Board 8 > Were any of you dudes bullied back when you were in school?

(+) Yeah! (+)

were you?

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I think I was a lot. But I was never physically beat up. All the fights started from me losing my temper and they were almost always stopped immediately by adults.

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Yes. Its not something I like to revisit, but it didnt get worse because I had older brothers.

not terribly but yes

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I specifically remember getting bullied in grade 1, but then I moved schools and it never happened again.

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Yes, but I also sometimes bullied others. I sucked.

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There were a rare handful of attempts here and there but I'm not one to take shit from anyone so they were unsuccessful.

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In middle school pretty bad, not really in high school tho

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Yes. It was mostly verbal but there were three physical fights that I recall. Got destroyed in the first two but won the third and no one ever tried that shit again.

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Yeah, mostly just standard "you're fat lol" and one instance in late high school where I outed a cheater and he demolished my (admittedly shitty) car in revenge.

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my elementary school was pretty friendly

high school i breezed by without anyone really knowing i exist

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Yeah really bad along with physical abuse

A little in middle school. Not really physical.

My high school was pretty chill and there wasn't much, at least in the circles I was around.

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Oh yeah, I bullied someone at summer camp. I don't even know why. Some friends there and I just decided he was an enemy. I didn't even consider that I'd been a bully until a while later.

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CaptainOfCrush posted...

Yes, but I also sometimes bullied others. I sucked.

This.

The worst part is that a kid we bullied recently made contact with me to apologize to me! He took all our bullying in hindsight to be reactions to the problems he saw in himself, which is kinda genuinely heartbreaking. I told him that he had nothing to apologize for, and yeah, it was awful.

kids are awful, I hope I can raise my kids to be better than I was.

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ChaosTonyV4 posted...

This.

The worst part is that a kid we bullied recently made contact with me to apologize to me! He took all our bullying in hindsight to be reactions to the problems he saw in himself, which is kinda genuinely heartbreaking. I told him that he had nothing to apologize for, and yeah, it was awful.

kids are awful, I hope I can raise my kids to be better than I was.

do you think it's a phase that most bullies grow out of and most of them go on to be pretty successful adults?

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I was pretty ostracized.
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I got the worst of it during grade school and first year of high school

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yes up until maybe sophomore year of high school. mostly for being chinese.

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I was the only openly gay guy in a high school that's most popular day was Drive Your Tractor to School Day.

So... yes.

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What did you not have a tractor?

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No, I was kind of an orbiter and had friends in every circle. I wouldn't say I was popular but I was a solid midcarder. The guy you say hi to at school and maybe a dap up but don't invite to your birthday party

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A LOT in middle school, eventually resulting in a fist fight

Less so in high school because by then I was > 6' and not worth the effort anymore, so I was mostly just ignored


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I was until I gained size and fought back

then they left me alone

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I don't think bullying was much of a problem in my school. Like, the worst thing I can remember is a new girl making a rude comment about me during PE (because I suck at sports and am totally the type who would have been bullied), and a popular jock immediately called her out. I wonder if it is just a case of the school being small enough and most people being a couple notches away from each other's social circles.

But I was also in all the advanced classes during high school, so I was insulated outside of PE.

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yeah I was bullied.

By both boys and girls. Honestly the girls are worse in some ways. They let me think I was their friend and then reveal they were just using me for "pity points" with the teachers.

There's a song that goes "I want to be like the cool kids" and I hate that song because I was like that and totally used by them. Once I met people more like me I got better and never wanted to hang with the popular girls again.

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I think a little bit in elementary school and maybe a tiny bit in middle school? Not that much though despite me being a total nerd, and not at all in high school.

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i think i was fortunate to grow early, grow tall and have a certain type of personality- nobody was bullied in my vicinity

there was one kid that kept eating his boogers who we taunted relentlessly to try to make him stop. he would not stop. i felt bad, but to this day i'm still not sure what the appropriate reaction would have been!

i remember the first time i was bullied, and it was such a weird experience. we were way too old for it- we were on JV baseball together. he called me stupid names, but i guess i didn't react in the way he wanted so he got bored

i think people bully each other when they're trying to iron out (from their perspective) aberrant behavior. if you're with it but don't want to change, you can sometimes turn it into a friendly back-and-forth set of zingers or get them to back off with a good enough display. show awareness of *their* faults without going directly for the jugular- make sure they know you have more left in the tank and that an armistice would be in order

but who knows, every bully's a little different. it sucks to feel out of control of that sort of situation

i had a rough semester in college where i was just kind of depressed and zonked out all the time. some of my friends were unhelpfully trying to snap me out of it by pointing out whenever i was doing something dumb. the rough part was that my brain was so foggy that i never had a proper response- it just felt like terrible bullying. don't talk to them much anymore

when starting my professional life, i think the salespeople wanted me to be one of the guys (surprise, i'm not! i'm a nerdy coder man that likes hanging out with the coders. they also might've been right- there was one woman i was foolishly following around at the time) and did a lot of bully-adjacent bro-talk. i forget how i broke that pattern. they weren't bad guys at all, so once i made it clear i didn't enjoy it they stopped. i'm not proud to admit it probably involved throwing some homophobic allusions at them in public (why are you so interested in what i'm up to, buddy?) while having more serious conversations about it in private


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[is this 'dudes' as in everyone?]

absolutely, elementary school was awful for me as far as bullying. Got thrown headfirst into a steel slide in first grade over disagreeing that boys are better than girls. They have brute force on their side, though! >_>

No other physical fights that I recall, but oh boy, was the emotional connection landscape As Arbitrary As Possible. Do your peers like you today? Show up to school and find out if the answer's yes or no :D;;;

Also, class size will shrink as you continue attending this increasingly tiny school and you will be left as part of a class of 5 kids, two of whom hate your guts. Those are not good odds.

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I was never bullied at school, but being a small/skinny kid I got banged around alot playing hockey, to the point where I quit at age 12 because it just wasn't fun anymore.

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Not really. I was the quiet weird kid when I was younger but somehow managed to avoid any bullying for that, and in high school I hung out with the drama kids and stoners, two relatively drama free groups.

The one time anyone did try to actively bully me was my senior year when some freshman kid decided I was his target but all of his attempts just sort of ended with me laughing at him and him never having the balls to escalate to physicality. Eventually he rallied like five of his middle school friends to try and jump me after school when I was walking home and even that petered out into nothing. Though the memory of this guy hanging behind his much smaller friends and threatening me over their heads still cracks me up.

Murphiroth posted...

drama kids... two relatively drama free groups.

I think you might've accidentally joined a comedy group instead.

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CaptainOfCrush posted...

Yes, but I also sometimes bullied others. I sucked.

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Barely, I was the bully >_>

There were a few times people tried to pick on me but I fought back
Sometimes I even went as far as to wait for a "revenge" against them and find them when they are alone
Of course I lost sometimes but if they know you will hit them back then they prefer to pick on other kids instead

Of course, thinking back maybe it wasn't very smart. All it takes is one crazy son of a bitch with a knife or something to realize that maybe it was better to be bullied without fighting back. So it's more of a luck that didn't happen

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Very rarely, but it has happened to me. I never had any regular bullies, and any bullying incidents from specific people were one-off incidents.
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LusterSoldier posted...

Very rarely, but it has happened to me. I never had any regular bullies, and any bullying incidents from specific people were one-off incidents.

really?

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