Earlier in my life, I would have said that I was a traditional victim of physical bullying. I was a skinny brainy kid, and bigger dumber kids would harass and smack me around.
However, later in life I became aware that at that time I had been engaging in a different form of bullying myself. I was a cut-up, always making with the funny comments. My superpower was verbal wit. However, much of it was insulting to others. I thought I was just being funny, and some of my friends did too. But every once in a while a friend would point out “that was really unkind”, but I would discount the negative feedback about the comments because, well, they were funny! And funny was the goal!
30 Rock actually had a part of an episode that illustrated this. I think it was a school reunion. Liz Lemon was flashing back to high school describing how she was being bullied for being the audio-visual nerd, when someone pointed out that they were feeling bullied by her due to her put-downs and judgy behavior.
So, part of the process of maturing for me meant learning to dial back the unkind insult humor.
I guess I was not a bully but I regret being a bystander to bullying. I went to a Catholic school which had a small number of kids with intellectual disabilities enrolled, mostly Down’s syndrome. They had their own classes but were in a mainstream home class for roll call in the morning. There was always only one of these students per home class and we saw them for ten minutes a day so they were very isolated.
I sometimes think about the crap they endured for the few minutes every day before the teacher arrived. It was mostly verbal and intimidatory. I think if I had to face up to that day after day, I’d be suicidal. I don’t recall a single time when any of them retaliated or defended themselves, they seemed to just stoically ignore it but sometimes it was clear they were uncomfortable.
These were the most vulnerable people a bully could pick on and I just sat there and watched it happen along with everyone else. It’s one of my greatest regrets.
Spice, you have an inner light that shines through. Maybe as a kid you didn’t know it or feel it. But I bet you it was there. That must have given you a sort of armor that protected you. Your background should have burned you down, but you shine on. Your mal-treatment from your Mother would have ruined a lesser person, yet you shine on. Your health would have melted most snowflakes but you’re shining still. You are my favorite poster!
I wasn’t really a bully but a bully buster. I was the silent hand of justice that went after the guys who terrorized you. And I was damned good at it. Made those bastards suffer and never got caught!
I was bullied pretty relentlessly by my older brother. When I told my mom, her response was usually “oh, he’s only doing that because he knows it bothers you.”
To this day I can’t figure out why that made it okay.
I was not a bully in grade school but was instead mostly on the receiving end.
This summer I traveled to the small town where I’d attended junior high and high school in the 70s, for the high school reunion. This was in part to drum up advance enthusiasm for my book, and people on the reunion board knew I’d written about those times.
Two different people made explicit apologies to me. A third came over to our table and told an anecdote about a time when he’d harassed me and I’d stood up for myself, and shook my hand.
Thirty years ago, at the ten-year reunion event, a different person had also apologized for his behavior.
I apologized to all of them as well. I had not been a bully but I had been a contemptuously hostile person who thought I was better than them and let it show. I think we all get better at understanding people who are different from us and stop seeing them as weird and alien beings.
Maybe, maybe not. Maybe pkbites meted out punishment that was outsized to the offense. Maybe pkbites got revenge at some long future point when the bullies were just trying to get through the day. By deciding to play the enforcer, pkbites could have easily fallen into bullying behavior. As the old saying goes, two wrongs don’t make a right.
Yeah, I got bullied and excluded a lot too, and it so often works both ways.
When I was in high school, I was talked into vandalizing a classmate’s car, a classmate that I didn’t even know, by someone who I thought was my friend but I realized shortly afterwards wasn’t at all. I’ve always felt terrible about what I did, especially because it was at the behest of such a really truly awful person. The only social media I’ve found the target on is Linked In, which I don’t use.
Tony, if you see this post and recognize yourself in it, I’m sorry.
I said I wasn’t really a bully but a bully buster. If that made me a bullies bully, so be it. I was too big and belligerent for those pricks to mess with me. I could have been a bully to the dorks who were already getting bullied, but I didn’t see the percentage. It just didn’t benefit me and I saw no point in it.
But I took great delight in terrorizing those who did. And I did it to the extreme. Real hardcore stuff.
Some of it even got published years later (No joke!). No way did I have a right to do any of it and I won’t argue against your “two wrongs don’t make a right” point because you’re right. But it sure felt outasight at the time!
I was considered a bully by some of the adults who didn’t want to listen to the whole story or believe that their little darlings would start something. To which I reply that I never started a fight, but I finished several. With one exception, and that “fight” was over in seconds.
Growing up, I was physically bigger than all the boys and most of the girls in my school cohort, and was, as my mother put it, “…peaceful by inclination, not nature.” This encouraged a bit of bullying of me by guys with the urge to prove something … until they managed to get under my skin. Even then I was simply trying to end it a quickly as possible. As the bigger boy, it was assumed I was at fault, automatically and axiomatically. :smack:
As another datapoint, I was bullied enough on the school bus that I typically walked home (and usually arrived in a dead heat with the bus).
The one fight I admit starting was in defense of a smaller kid. Our families were friends, so I was *in loco fraternis *to him, which the guy picking on him may not have known. The aggressor was a burly farmboy of the erythrocervic variety, who when I told him to leave “Fred” (NHRN) alone, assumed a confrontational stance, legs planted and arms akimbo, and said “Make me.” So I did. I was wearing hiking boots, which did not hinder me going for a field goal. :eek:
When “Cletus” became capable of coherent speech he started to threaten me until several other guys chipped in that they had seen it all and he got what he deserved.