[Serious] What is it like being bullied?

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  3. So I haven’t been bullied, but i have seen bullying happen and in one instance it was simply that whenever the person would try to say something, they’d get made fun of for whatever they said or how they said it.

    Or if the topic had nothing to do with them they’d get brought into it and made fun of, even though they were just minding their own business. The bully/bullies just saw them as an easy target for jokes

    From what i could tell its extremely frustrating and embarrassing. But that kind of bullying, where its not physical and not as directly malicious, isn’t something that anything gets done about much.

  4. Depending on the frequency and severity, it’s like you’re almost scared to go *anywhere* and anytime anyone laughs within earshot of you you’re convinced they’re making fun of you.

    Edit to add more: Back in grade school you’d be too worried to speak up in class to answer questions because no matter what you’d say it be easy fuel for teasing and taunting. And especially in gym class on any team games or sports you just stand to the side because you’d get blamed for anything that went wrong…even if you had zero involvement in it.

  5. Bullying sucks. Makes people self conscious and makes people want to kill themselves.

  6. It fucking sucks. There was a guy at my table in science class. I’m not sure what his problem was. He just kept on and on with me. This went on for a while. I guess because I was quiet. He sat directly across from me. One day he wadded up a piece of paper like he was going to throw it away and threw it as hard as he could at my face. Not sure what happened. I absolutely snapped. Temporary insanity stuff. I came across the table and just took him to the floor and just punch his face over and over and over again. I felt some weird force like trying to pull me off of him but I just kept punching until this force pulled me away and I could punch any more…..but i could still kick and I got a kick in to his face and one right to his groin.

    I had to go to the office over that. Luckily another guy had my back and flat out told the teacher what had been happening for weeks. This was before the days of zero tolerance. It was the bully that got suspended and was put in a different science class. After that day, I sort of became the bully to him. The next 2-3 years, every time we made eye contact, I just sort of grinned and he averted eye contact and kept walking. Interesting aside: I never heard of that guy getting in trouble or bullying anyone ever again.

  7. It feels like no one is there to help you when you either physically or mentally can’t fight back, and everyone is laughing at you, and every instance of emotional hurt you are going through.

    >>You got soaked by the bus that drrove through the puddle. Something got you wet like a horny GIRL

    >>Bus is crowded, no losers on it(shoves you off), not my problem if you miss school.

    >>Oh you like her? Well sorry but your ducks not large enough to tap that.

    >>Oh your parents died. Well don’t go crazy psycho on us about it, you might end up dropping your soap harder than your parents dropped dead.

    It’s like calling out for help, and the very people
    You would expect to put a stop to it are telling you they’re not going to get involved.

    It’s like being chased through the hallways because you had to shave your head for medical reasons

    It’s like being barred from playing a lead in a high school musical because you’re blonde haired and blue eyed, and music theater doesn’t want to let anyone who looks Aryan think they deserve a principal role they’ve worked for.

    It’s like doing a health pamphlet on the dangers of heroin, footnoting it’s import from China, and being harassed by teachers trying to make an Asian hate crime from
    You out of it.

    It’s like standing up for your class whose worked hard, then having their demands read back by a teacher, in a way that makes them turn against you, and openly say they want to kill you.

    It’s like being expelled from your school, because a student pulled a prank of penning a latter in your name, claiming you’re gonna be a second Virginia tech shooter. And being wrongfully sent to a psychiatric ward under suspicion of insanity, and spending five days there being sexually assaulted by other inpatients while the crime is covered up by the therapists on duty.

    You shouldn’t try to ask what it is like being bullied. Instead you should ask why nothing is actually done about bullying. I’ll give you a straight answer as to why nothing is done…

    >>*”Oh I’m terribly sorry you had to go through all that”*

    #NO!!

    That is not the response people should have about bullying. There should be no words of remorse or sympathy. There should only be REAL ACTIONS. Legislation criminalizing it, and recompensing victims for the mental/emotional/physical/financial damages done by it, putting them back where they’ve worked to be in life. People look at bullying as a symptom of mental problems, **the only mental problems anyone has is when they look at suffering and want to appease both sides of it like nothing happened**. It’s been over 15 years, and every day because of the bullying I faced in high school, and to me, it feels like I want to jump off the Golden Gate Bridge and take my life, and exponentially more so when idiots and stoics hear me cry out for help and just say “get over it”, like Autistic people like myself are suppose to have a switch in the back of our heads we can consciously turn off, every time we have flashbacks of some overweight, depakote-dependent psycho trying to force himself upon us, and of people who are supposed to be protecting us telling us to get over it.

  9. When I was 10 to 11 my class m8s really started being weird. They tried pretending they were grown up and their way to go about it was more childish than just acting their age. I didn’t change the same way, so they made fun of me and left me out for the most part.

    It was lonely, I hated everyone, sometimes I dreaded talking in their presence or going where they were because I didn’t want to deal with them. What happened to me wasn’t extreme compared to what you hear happens to other people but it was shitty to deal with as a child.

    I changed schools the year I turned 12, the bullying was part of the reason I wanted to but not the full reason. I went to a public school with lots more people and a lot more diversity of people. Turns out I was right, kids at private school were weird, which gives me a sense of closure that I love.

  11. In middle school I was bullied. I was sure not to ever set my backpack down so I wouldn’t have to be the monkey in the middle of jerks tossing my backpack back and forth to eachother. One time the kid who always bullied me stuck his gum onto my classwork. I went to wedge the gum off but it flung off into some girls hair. I didn’t know how to speak up for myself at the time and I ended up getting in trouble. I also remember he and his cronies used to call me names, I never really did anything about it. One more thing I remember is my gym clothes having mysteriously disappeared (probably stolen). I got in trouble because I had to keep getting Loanerz gym clothes from the school. Be I no longer had my own. I was too poor to buy a new set and didn’t know how to speak up for myself, so the penalties stacked up.

    What was more a thorn in my side were the adults in charge. They gave me detentions and Friday night extra long detentions and lunch detentions because I didn’t do my homework. I was not wrong about it either. Making students do school work outside of school hours is unjustified. The detentions didn’t change anything. I just turned the other cheek because I knew they could never do anything to truly hurt me.

    In summary, I was a target of bullying but not a victim. Bullied not because I was weak, but because I didn’t do anything about it. I never retaliated or told on them to authorities. They never did anything to harm me, I was too strong minded to be hurt by them and so payed their antics no mind. I always went about my way, the bullying was just a nuisance.

  12. My experience lasted from 5th grade til I left my freshman year at college. Even people who I’d never met somehow knew me and made their contributions. If you seriously wanna know why some people rampage and go nuts the human mind can only take so much shit before they gotta flush the toilet.

    Music is what I used to cope. If I didn’t have music, I guarantee you I would not be here. I’m in a much better place now but it was very rough.

  13. Depends a lot on the nature of the bullying and what sort of reaction the people who aren’t the bullies have.

    Me? Physical attacks (I’ve always been a big guy, but not fast or strong, so the bullies really liked hitting me in the back and hauling ass – in terms of actual, serious hurt, I don’t think I ever got any, but had two bullies sent home by the nurse and one needed a cast for his arm afterwards), name-calling, theft of smaller items (worst I lost was a textbook – never carried a phone/money to school.)

    The best thing I had going for me was the teachers’ support, I guess. Straight A student that never starts trouble means I was actually believed about fighting back, and got to stay in classrooms while they were locked between classes sometimes. I can’t imagine how the American “zero-tolerance” nonsense could have made the whole thing a nightmare.

    Long-term? Made an absolute ass of myself when I got to a decent high school and started reacting to ordinary ribbing – certainly frustrating, but objectively nowhere near as bad – and reacted with an attitude formed against actual bullying, being almost completely solitary (I did have a few friends during the bullying years, but I had nothing in common with them, only really hung out with them because they weren’t assholes) during such formative years means I don’t know how to keep any company but my own – and I don’t even know for sure if I want any, I dislike not having my stuff where I can’t see it when I’m going out somewhere not “safe”, absolutely hate people moving around behind my back, and poking me in the side to get my attention when I’m spaced out puts the offending fingers in physical danger. Other problems that are common aftereffects… In my case, I’m more inclined to write most of them off as gifted child syndrome.

  15. I was lucky. I never got physically bullied, it was all just verbal and cyber. Many others have had it a lot worse. I lived in a small rural town, I was the local homo. I was in high school and I didn’t want to come out but a friend I told didn’t keep their promise and spread the word. Being called a fag and told to kill myself was a daily occurrence. My parents went to a Mormon church and where under a lot of shame. The worst was when I’d be in the locker room before and after gym class. “I swear I saw that fairy trying to sneak look, I ought to beat his ass.” Or “Why in the hell is the dick sucker here? Would it be ok if I throw that fucker out myself.” As time went by, I just learned to ignore it as best I can. But I still have moments where I am ashamed of myself for my sexuality.

  16. Alright, this will probably be rather lengthy, as I got bullied for a pretty extensive period of time, and I was also subjected to many different kinds of bullying over those years. Most of this I’ve never spoken about outside of my therapist’s office, and some parts to my mom.

    So, for all of middle school (grade 8-10) and most of high school (grades 11-13) I was fairly aggressively bullied, with the middle school portion being significantly worse. At the time I was living with my completely distant and uninterested father after him and my mother divorced, and I really had no safe space or comfort at home. My father was also physically abusive, so I never even tried talking to him about the issues I was facing with bullying.

    The most obvious kind of bullying would be the straight up physical initimidation and abuse. I was a skinny, but athletic kid so even though I was often targeted for this particular brand of bullying, for most of my time I was able to avoid it by simply being faster than the kids that wanted to gang up on me and hurt me. In 9th grade however I broke my leg real bad, which left me on crutches for around 6 months, which meant for the first time, I was unable to get away to safety. This time period was absolutely horrible for me, and made me understand how terrible this style of bullying must be for any kid that isn’t able to escape in general.

    Every single day they would target my mode of transport – my crutches. A crowd favourite was to rip them out of my hands after classes ended and throwing them down to the edge of a river that ran right by our school. It’s not fun trying to scoot down a 25m long bumpy hill on your ass in the middle of norwegian winter, while simultaneously trying to avoid getting your giant cast wet, in order to retrieve your crutches. This wasn’t as bad as this particularly brutal guy who loved lurking in the background until I tried walking up/down any stairs on my crutches, only to spring in to action and kick them out from under me while they were supporting my weight on a staircase. One time this actually caused me to worsen the fracture and add an extra two months of cast and crutches.

    On the more insidious side was the near constant exclusion. This ranged from people loudly exclaiming frustration at being placed in any sort of group with me in class, to walking around handing out birthday invitations to literally everyone in the class/group beside me, right in front of me. This stuff really hurts, but I did get used to it and eventually kind of started to expect it and it actually didn’t hurt as much anymore. What really hurt was one day a group of guys from the “popular” cliquè very excitedly invited me to hang out after school, and like a naivè fool I accepted. After school I made my way down the bus stop that would be the meetup place, only for them to have gathered a massive crowd of kids solely for the purpose of hysterically laughing in my face for being stupid enough to believe they would ever actually hang out with me.

    Eventually it escalated into freaking psyops shit, even though this was back in the days of MSN messenger. Somehow the group of guys most active in my bullying figured out I had a crush on a girl in our class. They created fake account for her, and a couple of her friends and added me. Spent weeks talking to me, eventually getting me to open up about my crush and toying with my feelings around it. One day all of a sudden they decided to pull the rug out from under me, change the display names on the users to reveal themselves and the next day they had brought a selection of printouts from the conversations which they left all around school.

    This has gotten long, and now my mood is ruined, so I’ll end it with a particularly evil event, that ended up backfiring into me terrorizing one of the bullies right back for years. One day my neighbour who I had known for basically my entire life came over and invited me over to his house to play soccer in his basement. Unbeknownst to me, there was four guys from the soccer team waiting for me down there, just to beat me up. They all dragged me into the main room of the basement, and all of a sudden all but one got cold feet. Turns out there was one in the pack who had been the driving force behind the plan, and it turned into a 1v1. I ended up beating the absolute crap out of him, and after this event I would follow him mercilessly every recess period, the entire recess period. Like a lion hunting his prey. He started spending recess in the teacher’s lounge eventually.

    How does bullying feel? Soul-destroying, lonely, desperate. It’s a state of constant fear and anxiety. It ruined my ability to trust and to bond with other people. Even to this day, I have a very small network around me, and I don’t know how to make friends or feel comfortable in social situations. Fuck bullies.

    Edit: Some typos.

  17. It’s horrible. You feel like you want to sink into the ground and disappear. At least, for me as a kid, that’s what it was like, more or less.

  18. I was an immigrant that came to the states as a younger person so I struggled with English and I looked different from the white people and I had really dark skin. We were also incredibly poor. Like I didn’t realize how poor we were until I became an adult and started paying my own rent and bills.

    It was really difficult. Both girls and boys made fun of me. I was so unpopular that even the teachers treated me like shit. It was a daily thing in an ongoing thing.

    It was also like that in my house because my parents are really aggressive and violent towards each other in the siblings train themselves to do that kind of shit etc.

    So I was bullied literally all day long at school and then literally all night long at home, nonstop, for years.

    I had three suicide attempts. There’s some permanent damage to my body from them but overall I’m doing OK.

    It does start to affect you because it feels like those moments represent the entire population of the world and it’s very difficult to get out of that mindset even as an adult.

  19. Usually they pick a few things about you and just fucking torment you on it, sure they stop saying it but you don’t stop REPEATING it which is why it causes people issues later on

  21. The crippling feeling of loneliness it gave us something I still struggle with today. One of the problems it gave me was not forming actual healthy bonds with people because of mistrust. I don’t blame my bullies though, I blame myself for not leaving the past behind.

  22. I used to have a visceral reaction to the sound of skateboard wheels on the sidewalk. My bully skated.

  23. Bullying is a loose term utilized for any type of repetitive, rude, hurtful (sometimes harmful) actions from one person to another. Not all cases are alike.

    I’ve seen people get bullied everyday getting beaten down behind a school, and I’ve seen bullies never go past the verbal and mental bullying.

    Either way, bullying can make you feel alone and that you can’t trust anyone. It can instill a constant state of fear and insecurity in an individual, and the mental state can quickly deteriorate due to insecurities and traumas typically being targeted by the bully.

  24. The point of bullying is that it makes the target feel inferior in some way. That’s what being bullied feels like, often taken to an extreme such that a target of bullying feels worthless.

    There are a couple of things to keep in mind about bullying that many people forget. One is that bullying can happen almost anywhere. When most people think of bullying they think of school bullying, and while that’s a very common place for it, it also happens in the workplace, among a group of friends, or at home by family members (although that’s often categorized as domestic abuse). It can even happen to a random passer-by in public.

    Another thing is that, when a bully has decided to make you their target, they’ll look for any sign of a flaw or weakness (or something they perceive as one) to make you feel bad about. Despite the fact that everyone has weaknesses. And if they don’t see one in you, they’ll make one up, usually projecting their own insecurities onto you. Bottom line is, bullies will find any reason to make you feel powerless and it says more about them than you.

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