I don’t know if this is something people say in other countries, but in my country, there’s this common cliché or “wisdom” where adults will assure you that the people who picked on you in environments like school will universally develop lives of hardship later on, one way or another getting into mayhem.
I asked my mother one day what happened to all those people growing up. I can sense she may have been sugar coating it, but she said something along the lines of “well, I waited, and waited, and waited, and waited, and waited, and became a teacher, and waited some more, and finally watched as my bullies had to go into retirement five years late, yay” (okay, not really like that, but it might as well have been).
Yeah, common theme in my experience that what we hope for is never “that” set in stone. No matter where in the community (or even long-distance communicating) you knew them from, based on life, how much approximate correspondence do you associate with that mindset in the first paragraph?
A few years ago, my baddie killed himself. No idea what was happening in his life at the time. I hadn’t seen him since high school, which was 25 years ago. I saw the obituary and thought it was surprising and interesting, but didn’t feel bad, or good about it in any way.
I met one of the guys again who bullied me in school. He was a junkie, begging for money at the train station.
How did you two react to seeing each other with him in that state of being?
I recognized him. I doubt he recognized me. I ignored him.
Why would I spend any effort on keeping tabs on people who made my life miserable?
Yeah I forgot about those chucklefucks aeons ago
This lol.
I’m fucking 40, anyone I grew up with who made my life miserable are people who I have had no exposure to or communications with since I graduated high school June 16th 2002. Anyone since then who makes my life miserable for more than a few minutes gets told to fuck off on the spot lol.
You graduated on a Sunday? My school always did graduations on weekdays. I graduated about a week earlier than you did. Juuuust about to turn 40 myself.
And yes, I’ve either befriended my old bullies (a lot of them were just lashing out because they had a shitty home life/no one to listen to them), or they’ve gone off to live their lives and I never heard from them again.
My class is finally at the age where they’re keeping tabs on who has died since the last reunion, and the list is very short with none of my former bullies on it.
Did you look that up or are you one of their that knows days from dates ?
I looked it up, because my high school graduation date was right about that time. I was curious if I graduated on the same date.
Might have been a few days off with the date, it’s been a minute lol.
To see if it backfired on them?
To preserve one’s childlike belief in a just world, of course.
Fuck me if I know what any of them are doing with their lives. Part of me sure wishes that the shitty people from my past are getting what’s coming to them, but also what difference does it make to me what karmic justice may or may not await them.
My life is objectively better than when I had to deal with their shit. Why waste my mental energy on them?
I’ve no idea, I haven’t thought about them since I left school and now I can barely remember their names.
No idea. I don’t pay any attention to them. I hope they’re happy and doing fine.
I ended up ghosting/ditching most of my own age group, since most of them got hooked on various substances and going down the wrong path.
Yeah it kinda sucks, but I don’t wanna find myself in and out of jail for the rest of my life.
I know at least one of them was arrested for B&E and possession with intent to sell of meth (though it was immediately after high school and I’m sure he’s out by now). The rest, don’t know don’t care.
What’s B&E?
Breaking and Entering. He (and two others) were burglarizing homes.
A town near where I grew up had an epidemic of that. The teachers treated the bullies like their favorite children, the next thing you knew they had burglarized every single unlocked vehicle in the entire town for drug money on multiple occasions and were arrested right before they would’ve graduated from high school. My friend was one of their brothers and I remember it got so bad they graduated him despite him not passing just to remedy the memory of trying to overshadow him.
One was in a car accident, ended up a quadriplegic.
Another one, last I saw, he was pumping my gas.
I met one during college. We were both very different people by then and went out for lunch.
While there were no apologies (there were lines crossed by both of us), there was closure.
What do you mean by closure?
This new version of them was not someone I could hate.
We were completely new people, so it felt like the “us” from before were gone. There was no need to hold onto any of the hate.
More often than not people become bullies because they have a hard life in the first place. So, sure, feel superior and have this “gatcha” moment or grow up and feel bad for these people, it’s your choice
You’re not wrong, though I wish they wouldn’t take it out on random individuals around them.
I wish that too and to change that, we need to help both victims and bullies since both are victims of the system
Found the bully!
I was bullied as a kid and grew as a person
I was curious about a guy who bullied me in elementary school so I looked up his name on Facebook. His profile picture had a pro-life message in it. I was not at all surprised.
A bully having a pro-live message? Surprising.
You know what’s not surprising? How much you can save by switching to Geico.
One bully of mine actually beat a young girl to death at a private party some (~10) years ago. Served just a few years prison sentence. I heard that when I was still on facebook, and I’m glad I’m not there anymore.
Yikes. Always thought it weird when violent crimes get you less than nonviolent ones.
I haven’t met a single person I went to school with, since I left my home town to go to university. So, no idea.
Living the dream, the best revenge is a life well-lived.
Many people who were assholes as kids turned out to become chill adults. I had a person who I considered a best friend suddenly turn on me in my last year of primary school. He always targeted me specifically and Istill remember coming home crying from the bullying. However, our lives diverged and we didn’t really meet until late in highschool somewhere in a bar in the city. We were both already a bit tipsy (alcoholic age was 16 y/o at that point here), and when he ran into me he basically just acted as if we had never not been friends. It was like the old friend was back, rather than the guy who caused so much pain. It was like he never realized what he had done. At that moment I realized we both had changed so much since the moment that he was bullying me, and I chose to just be glad to reconnect with an old friend.
This story goes for quite a few people who bullied me. Pretty much all of them, when I met them years later, seemed blissfully unaware of the pain they caused and just greeted me as an old friend or classmate. And with all of them I also recognised that they had grown into chill people, and had changed so much that they weren’t really the same person anymore. So I chose to also consider them old friends or classmates, and if I ran into them now I’d probably just have a nice chat about what our lives became.
As friendly as the two of you are, I would encourage you to not be afraid to explain to him the pain he caused.
