then. Perhaps I would have carried myself differently the following morning. Perhaps I would have felt less frightened of the life ahead of me.

Perhaps we are seeing the end of an era. I want so much to believe that. I also know how easily cruelty finds another audience, and how much work remains once the celebration is over. The test will come in the ordinary decisions that follow: whom we protect, whom we believe, and whether we speak when someone is being made small in front of us.

That asks something of all of us. It is easy to recognise bullying when we already dislike the bully. It becomes more demanding when the laughter comes from our friends, our colleagues or our own side. I have to hold myself to that standard, too. Otherwise I am simply negotiating over who deserves protection.

I still think about the boy at my school. I hope he found people around whom he could relax. I hope he was valued for things those boys never bothered to discover. I hope there have been ordinary mornings when he woke without dread, and years in which he scarcely thought about school. More than anything, I hope he has known the quiet relief of being somewhere he could simply be himself.

Nothing that happened in this election can give him back those days, or give either of us the childhood we deserved. But the conditions in which children grow up are ours to change. We help make them every time we decide what to encourage, what to interrupt and whom to stand beside. After fifty-five years of wondering how that boy is doing, I find myself hoping that life became gentler around him. I hope he has spent much of it feeling safe enough to step outside without checking the weather.