Can you recall the first time you stood up for yourself and what impact did it have?

6 comments

1. I bought an attachable speaker. I don’t like to yell and I’m soft spoken. My speaker solved my issue against students being rude. Helps me calmly redirect without getting upset.

2. I suddenly realized that the people who i had a crippling fear of (my own parents) couldn’t deal with conflict and independent thinking from their adult child. I spent my entire twenties in a fundamentalist religious sect even though I had dreams about leaving and starting my own life at 18. It took me 10 years to finally stand up to them. The fallout was awful, and currently they are shunning me.

   I used to think i wouldn’t be able to function without my family. i thought i’d probably end this life experience early due to the lonely isolation.

   The great philospher Seneca says “we suffer more often in imagination than in reality.”. I realized groups like church i grew up in take advantage of your fear and create scenarios of eternal doom, loneliness, abandonment and it compells you to stay. Once I left I just felt…. happy. Not overwhelmingly happy, just…. happy, and alive, and grateful. Even without my family in my life much… well, at all really.

   Before that I couldn’t feel anything.

3. Idk… I had the fight-response as a kid. Fighting back to your physically abusive dad or bullies isn’t a particularly smart move. But I admire little me’s resilience. These days I’m a people pleaser with a freeze or fawn response.

4. My bully took my nearly complete coursework and set it on fire.

   I smashed her head on a radiator.

   I went to the headmistress and told her what I did and she punished me by making me take after school study.

   Which she knows I did every night voluntarily anyway.

   I now know how long my fuse is and to not let people run roughshod over me until I get to the end of that fuse. I’m a lot more vocal as 33 year old.

5. I was a very young teen, still a pretty otherwise innocent kid doin her thing. Never really had any kind of altercation with anyone up till this point. I was out just chilling on a park with a couple friends and these girls from my school turn up absolutely steaming drunk. Start shit with us for quite literally no reason and that was the first time I’d ever properly had to stand up for myself; and I did.

   It was a pretty pivotal life moment looking back, I can probably date back a lot of my general attitude and unwillingness to accept bullshit back to that day. On the other hand though, it set of a pretty big chain reaction of me having a continuous 5 years of beef with all the ‘popular kids’ which had its pros and cons lmao

6. Whenever I stand up to myself to my father he doesn’t talk to me for months 😅