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.

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