Who Bullied You?

Experienced light enough bullying at school constantly, but nothing heavy i couldnt shrug off, nickname i didnt like, that sort of thing. Got more physical aggro from teachers tbh.

At home the older brother would beat me senseless often enough (big guy, sensitive, bad childhood, lippy younger brother- perfect storm), and mommy dearest was a fairly vicious creature when the mood/drink took her (1992 thru 2005 iirc) but that was mainly verbals.

severe lasting bullying... but this slowed down when i got to middle school -- which coincided with my family moving back to the east coast -- and stopped altogether by high school. it sucked. i just had nothing in common with other kids. being in adult is so amazing compared to being a kid i'm grateful for it every day.

Mine were all random acts of bullying ... like you're walking down the hall and someone knocks the books out of your hands, or sucker punches you, or etc. But I never felt specifically targeted.

Severe lasting bullying, through middle school (although that was mostly one guy) and high school (from a lot of corners). I recently ran into the middle school bully and he was totally nice tho.

Like poly, mine were random acts. Kids in the neighborhood just being assholes or later in school when someone stole the hat I was wearing and dared me to fight to get it back.

Severe. 7 years since I left school and I still have bad dreams about it. Fucked me up, destroyed my confidence, and contributed to my depression, which I thought I was over, but the last couple of weeks have been quite bad.

I recently ran into the middle school bully and he was totally nice tho.
Were you nice back? Always wonder how I'd react if I bumped into them. Kind of hope it never happens.

i hope you were a dick to him, reverend. it isn't fair how bullies can grow out of it but their victims retain the scars for life.

lol @ the naming & shaming implied in the poll question... the worst I got it was from the "cool"/"bad" kids who generally fared poorly at academics and needed to assert their sense of self-worth via their better looks and/or athleticism and general physical superiority and this persisted throughout the period where those things held conceivably the most weight socially (ie from the middle part of elementary school through to the middle of high school; by the end of high school these kids either realized being a dick was unnecessary and/or had fucked up so bad they were no longer "cool" but were instead on an obvious downward trajectory of unemployability/jail). I've forgotten a fair amount (albeit not all) of their names. There was the kid that pushed me off the top of the jungle gym in 3rd grade and I landed on my face and got a concussion. There were the guys in jr. high that stole my shorts in P.E. and tried to shove me into the girls' locker room. There was the guy that smashed my hand and dislocated my thumb (also in P.E.). There was the guy that would come up to me during lunch and just smash my food/knock it out of my hand/throw it in the trash. (Special shout-outs to Justin Jones, Felipe Salazar, and Dustin Puffer I hope you guys all died in a fire).

xp Ha no. It was pretty cool running into an old face actually.

ime, it was never the in-crowd who dished out the bullying, but the kids who wanted to be in the in-crowd. Also everyone from school that I've crossed paths with since has been totally cool no matter how big of a dick they were at the time.

I used to slap the sandwiches out of one guy's hand, but that shit was legit hilarious tbf

nothing serious for me, I was a prime candidate but blessed with a couple of friends who grew up on my street being little proto-psychos, so I was never one anyone would want to mess with. \o/

Ha i think ive noted before that the psycho scrapper older brother was quite handy to have as a preventative presence outside the house.

I was never the target of mass bullying, usually just one person who had a problem with me. Whenever anyone would try to bully me, I'd challenge them to a fist fight, and I always made sure to show up and throw the first punch. I'd get my ass handed to me, but I earned enough respect pretty quickly that nobody bothered me after that. Choosing abusive friends, that's another issue...

moderate yet fairly constant through late elementary/ jr high. mostly for being undersized, pathetically unathletic (which is really just asking for it in the deep south), and just generally awkward.

by tenth grade things started to look up considerably. my last three years of high school were actually better than college. this was not the experience most of my friends had.

one girl in particular. in 7th grade i got into a fight with a girl I had been best friends with in primary - we fought because I called her a slut behind her back and it got back to her. which wasn't cool. thing was, the bully wasn't the girl I was fighting with, it was one of her friends. this one girl took it up on herself to wage a long war against me on behalf of the girl I had been friends with. she'd follow me whenever she saw me walking around school, whisper threats about beating me up after school, 'we're going to punch your face in', call out to me from across the street if she saw me downtown. it went on for months, to the point where I wouldn't go anywhere by myself because I was scared they were going to get me. mum found out about it and dragged me to the local swimming pool (where I refused to go because that's where they hung out after school), and tried to get me to 'face my fears' and 'stop being a coward'.

i just sat there on the edge of the pool terrified, trying not to make eye contact, knowing this girl was staring at me the whole time.. when we left she and the other girls were standing in the parking lot watching me leave, and she laughed at me.

I have no recollection of how long that went on, my brain says at least a couple of years. I know I made amends with the girl by like, 9th grade. But before then I was too scared to talk to her because I was sure this girl, and her, were going to tear me apart.

it was kind of a dumb situation, since it was partly my own creation. but man. I saw a photo of the mean girl on FB recently and I'm still kind of scared of her.

I was weird and small and bookish, I always thought I should have been bullied but I never was. Too damn likeable I guess ¯\(°_o)/¯

the downside of that is that it has left me totally unprepared for physical altercations as an adult, like when I was randomly attacked in a club a month or so ago.

Never got bullied, never even got in fights. Elementary school, I was taller and bigger than anyone else so I didn't get fucked with even though my best friend was a girl. Jr. high and high school I no longer had a size advantage but was always somewhere between who-cares and popular.

v interested to see if anyone cops to being a bully. I know people who have admitted to being bullies - quite nasty, in one case - and they all really regret it

*having been bullies

First option--I only remember two specific incidents, a few years apart, and both were one-offs and not traumatic. I think an early knack for self-deprecation immunized me somewhat.

I wasn't bullied too much, but I had a tendency to take everything to heart so it seemed much worse to me than it really was.

Well yerman with the sandwiches got over it but it took his mother another decade to warm to me

I don't think I ever straight up bullied anyone, but I had a sharp tongue and played too rough on the playground. Through elementary and jr high I'd belittle people until they didn't want to be so aggro, in high school I didn't want to win arguments/debates so much as make people feel bad for believing what they did.

But it wasn't directed at any persons in particular or on a regular basis, I was just an asshole.

xp my mum still occasionally mentions how a former classmate of mine used to steal my pencils when we were five or six, even though we were friends for about ten years after that.

oh milo, I'm not curious to know if anyone here cops to having been an asshole

My girlfriend has some terrible stories about being a mean girl in junior high - specifically, spreading a rumor that a girl who had been mean to my gf was having sex with her own father, in the course of investigating the terrible rumor it came out that the girl was being molested and had been for years.

That one cured her of bullying.

xp - well, I feel like the line about bullying is much stronger today. Things that didn't seem out of place or bullying in 1991 would probably not fly today.

I'm not so sure about that, kids are little monsters 'twas ever thus

ime, it was never the in-crowd who dished out the bullying, but the kids who wanted to be in the in-crowd

^ this. I once bumped into one of the cool kids one day about five years after we left school. He was lovely to me, we went for a beer, did some "hey remember [cool thing that I wasn't involved in and was only aware of through jealousy], have you heard what [person I never spoke to the whole six years I was at school with then] is up to these days" kind of things. He seemed completely unaware that I was never involved in any of these things and that various of his acquaintances had made me feel I could never be involved in speaking to these things, I was just the quiet geeky kid who kept herself to herself for the most part, and he seemed quite surprised to learn we had similar tastes in music etc, and that we'd never been mates at school. We kept in touch for a wee while, then drifted apart, but it was a nice wee casual friendship for a bit. Except that I spent most of the time thinking "you know, if you'd been this nice to me ten years ago, I'd have been a whole different person now".

I was systematically ignored and left out of things for six years, which is the worst kind of insidious bullying when you're at boarding school and the people you're at school with are all you have. I've all but blanked out my school years these days.

i was never in fights or anything but received a fair amount of ridicule and taunting during middle school. Probably par for the course.

...including my English lessons, it seems. I swear that read coherently a second ago.

xpost to myself

I was sexually abused by one of my classmates regularly during physics. My peers didn't believe me because it involved someone finding me sexually attractive so I never even bothered trying to tell an adult. High school! :D

I went through a year of hell at age circa 13/14. Simply wasn't mature enough to deal with light ribbing while my peer group went from children to overgrown children with serious sociopathic tendencies. One kid, a guy I'd known well since primary school, died in a motorcycle accident in his mid twenties. The last time I saw him I was about 18/19 and he was still acting the same way towards me as when we were young teenagers. I still don't know how to feel about this.

xp - well, I feel like the line about bullying is much stronger today. Things that didn't seem out of place or bullying in 1991 would probably not fly today.

― Kiarostami bag (milo z), Friday, May 24, 2013 12:29 AM (4 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I'm not so sure about that, kids are little monsters 'twas ever thus

― four Marxes plus four Obamas plus four Bin Ladens (Shakey Mo Collier), Friday, May 24, 2013 12:30 AM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

my asshole comment was meant as a joke (you know, cause of the operative word "here" hahaa nah you're right it isn't funny) but I def agree that i)awareness of what constitutes bullying has increased and ii) non-assholes are the minority at that age

that's horrible, lana, sorry

yeah lana that's awful

where was yr physics teacher

I have just remembered a creepy horrible guy in one of my classes flashing his cock at me when the teacher's back was turned because "I'd never see one otherwise". We were about 11, iirc. Fuck, I'm glad I don't think of this stuff much.

i didn't get bullied much

this guy beat me up when i was in 7th grade tho

later he murdered a woman and tied her to a car transmission and sunk her in the river behind his dad's house

http://www.doc.state.mn.us/publicviewer/Inmate.asp?OID=200426

Voted "light and periodic", but it was more "light and ongoing".

For the most part, it wasn't much to call home about, except one kid who picked on me throughout elementary school. On my first day of school, he was the first kid to talk to me. He threatened to take me back to his house and his uncle would cook me in a big stew pot and eat me if I wouldn't be his friend. It all culminated in him pulling a small knife on me in fifth grade at my safety patrol stop. But he had already demonstrated a lot of very apparent family issues, so I wasn't even that shook up about it, other than it being a clear violation of school rules and I was so ready to write him up by that point. I got the cops called and he got a two-week suspension. He committed suicide sophomore year of high school. Must have been so fucked up in his life. : (

But kids picked on me fairly steadily. I had cool friends a grade above me when I was in elementary school, but my parents dressed me in thrift store clothes or lame crap that they brought home from Sears. To compensate, I got kinda weird. No one ever threw me in a locker or whatever, but they asked me what the fuck was wrong with me or if I was a fag or a druggy all the time.

Not sure how to answer this poll. If
Anything I came out better for it, but at the time I was a very sensitive lad with little-to-no self deprecation. Even a jokey sleight would result in serious trauma and kids knew that, so they egged it. I spent my puberty as a zombie as a result. One day a so called friend turned round, upper-cutted me in the jaw and gave me a fat lip before pushing me into a thorny bush at school. My mum told the teachers and I had to spend a humiliating hour with the guy in a PE teacher/head of year's room having to pretend reconciliation. It was the worst time ever... But lasting? It didn't fuck me up. I got better from it. I learnt humility and how to rise above my own problems. I wonder how life would be now if it had never happened. It was a nightmare though

experienced bastard ..

I also had a gang of kids turned up at my parents house to fight me once. A gang (I reckon about a dozen or so). Against me. Apparently my refusal to leave the house meant I was a big girlie sissy, thus validating the rest of the bullying. The ringleader was a mouthy wee madam whose dad was my neighbours' gardener, my parents nearly sold the house on the spot (I was about nine years old at this stage)

..

+ parents ...

Oh man I just remembered something that did happen to me. No way am I talking about it here though.

Interesting to hear from the other side I.e. the bulliers. I like to think I never bullied anyone but of course I did, to an extent. It was purely from fear though - 'thank fuck some other kid's getting grass shoved in their mouth' etc... Terrible shit.

thx pasty, appreciated. Just thought I'd say because sexual abuse doesn't really seem to be understood as part of bullying but that's exactly how I experienced it.

I asked physics teacher if I could move, he just assumed I didn't want to sit with a boy because genderwarslol

ailsa, yeah I'm going to take appropriate prescription drugs now w00t

Light and periodic. The most sustained bullying came from the second and third chair saxophonists in jr. high band (I was first chair la di da) who passed the time in class by being generally rotten to me. But one of them quit band to play football and the other quit to focus on being the best redneck she could be, so that was the end of it. Otherwise, just name calling, moo-ing, or general douchebaggery.

I wasn't one of The Popular Kids, but I wasn't not popular, and I always had a sense of the fleeting nature of my social status. So while I didn't set out to make anybody's life miserable, I definitely joined in occasionally when people were picking on another kid because that kept attention deflected from me. Basically I didn't have a whole lot of integrity when it came to standing against the brutal, random social hierarchy of jr. high and high school. It is a thing I often wish I could go back and fix.

looking back i really had remarkably good luck through school as a whole i'm thankful

did that psycho dude never use 'your mum's so fat i wouldn't even need to use a car transmission' zings

he wasn't a real joker on the whole

violence or the threat of was ever present at home & school, hospitalised a few times. got better when i went to secondary school (11+). couldn't wait to move the fuck away though.

I was not bullied to any noticeable extent, thank god. The one time a kid tried to threaten me in the 7th grade, my older brother stepped in and discouraged him. It did the trick. No incidents in high school. None I can recall before 6th grade. I got off easy.

got in several fights in elementary school, generally stupid 'the fuck did you say about apollonia' meeting of equals or whatever though one was w/ the class bully, i can remember the teachers telling my mom they waited to break up the fight cuz they wanted to see me beat this kid's ass a little more. afterwards he really really wanted to be my friend w/ this weird angle of us as a team or something but i wasn't interested, it's not like he was the cool kid he was just the weirdo that beat up other shyer weirdos (freaks and geeks got this pretty right). another kid i fought several times but there was no bullying there just two kids that hated each other, i remember one time we were fighting over a foul dispute in kickball and i managed to kick some of his teeth out, it was awesome. another time i got stabbed in the eye. then we moved from east point to athens. jr high not as many fights but the social dynamic changes considerably and i don't think that was just changes in location. i'm guessing the introduction of sex (which is gonna lead to greater consciousness and display of class and what cool and style is able to be developed and maintained by a 12 yr old, which tbf is considerably more than can be developed and maintained by a 7 yr old) plus the greater potential for disparity in physical abilities (some 12 yr olds are gorillas, some are lemurs), definite formation of cliques and a social order, saw some actual bullying and mocking but now that i think of it nothing that matched that weird air of tension and desperate awareness of the pecking order. i was friends w/ popular crowd and hung w/ them, went to pool parties, etc but i was never quite of them, i think i was just too enthusiastic about too much weird shit - the cure, comics, horror movies, malcolm x - to be a comfortable fit. i probably only got in five or six fights in jr high and it was w/ both popular kids and dorks, never business, always personal. by high school that weird social order was gone, there were still popular kids and nerds but really everyone was over it and it would've seemed bizarre if someone had a problem w/ someone else cuz of what clique or whatever they were in (particularly as cliques had effectively dissolved), i know this isn't true everywhere (though i've found alot of ppl who recall jr high being much more vicious than high school) so i'm guessing this change came about due to small class size (so that really by this point everyone had in some way actually gotten to know everyone else) plus cars, school was effectively yr job and the ppl who weren't yr friends and you didn't see at parties or whatever were just ppl you worked with. there's some truth to that 'stand up to a bully and he will stop bullying' but i can totally remember dorks who made their stand or whatever and were just so pathetic they only made it worse, and if the kid isn't standing up to one bully but a whole social structure good luck, ain't no 12 yr old beating that.

not quite sure how to vote. it was just one year--seventh grade--but i would describe it as severe for that year. i remember being so scared on the first day of eighth grade, and then nothing. the kids who had tortured me just acted completely normally.

i received some light but malicious zinging, which comes with the territory as a redhead. generally a loner back in the day, i didn't socialize much w/classmates at my first school, i spent most of my time hanging with dudes from my neighborhood shooting hoops and playing baseball or football at the park. whatever i went through at school i can't call it bullying, saddest thing i ever saw was a nice guy dude who was a bit of an outcast and on the JV football team surrounded by a bunch of the hillbilly dbag kids, howling for one of them to beat the shit out of him in the parking lot. that was bullying, mine was just 'the usual' for people who aren't socially skillful and have the ginger gene. i actually don't think skillful navigation of the high school scene is always a 'plus', if that makes sense. at least insofar as being a decent person.

serious bullying in junior high/high school. keep getting told here i'm not good enough to get invited to 77 secret board

me too brother

i grew up in a very small town too and i agree w.ball wrt to social cliques in high school not being as defined in small schools, mostly because you know you need WARM BODIES to have a kegger in a way and there weren't enough ppl to have one clique really be big enough on its own

i remember being teased/made fun of, but i guess i wouldn't call it bullying. i was dorky and had glasses, but i was also relatively tall/athletic.

in fifth grade i somehow got into a 'fight' (really a shoving match) with known tough guy sc0tt kün, who had failed a grade and was thus older -- there was barely any action, but i earned social credit for *not* getting my ass kicked. i remember being in the principal's office and totally breaking down with the *tension* of it all -- i think there had been some build-up like 'we're gonna go after lunch' or something, but i have no idea why it happened as i barely knew the kid.

in eighth grade i was one of a series of kids to fight this one guy. i thought he was a jerk and deserved it, but given the circumstances i'm sure he felt like he was bullied. i distinctly remember handing my glasses to someone to hold, and also that it felt *good* to hit someone in the face.

got into some shoving matches with this kid on my basketball team as a junior/senior, but that wasn't bullying -- we just didn't like each other.

it probably helped too that our football team sucked and that a significant portion of what had been the popular crowd were on academic bowl, super careerist strivers, etc. if there was a social divide it occurred along college prep/vocational lines and even that was effectively non-existent.

by high school that weird social order was gone, there were still popular kids and nerds but really everyone was over it and it would've seemed bizarre if someone had a problem w/ someone else cuz of what clique or whatever they were in (particularly as cliques had effectively dissolved), i know this isn't true everywhere (though i've found alot of ppl who recall jr high being much more vicious than high school)

this was my experience as well - jr high was very much 'cheerleaders, preps and jocks' (even though our teams sucked and no one actually gave a shit - looking back this was all about class), weird middle ground, freaks/skaters. Little overlap and in my last few weeks of junior high there was major tension and a number of fights between the cool kids and freaks (two kids killed themselves - a death metal loving freak who was being held back and his preppy girlfriend who was going forward, led to razzing of the freaks etc.).
Shit got pretty crazy. Then, 2.5 months later high school starts, we're all together plus another 500 kids and it's like none of that ever happened and nothing similar repeated itself.

Feel like a lot of this can be chalked up to the administrative atmosphere - my high school principal was a great guy who didn't allow special treatment of athletes and tbh let the drama kids and journalism kids get away with more, probably.

It was like Dazed & Confused plus an extra helping of Woodersons from the university.

Voted experienced severe lasting bullying

Nothing good came of it for me, except the genuine pleasure and satisfaction that I felt when I discovered recently that the worst of the bullies had a heart attack and drowned while SCUBA diving a couple of years ago

no one ever bullied me really, probably because i was always the biggest person in the class and thus not a good target? i dunno

7-12 was all in the same building in my school, so there wasn't much difference between jr and sr high

I shifted back and forth, probably like most kids - sometimes I was picked on, sometimes I picked on others. Only a few close friends most of the time, but I never really felt ostracized - spent most of my time reading in my room.

Worst things I ever did to other kids: in sixth grade, a new kid decided to raise his own status by challenging me to a fight after school - I got to the top of a hill, and when he came charging up at me I kicked him right in the face and back down the hill he went, fight over (we later became friends); in freshman year of high school, some friends of mine and I held a younger kid (eighth grader, I think, maybe seventh) down on the bus, took his shoes off, and threw them out the bus window. My mom had to buy that kid new shoes, which she told me years later we really couldn't afford at that time (my parents divorced when I was 11/12 and my dad was not the most reliable payer of alimony/child support).

Weirdest thing: I changed schools for two years, came back in time for junior year of high school and for some reason had a much inflated/badass reputation upon my return - there was a rumor I'd been in juvenile jail or something, and I have no idea how it got started.

At 41, with no kids of my own, I'm one of those people who thinks kids today (and especially their parents) are way too sensitive w/r/t bullying - I think kids are shits and they're gonna fight and fuck with each other and you should just let 'em. I see news stories about bullying and I think, "Oh, you got mean emails? Oh, poor you."

yeah some of those stories i think 'good lord man up already' and w/ some i think (again) 'thank fucking god the internet didn't exist when i was young', w/ the exception of yr obv budding sociopaths (who generally act alone) i rarely get too disgusted at the kids bullying - kids are monsters and while who gets bullied and who does the bullying isn't completely arbitrary (helps to be athletic, be attractive, be rich) it's pretty close. kids will do stupid shit. i always end up angry at the administration though, not only failing in their duty to protect the kids being bullied but also to prepare any of these kids for the working world.

well yeah, but being a (pre-)teen is super fucking intense

you don't know how important/unimportant things are, you don't have the experience to deal with it, and no matter what happens you have to keep coming back to school. that's pretty hard

I've realised recently that I've blocked out a lot of school stuff, not so much specific incidents but just how I generally felt day to day. An old friend told me he remembers me being anxious all the time; I had forgotten about it but it's true - I always afraid that I would be picked on and put up big walls even against my friends. That said, the only time I was properly bullied was at the end of primary school and even then it was just insults and someone chucking a book (English dictionary iirc) at my head in class. In secondary school I was ostracised but in retrospect I played my own part in that (cf. walls) - I was a prime target for bullying so I guess I was lucky.

reading this thread, i feel incredibly lucky that i was never bullied - even though i was a pretty annoying, dorky kid who dressed terribly and talked too much and came from a very poor family. i mean, i got into spats with my friends, and there were always a couple of mean kids around who would say/do the occasional nasty thing, but i never felt singled out by it. like darraghmac, the bullying was way worse at home than it ever could have been at school.

xps i think it's easy to say kids/parents should just quit being so sensitive, and i'm sure that's the case sometimes, but i recommend watching the 2011 documentary "Bully" for some fucking heartwrenching examples of just how damaging bullying can be.

the administration at my first high school was atrocious (though actually i thought our school's version of 'dick vernon' was a cool dude in retrospect); teachers who were just teaching so they could be one of the dozens of useless coaches our football team had, teachers who loved to revel in transparent ass kissing from the favored students and who let them get away w/shit while exhibiting zero patience with a lot of other kids, etc. hard to say how much of that is tinted from being a sullen teen but then again a lot of teachers simply aren't good at all.

I had a tormentor who picked on me for a year or so until I flipped on him and he got sent to hospital with a broken nose and a singed eyelid. Got into loads of trouble but it was necessary and he came back with an eye-patch and didn't feel like picking on smaller people so much. You only have break a bully once to get rid of them, but it can be hard work if you don't like violence. I have always despised bullies. I had to pull my son out of school because he hasn't got the ability to fight back against bullies and it brought it all back home to me. Thankfully I have got him into a small Free School for autistic children and don't have to worry about him facing what I found difficult enough.

Voted severe lasting bullying. I still maintain a judgement system of other men where I think 'back at school you would be the type to try and fuck with me' and it is a pathetic value system to drag into adulthood and probably hasn't done me any favours, but there you go.

i think the idea that people should "toughen up" and not be affected by bullies -- not something anyone here has expressed, i don't think -- to be insane. i can't imagine not being devastated, even today, if someone just followed me around all day saying awful, abusive shit.

or wait someone did make the point that people should toughen up and that bullying is inevitable, upthread. i find that to be wrong. bullies should stop, or be stopped. people should be able to have a decent quality of life and children are people too.

agreed but i also can't imagine not resisting it or fighting back either. just remembered one bully i do remember from high school, one of the assistant football coaches (for what was again an awful football team for many years) who taught history on the side (i can remember he had a 'revisionist' take on slavery), i can remember he would definitely pick on the obv weaker/shyer kids in class and try to encourage students into laughing at this poor dork w/ him. the last year he taught at my hs he was caught fucking the girls bball coach on campus so they stripped him of his coaching position (still allowed him to finish out the year as a teacher of course), i can remember some ppl still called him 'coach arnold' but me and my friends always hated that schmuck so we'd call him 'mr. arnold' to his face w/ a smirk. he's apparently a scout now lol.

Bullying is a Bad Thing. It's also an inevitability, because humans are primates. Also, authority figures are mostly useless and never to be truly trusted. My solution to the bullying problem is a mixture of sucking it up and, when possible, reprisal.

As a nerd who started her period at age 10, I experienced sustained bullying for a couple of years until I convinced my mom to "homeschool" me (this just involved sitting in on humanities lectures at UNCA, reading a Richard Dawkins book & doing exactly zero math or homework).

Fortunately I moved to Athens at the beginning of 9th grade & made some really tight friends. School was clique-y, but people were cordial on the whole.

The solution to bullying is to hole up in your room with books & records duh

eh i think it is inevitable only as long as we think it is inevitable, like slavery was or capitalism is today... human beings can transcend things. what our "nature" is, and what aspects of it are and are not immutable, is far from clear.

i know that somehow bullying has become a 'controversial' subject cuz you're denying bigots' kids their god given right to bully gays but it's really insane to me that something that would generally be way beyond the pale and recognized as obv workplace harassment is somehow tolerated cuz children are involved.

man i remember kind of recently being in an in-n-out burger and seeing a 40-something dad with his two kids (maybe 13 and 15) and the older daughter was in a cheer uniform, and some older high school kids were leering at her and he went over to their table and just played it so poorly, really over-aggro, like he was a poster child for residual high school bullying aftereffects. a couple min later as they were leaving one of the dbag dudes shouted at him 'revenge of the nerds!' christ i've never felt so bad for someone's kids in that moment tbh.

pretty clear we're descended from apes iirc

i think bullying is fortunately becoming more 'zero-tolerance', probably because of a combination of social media exacerbating it and people who were victimized during their childhood speaking out more about it now than they would have in times of less "political correctness"

kind of comical how bullying does indeed go down a bit once kids hit high school and after high school it pretty much evaporates.

not 'comical', i don't even know what that means there, but i mean it just tends to disappear

balls otm re. harassment analogy. people say that kids are "overindulged" today but i think for the most part they are treated poorly. they are the only population that can't advocate for themselves so they are on the receiving end of a lot of abuse and bullshit and it sucks.

in terms of descending from apes, obviously that's true, but it's not clear to me that what "status" means to us -- and how rank is pulled and power is maintained -- is analogous to what it means to apes. i just tend to pick "culture" in those interminable nature/culture questions because culture is something we can change and i think it would be a pity to naturalize -- and so render (seemingly) immutable -- phenomena that are actual contingent and changeable, if that makes sense.

it's really insane to me that something that would generally be way beyond the pale and recognized as obv workplace harassment is somehow tolerated cuz children are involved.

It's because children aren't fully formed humans yet, and need to learn boundaries and how to interact - and you don't learn that shit by just following rules laid down by parents, teachers, etc., most of whom are fucked up in ways that even kids can spot. You have to learn by doing. Sometimes that involves treating other kids like shit.

ugh, God. Defensive, aggro parents are the absolute worst. I learned pretty early on that the best way to deal with it was to not let on any emotion. xpost

I think boys have it easier. I'd rather just get the shit beat out of me than submit to the intricate psychological tortures of tween girls.

every kid treated another kid like shit at one point, but the ones who do it systematically should be reined in for their own good as well as the good of the other kids. plus i mean it's good to keep tabs on who the bullies are. sometimes they're klebold/harris types.

every kid treated another kid like shit at one point, but the ones who do it systematically should be reined in for their own good as well as the good of the other kids.

Absolutely.

well yes which is why there should esp be consequences there.

xpost - didn't want to say it cuz it would've been conjecture but would agree that boys have it easier. occasional ass-beating >>>>>>>>> tween girls on a slow day. plus boys have an easy workaround, unless you're just historically ugly and obnoxious if you're good at sports it will greatly increase yr chances at being popular and if you're merely decent at sports it will at least humanize you and take whatever dork stink you've managed to get on you off. i can't think of any corollary escape clause for girls - sure as fuck not sports, not money, not even 'just be pretty' even if that were simple, the mores and unwritten rules at work w/ tween girls are ponderous man.

looking back i really had remarkably good luck through school as a whole i'm thankful

― unfinest DN (upper mississippi sh@kedown), Thursday, May 23, 2013 5:13 PM (2 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i don't understand why people are nostalgic for childhood. i do not remember it fondly.

are you kidding? free rent

you get older, in your memory they stay the same age

I am still super leery of befriending girls who hang out in packs thanks to middle school mindfuckery. I am SO FUCKING GLAD social media wasn't around in the mid-90s; 3-way calling was bad enough.

I was teased a lot from about 5th through 9th grade b/c I wasn't very tough. often I would be the first person to stick my neck out and befriend some new kid. if that kid later become more "popular" than me, he would likely join the other kids in teasing me. one such kid once called me at my house and called my mom a "bitch." my mom called the kid's parents, who were more bothered that she called than by what had happened. i don't even want to talk about the incidents of physical bullying. the one time i fought back I was suspended for a week.

of several folks who bullied me over the course of my childhood, one was killed in a gang fight and the other was killed in a drug-fueled car accident (both while I was in high school). i can't say i was particularly broken up by either event; they felt like cosmic justice to me at the time. if I heard that another one of them died yesterday, I don't think I'd feel much different. sorry if that sounds cold. I was brutalized a few times in junior high and freshman year of high school and I just don't have it in me to forgive.

i don't think most bullies really "grow out of it"; if they did, they would go out of their way to make amends. one of my junior-high bullies later transferred to my college. I ran into him, he acted really happy to see me (and maybe was?). I told him he was and would always be an asshole to me and that was that.

i should say that my mom picked up the phone and he called her a "bitch." i should have bashed his face in the next monday but i was concerned about "getting in trouble." actually above all i just hated dealing with school administrators, who to my mind were just another brand of bully.

despite the clockwork high profile bullying nastiness that pops up It seems every week, I think this generation is generally better than the last. I'm not sure why -- 9/11? Columbine?

i never had the physical altercation problem, except one kid who beat me up in fourth grade by pushing my face in gravel. i don't really understand the mindset of a bully. as far back as i can remember i've always wanted to get through the day without causing conflicts and i could never deal with the prospect of anyone disliking me, it would tear me apart. these kids seem to have a different modus operandi.

I got in a couple of fights or pushed around on the playground a couple of times, but nothing consistent or remarkable. I was an asshole to a couple of people but again, nothing consistent. I was generally too sensitive to be too mean to people and didn't get riled up enough to make consistent bullying worth it, plus my class had no real strong hierarchy and everyone tolerated everyone else for the most part.

The last time I remember somebody fucking with me was in 8th grade, and I told the guy - the class bully who had failed a grade or two so he was much bigger than anyone and probably really poor with a shitty homelife - to go ahead and kick my ass in front of the assembled crowd of people because it wouldn't matter if he got suspended, as he was stupid and doomed to fail at life and nobody cared about him. He teared up and ran away which still kind of haunts me and makes me feel awful but he was cool to me after that.

actually i sort of did that once, i was in science class freshman year. one day we got back our exam grades, and a bunch of dudes around me were giving each other high-fives for getting C's (that wasn't better than their average, they were congratulating each for doing not-well--a sad kind of social pathology). one of them (a guy who had earlier punched me for reason in middle school, then chased me into the bathroom) saw that i had got an A and started ridiculing me for it. i told him that he'd probably end up in juvie within a year and would miss me. he actually just kind of laughed at that but did stop bugging me after that day.

he did end up in juvie w/in a year.

(i would look him up to see what he's been up to since, but i forgot his name, which is sort of the ultimate revenge.)

Bullied constantly by one particular, fixated girl (the leader of a particular group of 'tough' smoker's-corner girls) throughout 7th/8th grade - in the last week of 8th, having been told she'd be suspended if she hassled me again, girl hit me and then realised I had her entire future in my hands because if I reported it she'd have to miss finals, repeat the year and essentially be separated from her equally stupid friends. Her face was a kaleidoscope of emotions as she processed these facts. I just folded my arms and stared at her until she couldn't grow any more pale, and then she actually ran away. The next year, this girl and her friends did little snipey things to me every day, but not the physically intimidating crap they did before. All of this stopped for good when the leader of the incredibly cool and mature punk-rock girls told them 'if you've got a problem with her, then I guess we have a problem with you.' Which was a relief, because the administration generally dealt with problems by dragging people into offices only to tell them that one person's word against another meant no action, or the next person to interrupt the adult would be given detention. I called bullshit on the assistant principal in one of these meetings, for worrying more about the respect he felt he was owed by us just for being the adult in the room, than the respect he was supposed to get us to show for one another every day. The girls who were bullying me didn't have ideas like that or the vocabulary to express them, which was part of the reason I was getting bullied by them, and the assistant principal didn't issue any more bullshit demands for me to respect him.

The situation now is that I have more good friends from my high school than I actually had in high school. The word from most of them was that, bullying aside, I seemed to be so determined to get where I was going, and so independent/not giving a shit about peer pressure that people (boys in particular) were actually intimidated by those things. Many of the zings I offhandedly fired at abusers have been quoted back to me as 'classic' twenty years later. Plus, in hindsight, they came to realise I was into all the stuff they grew to find cool when they got to college.

Light/periodic. Nothing particularly traumatizing, and I was targeted (afaik) far more for nerdiness/quietness than for perceived gayness. One of my early high school occasional bullies, however, is now the captain of an NHL team.

light/periodic coupled with the dispensing of some light/periodic bullying. ticked "other option".

I was bullied from 4th-7th grade. I was annoying & precocious & loud & didn't really know how to react to kids calling me a faggot other than by bursting into tears and being all "WHY CAN'T YOU BE NICE TO ME??" so I feel like I was just an open target. I remember one time someone convinced like half of my 6th grade gym class to chant "fag! fag! fag!" at me. It hurt pretty bad but mostly because the teacher refused to do anything about it. Teachers hated me more than any of the kids. A teacher once pulled me aside and told me I was the most ridiculously out of control student he'd ever had & I was basically ruining his life and making him hate getting up in the morning. Things like that happened pretty often in middle school & it sort of explains a lot of my approval-seeking issues I think.

The last time I can remember really being bullied was by this one guy in my freshman year gym class, by which point I was kinda old enough to just Deal With It, but I do remember one day he kept making fun of me playing volleyball and I ended up storming over to the other side of the net and throwing weak punches at him. Then he kicked me in the nuts and I just sat out for the rest of the period. Thinking about that incident just makes me LOL though.

Aw. I cried a lot too, crut.

this thread is so intense

not sure what to choose from the listed options: i bullied myself a lot more severely and with less restraint than anyone else ever bullied me, though there were external incidents involving ostracization, notes, everyone hating me (multiple occasions) and being rejected constantly for no reason i was able to tell. took me a long time to bounce back!!!

Man, what seandalai said really hits home. I wasn't bullied much, but I was very sensitive to what little did happen (it was more teasing than bullying) and it made me put up walls, avoid social situations, made me think that most everyone would bully/tease me. But my worst enemy was myself. Makes me sad to read that so many people had to go through this stuff, bullying fucking sucks.

Got bullied pretty badly up to but not including getting beat up at school throughout elementary school -- then the one physical confrontation that did happen, when I was about 10 (a friend of mine who was borderline cool kid), I fought back hard -- I lost badly because I was no good at fighting, but I hurt the other guy because I was big and, since I was getting the crap beat out of me at home by my older brothers (severe physical abuse by siblings, above and beyond normal fighting, strikes me as an underexamined and underreported traumatic life molder), I wasn't scared. I think this incident kept me safe throughout the Lord of the Flies nightmare of Jr. High, and I was not shy and fairly funny, so I eventually advanced to King of the Geeks by the time I abdicated for punk rock.

I don't know how to vote in this. I was both a victim and a perpetrator.

I was naive and sensitive and could be made fun of endlessly for dumb shit, so I was. The bullying was not, in retrospect, THAT bad, but the problem was the school wasn't big enough to flee to another group: everyone knew everyone.

Aside from getting called "nigger" once every 18 months or so up through middle school, in 8th grade I endured a full-on assault from the popular clique that culminated in a group of dudes spitting on me during a bus trip. I spit back at one of them and all of us got detention and had to clean up the cafeteria together. I am actually cool with pretty much all of those guys now but I will never forgive the administration for punishing me along with them, even if I see some shreds of the logic if I look at it dispassionately.

Also, in 9th grade after my brother was killed by a hit-and-run driver, a kid started passing around a "hilarious" drawing he did of a black man getting run over by a truck with "NIGGERKILLER" written on the side of it. This dude happened to have his locker outside of my honors English class; one day, one of my friends told me as the bell was ringing that dude was out at his locker by himself, so I left the classroom, grabbed his ears, banged his face into the adjacent locker door five or six times, and threw him headfirst into his locker.

No one really fucked with me after that.

Teachers hated me more than any of the kids. A teacher once pulled me aside and told me I was the most ridiculously out of control student he'd ever had & I was basically ruining his life and making him hate getting up in the morning.

That is horrible. That teacher sounds worse than the bullies because at least the bullies have the excuse of being kids.

I had one teacher in middle school that had it out for me and hated me, and would do things like call me a weirdo in front of the whole class which didn't exactly help with the mild bullying I was already getting from other kids. One day I snapped and told her to fuck off -- she was outraged and tried to get me suspended from school, but because I was an honor student the principal decided not to suspend me from school but suspended me from her class for the rest of the semester. I got to do my classwork in the library (which took maybe 5-10 minutes), and spent the rest of the time reading and goofing off. It was awesome.

xp - Dan, that almost goes beyond bullying, I have no words for that.

that is so incredibly fucked up and horrible, Dan. :(

I don't really hold anything against said teacher for saying what he said; I was a hyperactive little shit and dude was a really good teacher. He just snapped because I was such a thorn in his side & made it difficult for him to do his job I guess.

in eighth grade I had him again & by then I had chilled out considerably. I should try to find what he wrote in my yearbook that year; it was something to the effect of what was once a menace is now a thoughtful well-adjusted young man

aw

Oh our group at college ostracized meself and herself cos she dated one of em for a while previously, it was p much the social equivalent of 'buy one get one free' tbh

despite being small and dorky, i was never really bullied, mainly because during those prime years for bullying i was at small private international schools that didn't have a culture of bullying, esp. physical bullying, i don't remember any fights at all. i went to a shitty high school with lots of drugs/violence for my last two years of high school but was mostly ignored, i just kept my head down and kept to myself. only real incident was i had to sell candy for some club i was in, i was at my locker and a kid came up and just grabbed the whole bag out of my hands and walked away. i ended up paying for all of it myself.

having to sell stuff for school is already form of bullying

Was he amanda palmer

easy but satisfying lol

thanks everyone for all these stories. reading these makes me realize i wasn't really bullied all that much in school... for some reason I always imagined i was ostracized or something. and it's dawning on me that i was kind-of a bully in reaction to feeling like that. as an adult i feel really guilty for the way i treated people, i was such a rotten little bastard to people who never gave me any problems. it's sorta like that liz lemon highschool reunion episode.

in 3rd or 4th grade i was friends with this girl who was poor and had a lot of problems at home. i suppose we were able to relate a little bit on that level, and i had fun hanging out with her. by 5th grade i was pretty angry and started developing depression, and i began making fun of her and being an all-around jerk to not just her, but lots of people. but damn i had an impact on her; in my early 20s i heard from a mutual friend that she spoke of me like i was the devil. i was that evil childhood bully to someone, that monster someone carries around with them in their traumatic memories. i feel so horrible about that. i've had fantasies about meeting her and apologizing to her for the way i was. my life was a living hell growing up, and i just didn't know wtf i was doing.

re: that picture incident (which I think was.. within 2 months of my brother's death? oh and btw the other detail to that horrible situation is that his best friend from college offered to act as a surrogate brother figure for me, then went out drinking in my brother's memory and wrapped his sports car around a telephone pole, culminating in me attending my surrogate brother's funeral on my 15th birthday; this is all just a massive, terrible tangent tho) I made sure word was passed around the school that if I heard of anyone saying anything about my brother, I would hunt them down and kill them.

so basically, I solved my bullying problem by letting everyone know I was psychotic and perfectly willing to do them irreparable harm if they crossed me

some bullying stories

1. in 5th grade a kid did a book report on Howard Stern's Private Parts. i told my parents (not intending to get the kid in trouble) and they were horrified and complained to the teacher. the kid was so angry that i snitched on him that he started being really mean to me - saying mean things, spitting at me, getting other kids to be cruel. our school had a student legal body where students could bring up conflicts w/ other students for arbitration. however he was friends with people on the court and they ruled that i was to blame for telling on him and he could continue to do whatever he wanted. after one particular bad day i lost my self-control and beat the crap out of him - i ended up smashing his head against the concrete outside and he pretty much stopped bothering me after that.

2. re naivety, i was really naive + not savvy w/ kids at all. in 7th grade they did one of those "look there's an X on the ceiling" where X is totally unbelievable thing (that i don't remember anymore) and i looked at the ceiling and the other kids teased me for being so gullible. i was really embarrassed (i was in a constant state of embarrassment at the time) and i kept thinking how it wasn't fair that i was picked up for being credulous when that seemed like a good thing to me. why should i be mocked for not being cynical and thinking other ppl wouldn't lie. this is the kind of thought process i had at the time and for indicative of why i was such an easy target. just no sense of social awareness.

3. in high school in 9th grade i didn't get picked on by other students anymore. i was pretty snarky + dismissive and started hanging out w/ older kids so the social stuff fell into place. however i got thrown out of two homes (the out-of-town school i was attending housed students at local community homes). the first was for a huge drama where a friend of mine (the son of one of the Rabbis) threatened my roommate w/ a knife and they thought i put him up to it (i didn't like my roommate but i def didn't encourage this kid). also i played video games, listened to secular music and read faulkner, none of which was allowed. in the second home my roommate was the son of the parents of the house. the kid was pretty troubled and he thought i was trying to steal his parents from him (bc i got somewhat close w/ his father) and claimed that i told him i had dreams of killing babies (definitely didn't happen). so i got thrown out of that house too. the third house was much better for me, and i didn't end up staying at the school the next year. however i remember the rabbis called me into their office regularly to just deride me and mock me and tell me how worthless i was. tbh tho if you have to choose between the administration bullying you and the other kids bullying you, i'd go administration every time. and i think it kind of made me a hero that the rabbis hated me so much.

the worst part of high school for me, and i wouldn't really consider this bullying but it was definitely oppressive, was having my room and items constantly searched for contraband. the rabbis stole my books, music, they were always invading my privacy throughout high school. this was really traumatizing, especially for a kid who loved to read novels so much. things got a lot better in 11th grade when the head of the school told me that i had a special gift for literature + writing and he gave me a special dispensation to read secular literature (as long as it wasn't too inappropriate). still there's nothing like having your privacy constantly violated to make you feel worthless and hateful. one time the rabbis took my music collection (which had jewish and non-jewish music) and i broke into the rabbis office to get rid of the evidence before he could get me in trouble and throw me out of school. they encouraged the other students to snitch on each other, which i never did, but got snitched on plenty. oh my god i could write a book about my experiences in high school. looking back on it now i feel like it was a lifetime ago in some foreign country - my time spent in pre-war eastern europe.

Am a little disturbed by how violence basically does solve everything in a lot of these.

ding ding ding

On the flip side, in 5th grade I beat up my best friend on the school bus because a group of 6th graders threatened to beat me up if I didn't; we stopped talking after that but after a brief ugly period of hating him for being weak enough to get beaten up by me (which... wtf was I thinking) I felt like it's the worst thing I've ever done to someone and to this day I wish I could go back in time and take the beating instead.

Then there were the stupid kids who thought they could look down on me because I was black and assumed that they were therefore better than me; I would tear them apart verbally and then remind them that, despite spending all their money on designer shit, my family had more money than theirs could even dream of and, status and intellect-wise, they weren't even fit to be in the same room as me. There was one girl in particular who was very snide and dismissive of me until we had chemistry together (she was not in in the honors program and wasn't in any of my English, social studies or math classes) and sat near enough to me that I could see the grades she was getting on assignments and tests, which I would then announce to the class and wonder whether that meant half or 75% of the class was doing better at this rudimentary, algebra-based version of chemistry than she was; I also ridiculed the incredibly yellow spray tan she got before prom, asking her if she was feeling okay because she looked jaundiced and that there might be a problem with her liver and that I hoped it didn't ruin her prom pictures. I don't feel the least bit bad about any of that shit, either.

So it's not like I was a blameless, innocent victim for all of high school; I'm sure I terrorized several people and, aside from that one dude in fifth grade, they all fucking deserved it.

Light and periodic. The most sustained bullying came from the second and third chair saxophonists in jr. high band (I was first chair la di da) who passed the time in class by being generally rotten to me. But one of them quit band to play football and the other quit to focus on being the best redneck she could be, so that was the end of it. Otherwise, just name calling, moo-ing, or general douchebaggery.

I wasn't one of The Popular Kids, but I wasn't not popular, and I always had a sense of the fleeting nature of my social status. So while I didn't set out to make anybody's life miserable, I definitely joined in occasionally when people were picking on another kid because that kept attention deflected from me. Basically I didn't have a whole lot of integrity when it came to standing against the brutal, random social hierarchy of jr. high and high school. It is a thing I often wish I could go back and fix.

OH and I cannot even imagine how much different it would be to deal with all the issues around this shit if the internet had existed when I was a kid. I am so fucking thankful it wasn't around (me b. 1970).

― carl agatha, Thursday, May 23, 2013 8:10 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

This! Right down to the part about being first chair sax (la di da) (alto for me). And esp incl the regrets about occasional joinings-in.

I feel lucky that I had a pretty tight group of 4 or 5 friends who were of similar middling geek status and remained consistent from grade school through middle school and most of HS until I had to drop out because of colitis.

Interestingly, the band room was also the site of my most regretted infraction: they would send us back into these practice rooms in groups of three or four and no one would fucking practice at all, it was outright license to go back there and be crazy with your buds for an hour. So my little practice group was always me, the girl I had a crush on, who also had a crush on me (but nothing ever happened) (flute section), her bff (also flute section), and a kid named Mike (trumpet) with a very, very, very unfortunate last name who had nominated himself to be universally picked on by coming to the first day of school wearing a mesh shirt with nothing underneath it.

We'd go back there and start teasing Mike, then the two girls would take off their shoes and start whapping Mike with them really hard while Mike laughed as if this was v enjoyable horsing around. It was a horrible mean and weird thing and charged by bizarre girl-boy energy (Mike clearly was kind of enjoying it insofar as it was physical interaction with girls). He continued to want to come back in the practice room with us despite the fact that chris and darlene were absolutely gonna assault him with their shoes. Of course none of us ever got in trouble.

I got teased verbally a lot 3rd grade through 9th grade for being 1. tiny 2. having a monkey face 3. big round straight haircut 4. D&D/paperbacks/comics nerd etc etc, yet somehow avoided ever getting my ass actually kicked. I guess I wasn't tall enough to be rewarding game, and also my sense of humor was more genial than snotty so it didn't provoke reprisal. Unlike my buddy tony who could not keep his mouth shut if a good burn suggested itself and got his face smashed a bunch of times as a result (cf the smart-ass kid from S King's It).

To this day I've never been in a physical fight. If someone attacked me, I have no idea if I'd shit myself, have a stroke & die, or erupt in a lifetime of fury and destroy my assailant.

Whoops! I accidentally inserted one of my sentences in the end of carl agatha's quote!

THIS is me not carl agatha:

OH and I cannot even imagine how much different it would be to deal with all the issues around this shit if the internet had existed when I was a kid. I am so fucking thankful it wasn't around (me b. 1970).

sorry

Being an awkward, nerdy, socially inept kid growing up AND relocating every 1-2 years thanks to my dad's job made me the perfect target for bullying every time I had to start at a new school. Junior high was torture, but high school was a special brand of hell.

Two quick stories:
My freshman year my study hall period was supervised by the football coach and was made up, primarily, of senior football players. It was in an interior classroom with no windows to the outside and a sidelite that was usually closed off by blinds. I would estimate that 79% of the times I walked into the room I was ambushed. The light days just meant whatever I was carrying was knocked on the floor. The worst days I headed to the bathroom bleeding. Football coach thought it was hilarious (because smart kids all need to be "toughened up") and principal refused to punish "star football players".

Our high school held an administration sanctioned "freshman initiation week" up until the mid-90s. Among the least terrible things I was made to do was forced to have deer piss (or whatever hunter types use) smeared under my nose.

oh, and i answered the second option

in primary school there were a group of sixth grade girls who would go around feeling for bra straps on the younger girls. if they felt a bra they would take you into the hedges, make you close your eyes, and they would pull back your bra straps really far and snap them. it fucking hurt. and then they would laugh and tell you to get lost.

i have no idea why they did that. but all 3 girls had very big boobs for sixth graders, so I just figured they were pre-empting getting teased by everyone else.

what made them realize this was not a good thing to approve?

Re: administration sanctioned hazefest

I was bullied so bad in middle school that meetings were held with my parents and the other kids parents at the school. I came home every day in tears for two years. It got so bad that I had to change schools eventually.

Re: administration sanctioned hazefest

A new superintendent started in the district and his son was going to be a freshman, so it was one of the first things he got rid of. Unfortunately, his son ended up becoming a good quarterback, so he ended up reinforcing all of the other football bullshit that ruled the district and town. Keep in mind, this was a tiny central Illinois town of 1800 people.

hmm let's see...

3rd grade i had a kid knock me over on the playground on a day after a beautiful freezing rain. i guess the roads were ok, but the playground was like a skating rink. in retrospect it seems pretty dimwitted of the school to let us out on it, but it was fun. until that kid swept my legs out from under me and i landed chin first. my mom had to come in and take me to the clinic cos i needed stitches; i still have a scar.

i vaguely remember being afraid of a kid around that same time named, no joke, "mike jerkins" but i don't remember why, and i can't remember if mike (no google-proofing. hi, dumbshit!) was the kid who knocked me down either.

in middle school i had a couple kids threaten to kick my ass cos of something i'd said about a girl in our grade. i don't want to get into the details because i am legit still ashamed and horrible about it, but i was pretty afraid. i had to re-route a lot of my pathways through the school to avoid them and was tardy a lot because of it.

aaand then in 8th grade i had a pair of friends (twins, as it happens) turn on me for reasons i'll never understand. nothing too violent but just constant annoyance and fuckery, messing with my stuff, breaking pencils, lying to other people. i think it did eventually get bad enough that we had to talk to the principal, and i remember not being able to adequately explain how baseless it was. school people always treat this stuff like there must be an underlying cause where both people are at fault; maybe these days that idea is changing. i think they were just enjoying themselves. strangely enough, if i had to interact with ONE of the twins during that time it was all ok. after a while they just stopped, equally w/o explanation.

all in all, not that bad.

When I did switch schools I went to an all-girls catholic school and made a bunch of friends who were cool until I told my class that I wanted to be an OBGYN which of course meant that I was lesbian. So one day I got a note in my locker that they were friend dumping me without explanation. It wasn't until senior year that I found out that was why - they thought I was gay. So after they dumped me I had no friends and literally ate my lunch in a bathroom stall for 3 months until a teacher found me one day and made some older sophomore girls take me to lunch with them. Oh god it was so humiliating. Eventually I found some awesome new friends and things got better. Oh and the girls who friend dumped me all still live on Long Island and have like 15 kids each and seem kind of horrible and boring now. Thanks facebook!

aw ENBB i am glad u made it, that all sucks like crazy

yeah no kidding.

a lot of heartbreaking stuff itt. hope everybody feels all right now, though it's amazing how man institutions still feel like high school...

My primary bully in 8th grade and early HS was a physically powerful athletic girl who had a sports star older brother and teased a lot rougher than I was used to, and was willing to be harsh and publicly critical, probably, in retrospect, something like a "coach" figure who is mean but you're supposed to want to uh overcome their criticisms or something. Instead I was emotionally SLAIN by every single one and spent hours trying to figure out why she hated me so much, and retreated sullenly and cried in private every day. I think I've told this before but one warm Memorial Day parade when I passed out from heatstroke in my marching band uniform, she was the first person to notice and urge someone else to catch me (and my new trumpet). She never hated me, she might even have liked me well enough and probably couldn't figure out why I was so incredibly vulnerable? But it was after 10 years of being a laughingstock for 100 people who I could never get away from so

xpost totally. Which has to also be why we keep dreaming about it, apparently til we die.

I have so many more stories I could share, the timing of this thread is kind of interesting for me. I've really been delving into this stuff in therapy lately and, holy shit at the memories that are flooding back. Nothing I would say that I really "repressed" (in the overly dramatic, huge revelation TV way) just stuff I tried to never think about.

I worked on my poker face early, years later someone said something like, I really envied how nothing seemed to get to you, I wish I could be above it like you and not care, which was funny because I felt like I was going to die of the embarrassment and hurt but be damned if I was going to let those shits know it.

Aw, thanks guys. It was pretty bad! It definitely affected me in ways I still see today in like how I have this overwhelming need to feel like people like me - even people I don't care about.

even people I don't care about.

Yeah I have this too.

xp yeah i get that too. i'm really bad at conflict, esp instigating 'necessary' conflict or uncomfortable sitches with people. which is probably why the one classic bullying deal i was stuck in persisted for so long. i just let it sit with myself and wonder if x person is going to get much worse to me than they already are...

i really don't know what current ed-psych thinking is on this, is fighting back good?

i totally have that too, E. there's no worse feeling for me than if I think someone has misunderstood me or doesn't like me

i really don't know what current ed-psych thinking is on this, is fighting back good?

IME fighting back was great but I think it really depends on the situation and the personalities involved; I was informed by a former coworker (and current friend) who grew up in Brockton, MA, that if I had done/said any of the things I did in my high school, I would likely be dead.

I think you kind of know where those things stand, like you sense how far you have to go if you want to be "extreme"--you can misjudge it or w/e but if you think BEING KILLED is a real possibility, all the rules are different.

I also ridiculed the incredibly yellow spray tan she got before prom, asking her if she was feeling okay because she looked jaundiced and that there might be a problem with her liver and that I hoped it didn't ruin her prom pictures

Haha awesome. Wish I'd been brave enough/ quick enough on my feet to rattle off a zing like this. The "mean girls" were every bit as terrible as the jocky redneck dudes when I was catching the worst of it 5th-8th grade.

it helped a lot that my mom was on the school board at the time, I think

On the penultimate day of 8th grade a buncha girls in my choir period started making fun of my outfit, which featured thigh-high stockings under a short skirt (oh, the 90s...). When they started to get physically threatening between periods, I went straight to the office and told them I was going home for the rest of the year.

I was beyond pissed when the movie Clueless came out 3 years later and everyone started wearing knee- and thigh-highs with skirts.

http://www.fash-eccentric.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/throwback-thursday-fashion-clueless.jpg

Yikes! were there any lectures at home?

Re: mom on school board

my notable bullying experiences:

in 4th grade - we sat in groups of four desks clustered together, and the other three people i was grouped with - two girls, one boy - were sort of merciless to me. they made me do all the work on group projects and then copied all my answers (and then mocked me when i got something wrong). the boy was just a humongous asshole to me on the regular, like i'd go out of my way to avoid him if i saw him in the hallway because i knew he was just gonna start shit with me, and i guess the girls just followed suit. having trouble remembering specifics but definitely get razzed for not wearing cool enough clothes. i symbolically set my desk a little further apart from them but never asked for a seat change because i intuited my teacher didn't give a shit. the seating assignment changed after a month and it got better after that but i dreaded school during that whole month. (i became close friends with one of the girls later, although we haven't spoken much lately.)

in 7th grade - teased intermittently by guys who are now total 'roid cases so i can't really sweat it, but i was also shoved into a locker that year by this one kid who was sort of an outcast (and who was listed alphabetically after me, so our lockers were adjacent). he unnerved me because this would alternate with him occasionally being nice to me (i somehow remember once being in a park with him and his mom and her telling me that she thought it was great that her son and i were friends). in high school he sat behind me in homeroom and would call me "smithers" because i seemed kind of gay i guess? then word got around to him that i actually was gay and he was thrilled that his nickname wasn't far off the mark. anyway, mostly low-level stuff (i guess except for the locker thing) and he definitely had some shit of his own he was dealing with but i never felt comfortable around him. i ran into him some years later - he was drunk and he apologized to me for the way he acted towards me in HS.

freshman year - i was harassed by these guys in the locker room pretty routinely (like, they'd put their hands all over me while i was undressing). i went to our vice principal about it (we saw the actual principal maybe like...four or five times total throughout my 4 years there) and he didn't do a thing about it, probably because those kids were always in trouble anyway so they were sort of "in" with him just by dint of seeing him all the time. saw one of the guys a few years later at UDel and he was really nice.

My parents shamed the racist football coach who kept benching my all-conference running back brother (the one who died, who also played for Air Force until a back injury forced him to quit) so he could try to make a worse white kid into a star, so no. I was actively encouraged to stand up for myself.

I worked on my poker face early

I remember being shocked when my closest friend in high school laughingly told me that I was constantly glaring at people in the halls - without even realizing it, my facial expression was pretty much always somewhere between the face visible in the WDYLL thread and a look of pure psychotic rage.

As mentioned above, I was perfectly capable of winning arguments with adults in the administration and often deployed 'don't make me have to tell you why you're wrong again in front of my mom'. It worked. No hassle whatsoever on that side of things after 8th grade.

I once told a Mean Girl 'where you're going, the longest word you'll ever need to spell is Maybelline.' Was clued in by a friend in the Mean Girls years later that they all took turns hating each other and if that person happened to be zinged by me during their turn in hate corner, bonus.

teased intermittently by guys who are now total 'roid cases

Presume you're referring to steroids, but I first read it as "they are total hemorrhoid-cases", which I hope so too.

depends on how much they're lifting

At home, my talents ran in the direction of being the peacemaker and the calmer of troubled waters. Apparently this spilled over into my school life, too. I can recall someone at my 20th H.S. reunion, when I'd made a joking remark about 'my enemies' at school, earnestly and immediately telling me, "but you didn't have ANY enemies".

Not even the potential schadenfreude of seeing in person the miserables wrecks that my tormentors have become would get me to even consider attending any high school reunion. My 20th will be next year and I plan on responding to the invitation the same way I responded to the 10th and 15th (who does those btw?): "Fuck no.".

I have not been able to go to a reunion since the 5th, which was super fun

Sounds like pure torture to me. Of course my few close friends from high school were either in the class ahead of me, or the class behind me. My class was terrible and I wish ill on nearly every single one of them.

The two guys I was really good friends with in high school are both dead now. I don't even think I'm Facebook friends with more than one or two people I knew back then.

I was bullied for three years, then I became friends with the new super strong dude and I was left alone.

the best part of the 5 year reunion was seeing Jaundice Girl with her husband from the class in front of us; she was literally the only person there having a terrible time and a good 80% of her "friends" were shunning her to hang out with the people she used to try to look down on

the last time ilx did this thread i said american schools seems generally worse than english ones, which some other english people who went to worse schools disagreed with

i don't think the sort of open toleration or encouragement of violence especially by ~varsity~ athletes is as common here

in general teachers treat it as something they would rather went away but if it is brought to their attention clearly enough then they are obliged to at least be seen to do something

I feel like high school hierarchies taught me a lot abt how the rest of the world views the United States. like the popular sporty kids who could get away with anything and the star qb who could get his underage DUI swept under the rug were the U.S., the douchey smart kids were the Brits, I was fortunate enough to merely be Canada (kept my head low, didnt get involved, oddball music taste, fair complexion.)

I completely avoid anything/anybody having to do with jr. high/hs, I hated the whole town and everybody in it so much. I can count on one hand the number of people I have seen from my childhood post-college and in each case they had to do some work to find me. I have often joked that the only reunion I would attend would be the 75th, when presumably most everyone is dead.

the thing I loved about my high school in retrospect (believe me, I hated it at the time) is that I, as an honor student who ran varsity track and played JV soccer, could basically do whatever the fuck I wanted, including periodically asking teachers if I could skip their classes for a day and physically assaulting kids who made fun of my dead brother

like, I should have at least gotten detention for ambushing that dude considering I left class after the bell rang to do it and at least one teacher was in the hall and my teacher watched me leave the class and come back in, but no one ever said anything to me; it was basically like the whole school had heard about what this kid did and aligned itself so that I could jump him

the other thing that's weird is, for as much as I hated being there, I can easily think of like 50 people from my class of 340 I would like to hang out with right at this very second

ugh god this is bringing back some awful memories.

8th grade gym class. "teacher" (I use that term very lightly) standing on one end of the gym. students lined up on the other. i don't remember what for.

this kid named cris cripell (?), short compact little dude with a huge mean streak, would just stand next to me and punch me in the shoulder. over and over and over, daring me to punch him back (knowing i'd get in trouble for doing so). over and over and over. occasionally i would grab his fist and push it back toward his torso and tell him to cut it out, but then he'd start right back up again.

the fact that i never punched him back means that i'll always feel like punching that little shit. a few years later i was walking around downtown and he passed me on his bike (he had long since been transferred to a school for "problem" kids) and yelled out some insult that i can't recall.

i have one 8th grade story that is pretty dramatic and amazing but it's a little too painful and specific for me to want to share. i'll think on it.

strangely enough the jocks at my HS were pretty nice. in fact there was a lot of jock/nerd crossover (I believe at the college level they call him "scholars and athletes")--two good friends, who worked on the school newspaper with me, were champion football and volleyball players, respectively. i never had any problems from jocks.

the volleyball player went to harvard

First chair alto sax high five to Jon Lewis!

There was a little psycho who used to be in the honors program but discovered drugs in 7th grade and decided that instead of studying he wanted to chihuahua-terrorize the school; his favorite thing was to put straight pins through a pencil eraser and hit people on the back of the neck/shoulders with it while his larger stoner friends giggled. He did this to me once and I turned around, grabbed his t-shirt and hissed "if you do that again I will fucking maim you" in his face.

I think that was the last conversation I ever had with him.

I was first chair tenor sax by default, because there wasn't another tenor sax player.

I was bullied for three years, then I became friends with the new super strong dude and I was left alone.

― Van Horn Street, Friday, May 24, 2013 6:05 PM (18 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

http://awesomebmovies.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/my-bodyguard-scene.jpg

On the penultimate day of 8th grade a buncha girls in my choir period started making fun of my outfit, which featured thigh-high stockings under a short skirt (oh, the 90s...). When they started to get physically threatening between periods, I went straight to the office and told them I was going home for the rest of the year.

I was beyond pissed when the movie Clueless came out 3 years later and everyone started wearing knee- and thigh-highs with skirts.

http://www.fash-eccentric.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/throwback-thursday-fashion-clueless.jpg

― kate78, Friday, May 24, 2013 12:33 PM (40 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

ooh, the years burn...

i absolutely adored siamese dream and gish, was made fun of a lot by ppl cos billy corgan sounded like 'a faggot', the band's iconocraphy is all hearts and girls, the power ballad was the one on mtv, etc. a year later mellon collie comes out, i don't like it very much, more than one of these country motherfuckers starts turning up in a ZERO tshirt!

http://www.gangsterbb.net/img/NoRespect.jpg

I always think of billy corgan as a jockish bully but his owning a wrestling league is pretty cool

lol a good chunk of my junior/senior high getting-bullied experience could be described as some idiot going "haha let's pick on the black kid OMG HE'S CRAZY, RUN AWAY"

ppl stopped giving me shit about my music when my brother gave me a copy of Living Color's Vivd a year before "Cult of Personality" became huge; ppl really respected my long game when "Give It Away" became huge because I'd been playing Red Hot Chili Peppers for ppl since 5th grade

in summation, thank God for older brothers into music

billy corgan strikes me as the tyrannical unfunny school newspaper editor who makes a girl cry because her photography of the football game is "just fucking lifeless"

see dan i was up on shit years before everybody and i got NOTHING. i was probably annoying about it.

haha I know for a fact I was annoying about it, somehow I still got the rep as a go-to guy for music; I think maybe because I refused to give up old music for new? like I was still repping all of the super 80s top 40 shit I loved like Breakfast Club and Sly Fox etc but was like "oh you dig rock music? you should check out these guys, they slay Winger *plays 'Glamor Boys'"

i didn't and don't have any older brother but had a friend two years ahead of me who would funnel me endless mixtapes of hip hop, ska, reggae, punk, etc. i need to thank that guy for pretty much everything. but i can't seem to find a working email for him these days. :(

I've read the observation that if you are the most popular kid in middle school, you're headed for trouble, because the social skills you're rewarded for at that age can be disasterous later on.

If you're the most popular kid in High School, you'll probably do ok, but you may never outgrow high school. But those who are popular and admired in a college or university setting are probably going to be social successes all the rest of their lives. This seems reasonably true to me.

in summation, thank God for older brothers into music

― they are either militarists (ugh) or kangaroos (?) (DJP), Friday, May 24, 2013 2:29 PM (13 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

^this. Thanks to the Rush shirt my brother got me at the show he saw, I didn't get bullied at sleepaway camp. I wore that shirt for two solid weeks, and got innumerable "YOU like RUSH?!" comments, quickly followed by, "OK, I guess you're cool." Skinny, gawky, taped glasses...and that Rush t-shirt saved me from many a beating.

It didn't stop Jeremy Piven, a counselor at the camp, from calling me "Einstein," though. Fucker.

steven mccombe, andy bendell, joe cowes, alan holland, richard toms, justin parker, noel scott and daniel groves

Don't want to go into a whole lot here, but I got called a faggot nearly every day from 7th grade until graduation by someone, whether it was because my last name was "Kaye" which rhymed with "gay"*, or because I liked Duran Duran and Prince and Madonna and Hall & Oates, or because I got good grades, or because I liked to read (esp. sci-fi), or because I was in a "gifted & talented" program, etc., etc., etc. I also took my share of shoves into lockers and basketballs to the face.** But there were kids lower in the pecking order that I harassed constantly, too, so in conclusion, kids are psychopaths.

*(I started 7th grade in the fall of 1981 in Perry, OH, after spending the first 12 years of my life moving around the world courtesy of the United States Army. Perry was a very small school system at the time, all these kids had been in school together for seven years, and I was brand new. My third day of school, someone came up behind me and asked, "Are you that Phil Gay kid?" and shoved my books out of my hand.)

**All mitigated somewhat by the fact that my best friend was on the wrestling team and kind of a big dude; and I had an older sister who was definitely one of the "cool kids" and made it clear to some people that I was off-limits. She and I once had a class together (Algebra II, my 10th grade year and her 12th grade) and to my eternal embarrassment, she got kicked out of class for calling the teacher an asshole.

having trouble remembering specifics but definitely get razzed for not wearing cool enough clothes.

the girl who sat in front of me in algebra class actually made fun of me for not wearing Abercrombie, LOL

those were the days when Lyte Funky Ones were fashion pioneers obv

I had no siblings, just myself, but thanks music/library/radio for being there for me.
Anyway, I resist the notion that I have to let negative shit that happened in the cesspool of adolescence define me for life, so I'm gonna put my vote in here for not languishing too long or relishing these memories too much. It's something I have been personally trying to move past for a long time and it feels pretty great on the other side and I invite anyone to join me. I'm just glad this happened before I was like 80 years old tbh.

But also I understand needing to work through it, and I respect that big time b/c it sucks.

Adding: I hold no grudges against anyone who bullied me in HS, and I am on good terms with several people who I was a total dick to.

I always got made fun of for my clothes because we were definitely on the low end of middle class where most of my classmates were upper class - I remember getting made fun for about a yearfor only having two pairs of shoes.

my older brother was into 90s Madonna and showtunes. I don't think that would have helped me out very much w/the bullying.

I don't think I was bullied more than most kids, but I was hypersensitive, thin-skinned, depressed and scared of everything so even regular teasing felt like the end of the world.

I almost forgot: At the time we started school in Perry, my parents had legally separated, unbeknownst to us kids. We were told he was completing one final duty station in Virginia, then would be returning to Ohio. (They had thought they might reconcile.) Not having a dad around was yet more fuel for teasing and bullying, especially in a small town like that.

Does anybody else hear this thread title to the chorus of "Who's Zoomin' Who"?

Holy shit, I was thinking the same thing. That song will not leave my head.

Who bullied you?
Take another look and tell me, Tarfumes.

I was one of those kids who always sang "Who's zoomin' whom?" and I still managed to intimidate my way out of most bully situations

Clothes-teased, what your thoughts on school uniforms/dress code?

even though I didn't have a particularly bad school life when I finished I made a break with it hard and fast, don't think I've seen or been in contact with anyone from school since I left. Probably part of why I didn't get bullied is part of why I felt the need to do that - with a fairly small school year there wasn't much room for clique-making to occur in any really divisive way, which minimises a lot of strands of bullying from the start, but it also forces you to normalise yourself even if you're ostensibly a weird kid who should be hanging out with other weird kids.

in retrospect I probably got much less than I deserved, considering that I might have worn a star trek uniform more than once.

There was a dude who dressed like a full on vampire and skulked outside during class and to my knowledge got no shit for it. He may not have been a student however.

who bullied who?
who bullied you?

http://www.freejohnnydare.com/fjd/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/bjohnson_small.jpg

One of my early high school occasional bullies, however, is now the captain of an NHL team.

i have guesses

The ringleader of the white trash girl group was called Big Jen. During a viewing of "Gandhi" in social studies Big Jen decided it would be entertaining to kick me repeatedly in the shins (we were in one of those stupid desk clusters--who came up with that idiotic idea?), and I eventually snapped and stood up and yelled FUCK YOU, BIG JEN!!! Fortunately my teacher liked me, so Big Jen got detention & I was not punished.

What Really Happens On A Teen Girl's iPhone

Not having an iPhone can be social suicide, notes Casey. One of her friends found herself effectively exiled from their circle for six months because her parents dawdled in upgrading her to an iPhone. Without it, she had no access to the iMessage group chat, where it seemed all their shared plans were being made.

"She wasn’t in the group chat, so we stopped being friends with her,” Casey says. “Not because we didn’t like her, but we just weren’t in contact with her.”

The most important and stress-inducing statistic of all is the number of "likes" she gets when she posts a new Facebook profile picture -- followed closely by how many "likes" her friends' photos receive. Casey's most recent profile photo received 117 "likes" and 56 comments from her friends, 19 of which they posted within a minute of Casey switching her photo, and all of which Casey "liked" personally.

"If you don't get 100 'likes,' you make other people share it so you get 100," she explains. "Or else you just get upset. Everyone wants to get the most 'likes.' It's like a popularity contest."

lord

jesus. no thank you to being a teenager in this day & age

oh my. my oldest is 4 so hopefully this is all done and gone by the time he comes of age, which by the looks of it is a lot sooner than I anticipated

there's still time to move to the mountains

That teen girl iphone story is so fucked up yet I understand how she feels about getting likes

Iron Maiden had it right all along xp

I don't know what to think about Facebook destroying bully's job prospects (or possible NHL captaincy) years down the line.

aaagh at the thought of facebook and puberty colliding.

I don't think I was bullied more than most kids, but I was hypersensitive, thin-skinned, depressed and scared of everything so even regular teasing felt like the end of the world.

yeah, this.

things were pretty gentle at school: one mean sporty girl but her speciality was boyfriend-stealing and I was way too nerdy to have any boyfriends to steal; some sarcastic arty/gothy types who I thought were the cool gang and longed for them not just to roll their eyes at me whenever I made some pitiful display of "I like indie musics too!" but in retrospect nobody else thought they were cool anyway; probably got some zinging I was too aspie to notice, but no real bullying.

on the other hand I got verbal shit on the way home from school p. much every day and occasionally spat at/shoved/threatened but only actually beaten up once. since these people weren't at my school and I had no social life locally I had no idea who any of them were.

thread is interesting to see how many people got it worse than me, and wonder why I've done worse at moving past it than most people.

(I did pick on one other girl for a while at the end of my first year of secondary school, and apparently in my first year of primary school I was pretty horrible to basically everyone. I feel bad about the first sometimes. The latter I don't even remember at all so I'm mainly just wtf about it, why did I do this when I was probably the smallest kid in the school, how and why did I stop, etc)

i was shy, sensitive, and dorky in elementary school, but i spent grades 3-6 with the same class of equally dorky GATE students and we were all mostly cool with each other. then in middle school, i hit puberty and went from being a chunky kid to being noticeably overweight, and a group of three girls spent a year doing that thing where they'd titter to one another quietly whenever i was around, smirk and laugh when I was changing for P.E, and occasionally offer me scornful advice on self-improvement. the ringleader of the group was a little chunky herself, and in retrospect it's pretty clear that she was trying to deflect ridicule by painting me as a more deserving target. but at the time i dreaded going to school every day, and i internalized a lot of negative body image shit (like "i deserve any ill-treatment regarding my weight because i am not trying hard enough to lose it") that took me a cool couple of decades to unlearn.

addendum: on the last day of middle school, i came to PE and the ringleader was in the locker room by herself. she saw me and said, with absolute sincerity, "you know, you have really nice eyebrows." then she walked out and i never saw her again. it was such a strange, specific thing to say that i immediately internalized it, to the point where even today, when other ladies talk about shaping and plucking their eyebrows, i automatically think "oh, i don't need to do that -- i have nice eyebrows."

I like the way this thread is bringing all of ilx together to join hands in a big circle.

i was mad tall, sporty, funny and smart tho so i'm not joining yr dorky circle *bullies u*

I was informed by a former coworker (and current friend) who grew up in Brockton, MA, that if I had done/said any of the things I did in my high school, I would likely be dead.

Woah, thread hits close to home. I didn't really realize until I moved in the middle of high school how fucked up Brockton schools were.

Pretty crushing bullying in middle school led me to cultivate a lifelong habit of invisibility. At least the high school was so huge that it was easy to hide.

A queen bee tried to bully me in Grade 9 with a "hey, come over here!" and I went over and she said "you know, if you ever flew a plane, you'd fly real low to the ground," and I looked at her like "?? zing??" and still don't get what she meant

Another time this girl kicked me in the balls when I was 10 and I was in incredible pain but didn't tell on her because she had CF and there were bus shelter ads that always reminded me she'd likely be dead by age 16. Now she's an established jazz singer and 37 and part of me wants to call her up and be like "you kicked me in the balls!" but mostly I'm just relieved she didn't die, she had/has to take a fuckload of medication, she's welcome to kick me all she wants, frankly

Another kid, a boy this time, played Homie the Clown when I was 11 and whipped me with a sock until I cried but he was a pretty decent kid otherwise and I wasn't really bothered by it in the long run.

Otherwise it was kids yelling "computers!" because I had glasses but it was too small a school to

are you considered particularly tall or sporty as an adult my name is louis and i'm an acoleuthic?

Lol no i am unremarkable in p much every dept, and much happier

(i'm an inch taller now than when i 13 ;_; the same year we moved to a school without a sports programme)

i only had one really bad year, eighth grade, and it was because i'd left school after fifth and homeschooled grades six and seven, which if you're only gonna homeschool two years are a really bad two years to pick cuz when you come back everyone's halfway into puberty and you've been playing starcraft and have no idea what's going on. i was in a new town and starting from scratch and had a lot of poorly socialized weird-kid habits and Was Fat so i was a pretty inevitable target. once i'd gotten a handle on things by mid-ninth-grade and become more popular than my bullies (not hard) they were almost obsequiously nice to me. unnerved me and i just went with it.

i remember with cringing full-body stop-you-in-your-tracks-on-the-street-in-broad-daylight shame every time i was ever cruel to another kid, except no, i probably don't.

further vague memories:

- dreading bonfire season every year bcz these kids would buy cheap rockets to set off at people in the street - they never came very close but I was p. scared when it happened in more confined spaces

- my parents' advice was "just ignore it" which i maybe took a little too literally as "oi deaf kid!" was added to the list of great things to shout (mainly references to my physical appearance and debates about whether I was a boy or a girl because I didn't look like a girl but wasn't "worthy of a dick"), and things started getting more physical to make sure I got the message

still. nice sunny day. grown adult. don't need to think about it.

(actually they probably didn't buy them, they probably nicked them or knew someone who knew someone, but anyway)

THe 'act bonkers if someone gets up in your face' thing that Dan describes as a coping strategy is very familiar to me. From the time I turned up to my first day of school in a horrible post-chemo wig, let's just say I picked up a reputation - being able to read and have proper conversations with adults didn't help, and my fellow kindergarteners thought I was the teacher's pet because I was allowed to miss school once a week and wasn't punished when I was moody. I was going for chemotherapy, so I was ALWAYS moody and liable to notice the kinds of things kids do to each other when they think they're being subtle - mostly because they were being done to me. Ditching the wig on Day Two meant they called me 'bald' until I was about nine, even though my hair grew back thick and curly. Obviously, I didn't trust any of them, because I couldn't be sure from day to day which kids were actually my friends. My mom had to come in and get badass after a bad experience with a teacher in first grade: 'it seems like you only know what to do with kids like Suzy if they happen to die - when you name an elementary school after them.'

So, grade school passed with me feeling othered all the time. I didn't retaliate that often, although I found 'ignore them' to be impractical. Finally, in sixth grade, I kicked a mean, popular boy in the balls. He was behind me in the lunch line and kept 'accidentally' pushing me, making the 'cough a loogey' noise and pulling at my hair. I turned around and warned him that the next time he did something, he was going to get it. About two minutes later, he did that something, so with my back to him, I raised my knee and kicked backwards, HARD. Instead of delivering a shock to the shin, I'd given him a kick to the dick and suddenly he was curled up in a ball on the floor, whimpering. The teachers went ballistic at me, but I'd been building up a knot of defiant rage while being picked at in line. How on Earth could the thing I'd done by accident be any worse than what the boy had done on purpose? We both got hauled to the principal's office and compelled to offer one another apologies, but I couldn't help notice they weren't willing to address the boy's behaviour because BALLS ARE SACRED (thanks to watching Gilda Radner on SNL, I'd looked up 'penis envy' in our dictionary) and therefore they considered boys' feelings more important than mine. But between the underhand jabs and the mean kids telling me they were sorry I wasn't dead every so often, I developed a thick but transparent skin it's taken decades to calibrate.

'it seems like you only know what to do with kids like Suzy if they happen to die - when you name an elementary school after them.'

jesus christ

why are some teachers so heartless and evil?

there was a weird kid in my 5th grade class who sexually harrassed me & one of my friends, tackling us during recess and threatening to drag us into the woods and show us his dick (which he called his "thingee"), and when I tried to tell the teachers what was going on they refused to believe me & told me I was egging him on (which I absolutely wasn't) & implied that I was the real pervert for knowing that when he said "thingee" he meant "penis"

I was just super pissed at the time, but only upon looking back to it am I actually disturbed.

Crüt, my mom is a specialist in very emotive argument, which was a net bonus until she started watching wingnut propaganda all day. She literally does not give a shit how bad she makes her opposite number feel - it's sort of the point to put the boot in like that.

Basically there was a rule in place in the first years of primary school that the kids weren't supposed to 'tell' on each other - some hippie somewhere decided it would be best to encourage kids to settle their differences themselves. In practice, you got in trouble from adults for 'telling' and made to sit in isolation, while nothing happened to the person who'd hit you or spit water on you or whatever. In fact, it made people like that redouble their efforts because I *would* tell, and then it would be really funny to watch me getting in trouble for it. Bonus: the teacher my mother unloaded on was the same woman who taught her in first grade.

haha sorry I misread that I thought that was what your teacher said about you

i got bullied by teachers. in fifth grade we moved to a new school, and the kids were picking me on me because i had a big vocabulary. one day in class mrs. herbach told one of the kids to get a dictionary out and she sat me down in front of her, face to face, and instructed a kid to pick out words at random from the dictionary, and another kid to keep score, for an impromptu contest. talk about humiliating, on so many levels! another episode -- in 8th grade, the gifted teacher was out one day, so we gifted kids had to be watched over in a "regular" class, where mrs. harles was lecturing about the geography of washington, d.c., our class trip destination (which my family couldn't afford, but that's another story) and i was distracted from my own reading not only by the lecture but the mean kids not paying any attention to mrs. harles picking on another kid really, really badly. trying to get them to stop, i got in trouble; mrs. harles took me outside in the hall and told me, "no matter who you think you are, no matter how hard you try, you're never going to amount to anything." that was one seriously fucked up school

My reading & English skills were pretty far ahead and being born late in the year meant that I started Kindergarten at age 4 *and* took 2nd Grade English classes. At the time, there wasn't a gifted program so that's just what ended up happening. You can guess the rest. Got it from both teachers and kids.

voted "severe lasting bullying"

i was never bullied by teachers but i did stand up to one math teacher who was constantly egging on this one kid (who would probably be diagnosed w/ autism or something nowadays, he was a mess, but this was early 1990s and there was less awareness about such things) and engaging in battles with him (in which she would say really cruel things aloud) which would just sidetrack the class. i told her this, and she told me to "mind my own business" (even though i was in her class!) and refused to acknowledge any problems. a week later i got permission from another math teacher to switch into his class (IIRC another "honors" algebra class). when i told the 1st teacher this, she recoiled and yelled at me, "if you can't keep up i suggest that you down to the regular-level class with all the other idiots who don't want to learn." she could not believe I was leaving her class for any other reason, and what's more revealed her utter contempt for students that she herself taught.

standardized testing is very much not the answer, but i do think there needs to be more oversight of teachers at just about every level (grade school, high school, college). i say this as a teacher.

i should probably try to remember these teachers' names and send them nastygrams, before they up and die like 1/2 of my elementary school teachers. one particularly rancid 8th-grade "art" teacher (who scarcely ever taught anything related to art) who picked mercilessly on a jehovah's witness kid in a way that would get her sued today... died a few years ago, probably without ever being forced to acknowledge what a horrible teacher she was. her obit spoke broadly of her "being an inspiration to generations of schoolchildren"--i didn't know whether to laugh or cry.

i went to a progressive catholic high school in the age of no tolerance for bullying, assemblies about acceptance, where there was an emphasis on academic success and being part of the community, stuff like that. i had one friend named michael aldridge, who came over to me in the lunch room when he saw me reading the carl sagan book about nuclear winter. we never did anything socially outside of school. i can't remember the full name of anyone else i graduated with. i had a good relationship with my teachers. i occupied myself with books and online pornography. i remember occasionally feeling awkward in group situations and a general sense of loneliness but i never experienced any bullying.

amateurist, i want to hold you and stroke you and never let any harm come to you.

mrs. harles took me outside in the hall and told me, "no matter who you think you are, no matter how hard you try, you're never going to amount to anything."

See, you know how people harsh on teachers who are into self-esteem and "everybody gets a trophy" and "each kid is special" and accuse them of coddling kids and not preparing them for the pressures of the real world? Well, the reason lots of teachers are like THAT is that lots of other teachers are like THIS.

favorite thing a teacher said to me after taking me out into the hall: "you have a disease. it's called ADD."

imagining that in "Mr. Rosso" voice for some reason

Light periodic I guess, though I used to get pretty upset about it. Looking back there was nothing I wouldn't shrug off with a laugh these days.

amateurist, i want to hold you and stroke you and never let any harm come to you.

― dylannn, Sunday, May 26, 2013 6:31 AM (7 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

um...

(or maybe this is sarcastic, hard to tell on the internet)

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

gimme yer milk money nerdos

Mordy is the Wallet Inspector

i wanna call "liar" but this is probly true for ILX

Stray thought:

Complete lack of warm feelings on knowing for definite that kids at my school who bullied other kids horribly all had kids of their own at about 19-22, then split up with the mother/father of their child, and still behave like their 15 yr old selves. These people themselves had parents who behaved like 15 yr olds. Round and round and round it goes.

Saw clinically obese and asperger's kid getting his face kicked in by sporting favourites of the PE teachers/girl with down's was systematically sexually assaulted by other kids/the people who did this are still at large doing their thing/the kids this was happening to were in the same no-future bracket as their bullies, I have not seen them since last day of high school, was not as friendly to them/protective of them as I should have been.

It sucks.

http://www.irishtimes.com/debate/letters/true-victims-of-bullying-1.1526984

At 41, with no kids of my own, I'm one of those people who thinks kids today (and especially their parents) are way too sensitive w/r/t bullying - I think kids are shits and they're gonna fight and fuck with each other and you should just let 'em. I see news stories about bullying and I think, "Oh, you got mean emails? Oh, poor you."

― 誤訳侮辱, Friday, 24 May 2013 02:29 (3 months ago)

I remember being shocked when my closest friend in high school laughingly told me that I was constantly glaring at people in the halls - without even realizing it, my facial expression was pretty much always somewhere between the face visible in the WDYLL thread and a look of pure psychotic rage.

― 誤訳侮辱, Friday, 24 May 2013 18:42 (3 months ago)

http://i.imgur.com/WWeP8AJ.png

Lol, I never read this thread because I was in a psychiatric hospital at the time because of issues not unrelated to this thread. (that's a lol as in 'They're coming to take me away lol lol lol' or however that song went. Bullying went away when I discovered music, my crutch)

While I would say it was severe (I was once stabbed with a pencil by the kid who sat behind me in German, and for some reason no teacher noticed the blood stained shirt I wore for the rest of the day. Actually kid who did that was diagnosed schizophrenic as an adult. Thank God we never shared a cell!) The advice I got was to throw the first punch, which isn't much used to someone who has only hit someone in the face once, when I was 11 or 12. Made me an immediate pacifist, and punching bag. :( In retrospect I should have carried a knife and got in the first laceration. What could they do to a bookish, ginger minor?

I do have one comment on the thread though - the women seem to have found it a lot harder than the men, and their emotional response was similar to mine. So I have a question which came up with my shrink the other day. Only men can answer this really. Is being made to play a form of what I believe is called 'the biscuit game' against your will when you are 12 or 13 bullying or sexual abuse? Serious Answers Only please, as they say.

xpost

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H67uEgRZs2Y

Only men can answer this really. Is being made to play a form of what I believe is called 'the biscuit game' against your will when you are 12 or 13 bullying or sexual abuse? Serious Answers Only please, as they say.

― I have gathered no gaudy flowers of speech in other men's gardens (dowd), Monday, September 16, 2013 8:31 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

elaborate on what you're asking here and i could probably give an informed answer

yeah, me too... i'm going to need further elaboration to figure out if forcing a 12 year old to eat semen crosses the line.

You're uh...not far off. The other boys were about the same age...

yikes just wiki'd biscuit game which i'd never heard of (evidently not popular in the US), definitely being forced to "play" against your wishes constitutes SA.

OMG. Was not bullied much myself, but what was semi-traumatizing to me was the way schools I attended refused to address the issue. I have no idea if bullying is worse today or not. I was a but of an idealist and activist at school, and some bullies just like to bait people who talk about unfairness.

My mom was a pacifist who stressed non- violence, although she recommended "fighting back" against the physical kids. Couldn't bring myself to do it unless I truly had to defend myself. Having had to defend myself a few times in the schoolyard, I have to say verbal abuse and harassment is worse. Also stuff like people spitting on you, one guy threw my purse out of the bus window.

But as I said, the biggest scars came when I just did not agree with what other high schoolers think is funny. The high school I went to was Catholic, affluent, and a bit self-righteous. One year kids secretly agreed to elect an "ugly" girl to prom court. Enough kids thought this was a good idea that she made prom court.

Also this girl who had burn scars was nicknamed "Iguana Woman". I tell you at these affluent schools, looks are everything.

Bullied in kinder and first grade by a girl who was shorter than me with Cindy Brady ponytails. I was pretty tiny myself so looking back my bully must have been uber cute, cuter than me which explains why she probably got away with it. She got held back in the first grade and her parents pulled her out of my school so that was the end of that.

My little brother had an older boy step on his hands at the school yard. It was on purpose and my brother came crying to me with the sneaker indentions still on his hands. I was only in the 4th grade, the guy was an 8th grader. I went up to him and threw my plastic lunch box at him and raised my voice and told him to live my little brother alone. I pictured The Fonz the entire time, I just kept thinking about The Fonz and how tough he was. Anyway, the guy wasn't impressed or afraid and nothing really came of it.

Bullied again in 7th grade by two girls who came into my Catholic school from public school where they had issues. At that point I ended up being pushed way too far, snapped while on a field trip to Alamo Village. I ended up in my first girl fight. My dad was proud of me, he always stressed fighting back. It definitely changed the way I saw myself and I realized I was capable of being strong if I had too. Prior to the incident I was seen a sweet, nice, quiet girl, got the straight A's, top reader at the library in school, perfect attendance, never cussed, never really raised my voice in anger.

However, had it not happened I would have continued to be meek and quiet...I wonder who I would be right now had I not stood up for myself then. It changed the course of things I think.

FUCK. I just had a suppressed memory surface.I don't think I've thought about this in 20 years. I snuck out of my house in middle school and ran around the town spray-painting things with a can of black krylon I found in my parents' basement. We spray-painted traffic signs. We spray-painted the wall of the bank. We spray-painted the street.

Then we came to ____'s house. ____ was a friend in elementary school, but he was a super-GT kid and he took a lot of pride in his smarts and would make fun of you for not being as smart as him, which I wasn't. He had gone on to a fancy private school for middle school and I hadn't seen him in a year.

So we spray-painted "FUCK YOU" on his mom's mini-van. Holy shit, I'm ashamed of myself. Holy shit. Ugh.

haha nice.

Why dyou think lots of interstng posters left ilx btw

Also have I ever bullied u fess up now or ill zing u til ur lunch money quivers

No, sir, you've always been...very kind to me. Very kind. Too kind, if anything, sir.

deems has only ever given me my due

That's a coded truth

keep it pg kids

the energy's back!

deems is a monster, exile him

reminds me of WHO'S A BETTER POSTER POLL SEVENTEEN: titchyschneider vs Darraghmac

think I never posted on this thread because I didn't have a good handle on what was bullying and what was just me making friends in high school who had bad ideas about what constitutes normal behavior

the one thing that sticks with me, just because it's sad, was the only interaction I had with a kid in high school. I lived on the boundary between middle school districts. so I went to elementary school with one set of kids, middle school with a handful of them, and then about 1/3 of my middle school went to high school with me, plus all of the kids I hadn't really seen since elementary school.

there was this kid who was constantly in trouble in elementary school, not for bullying, but for being completely unable to follow directions. in kindergarten, the teacher had to occasionally hold him on her lap because he would run around. part of it was his parents splitting when he was that age -- it was clear his home life was dysfunctional, especially when he'd show up to second grade and talk about his dad letting him watch horror movies all weekend

so I run into this guy a single time in high school and he's already on his way to looking like a chubby thirty year old. I think he tried doing something dumb, like grabbing my arm and not letting me pass him, and I was just thinking.. I don't have time for this. there's absolutely no one around. I lightly slugged him in the gut, and it was as if I'd hit him with a roundhouse kick, he just fell back. I still feel a lot of pity for the guy, he absolutely had no coping skills, not even the ability to be a bully

in high school i got sick of this one guy thumping me every single day for no reason, so one day i kicked him in the nuts. he never touched me again.

____ was a friend in elementary school, but he was a super-GT kid and he took a lot of pride in his smarts and would make fun of you for not being as smart as him, which I wasn't. He had gone on to a fancy private school for middle school and I hadn't seen him in a year.

So we spray-painted "FUCK YOU" on his mom's mini-van. Holy shit, I'm ashamed of myself. Holy shit. Ugh.

deserved it, next

my brother had a best friend in kindergarten and primary school. the kid would always come over to our house to play, him and my brother were pretty inseparable. as adults my brother told me that that the kid had been bullying my brother the whole time, taking his lunch, making him give him money, the whole works.
broke my fucking heart to learn that.

thinking back, the kid's older brother used to beat up kids at school, and their dad was a big burly truck driver who liked to throw his weight around so the apple did not fall far from the tree at all.

Gravity iirc

ugh, I understand that VG although most of the people who bothered me had different backgrounds and excuses

the irritating thing about a few peers who weren’t bullies was this inherited “dude friends should slug each other hard on the shoulder” bonding thing. dude, I get it, but I went through puberty late and your pubescent self slugging my small frame was never appreciated and felt like territory drawing

just did my edit of wikipedia to show that one of those dudes is his actual age, not his “i’m a guitarist in a few bands who is totally not five years older than I claim” age. if you were nearly post-pubescent and slugging me back then, you can’t claim to be over five years younger than me today, buddy

Well at least you're over it now

I was bullied and got into some scraps as well. Was always able to take a good ass kicking if nothing else.

never over it, my peer is never five years younger than me

*writes letter to obituary column in future*

I was more emotionally bullied but I made it easy on people as I was so desperate for affection sometimes that I let them.

My dad wasn't a bully, and was in fact a loving father most of the time, but he worked a lot when I was growing up, so I usually just saw him when it was time for bed. And he was six feet tall, 230-240 pounds, and strong. He was never physically abusive, and never laid a hand on us or my mother. But he yelled a lot growing up, and being a former actor, he had a voice that carried, so you could hear it down the street. It scared the shit out of me when he yelled because even though it never went beyond yelling, he sounded *so angry* when he yelled that I usually started bawling. He was a sweet man most of the time, but those moments where he was angry were terrifying to me.

then my best friend growing up was a kid named David, and while we were good pals growing up, he was a known instigator and loved pushing people's buttons just because he thought it was fucking funny. He'd make "comedy racist" jokes to our friend Kurt, who was Black, instigated fights with people for amusement, made fun of my younger brother, made fun of my dad, all to get a rise out of me. In middle school he'd insult my guitar playing, my taste in music, my clothes, all these things, and I just accepted it even though none of my other friends acted that way.

The bullying by everybody else started in elementary school in my Sunday school class. I was tall, scrawny (a bit underweight), with zits, dandruff, glasses, braces, a dorky haircut, and out of style clothes...and i was a bit sensitive. I was also very clean cut and didn't swear or know anything about sex. In 4th or 5th grade, the kids in Sunday school would gang up on me and insult me for the entire hour and the teachers (who were just parents who could read out of a workbook) just giggled awkwardly and didn't discipline them.

By middle school, fairly everybody in school ripped on me daily for similar reasons...boys, girls, telling me how ugly and nerdy I was, playing keep-away with my glasses, writing insults like "faggot" on my backpack, or writing profanity on my progress reports. one of the kids (Patrick) who had ripped on me in Sunday school and elementary school continued the assault in middle school. never physically beat me up (the kids at my school woulda thought it was low to beat up a scrawny nothing like me), but would just torment me daily. He even spent half of a year pretending to have changed his tune and become my friend, only to rip the rug out from under me. Girls would pretend flirt with me only to humiliate me, y'know, the usual.

By 8th grade I was angry and hated life, and then made my first real female friend (Tiffany) since I was like, 9 years old. I was convinced it was a ruse to make fun of me and then realized a few months later that she was actually just a nice person and a legitimate friend. My first teenage crush really.

I started going to a Fundamentalist church my freshman year and figured ok cool, this is a place where I can finally be myself. Only to find out one of the Juniors, who was sweet to my face, had been bad-mouthing me behind my back for a while. I even remember the night I overheard her making fun of me, where I sat awake in bed unable to sleep, really upset by the whole thing.

Most of the bullying stopped by junior year of high school as by then, I'd lost the braces, acne, and started wearing contacts, plus I mostly stayed out of everybody's way and nobody really gave a fuck about me one way or another. I was fairly fragile though and used to be majorly paranoid that every friend of mine was secretly plotting against me, and used to have really inexplicable outbursts against well-meaning friends. it took me going on anti-anxiety meds in my late 20s as well as therapy to rid me of that.

my self-esteem issues never went away, so it took me a looooong time to recognize that I definitely had toxic people in my life, as well as people who were taking advantage of me, and spent my late 20s/early 30s getting rid of them. I really credit 95% of that to my therapist from 2013-2016, who basically asked me why I was letting people cross boundaries with me. Nowadays, I have a ton of close friends that I've known for ten or more years, and I actually am more social than I've ever been, which is weird to me. but I still get hair-trigger upset about some things as kind of a holdover from those days. like an incident from a few weeks ago that I posted about here.

anyway, bullies are terrible people.

one of the dudes who was in my extended group of friends I would hang out with at school, who I thought was smart and interesting (which he was) had a weird parent dynamic to live up to — they had this biker/outcast thing going on that was performative, to the extent they were on the Sally tv show! They played it off with his dad being a masculine biker type and him doing some skirt-wearing goth thing, but I never saw it.
So I am hanging with my friends and he’d pop in and have to live up to something and it seemed surreal. He talked for a week about how some kid a couple years younger was pushing in on some undefined territory and I shrugged it off, but he kept saying “I am gonna jump on the lunch table and kick him in the face, steel-toed boots”

I wasn’t there but that actually happened and it still seems unreal. It seems like a bizarre choreographed bully role that was played into, but I wonder why the fuck I never raised red flags, telling people this seemed completely fucked up. It all seemed fucked up, even the times he was super aggressive at me, I couldn’t take it seriously

I wonder if things are even more meta to kids these days and reporting things seems useless

My parents moved from Germany to super-rural Portugal when I was four. I already hated kindergarten in Hamburg but moving really reinforced this - I couldn't find much in common with the local kids and my physical features being clearly Other made me an easy target. I quickly adopted Bullied Kid as an identity, which I even wore with some pride ("they hate me because I'm smart!") and as soon as I learned about nerd culture from US magazines I embraced that 100% too. Sometimes I wonder whether if I had been born a decade later I would've gone full GamerGate, though my socialist, feminist parents and my profound fear of any multiplayer video games (another venue to be mocked and humiliated in!) would've prevented that I hope.

Anyway in recent years I've looked back at that period a lot and realised that, though I was certainly physically attacked and psychologically tortured a fair bit, there was also a big element of self-identification in this, that I just assumed everyone would hate me and didn't even try to make friends. That I was so terrified of doing something "foreign" that I mostly retreated into myself totally, and that I probably came across as quite aloof and unlikeable.

In therapy I've started to work at accepting that there's no way a kid would have been able to understand all this and that I shouldn't beat myself up for not having been savvier at social stuff back then. Which I guess confirms the stereotype about therapy being coddling and self-indulgent to those inclined to think that way, but frankly the guilt I feel over not having been smarter in the past is not a very constructive emotion and best get rid of.

best wishes to all who have went throught bullying itt

today is anti-bullying day in BC. To honour this, people wear pink shirts to work. I feel weird about wearing one today because there's two bullies at my work place, so i'm wearing all black. The idea they will be wearing pink makes me feel sick, as it's not a fucking t-shirt that's going to solve this problem which management seems to do NOTHING about it on a serious level.

Guys those are p sad tales and I hope you are all in better places now or will find your way there in future

But we have a thread about bullying it is called why do posters leave ilx for good

This thread is to find out why posters are leaving ilx for good

And for ppl to say if I bullied them