8 ms·

The reason high school bullies get back in touch later in life (2019)

27 points by optimalsolver 4y ago

flatearth22 4y ago
bombcar 4y ago
Strange, zero mentions of trying to sell you some weird life insurance or knives.
- artogahr 4y ago
  or MLM schemes.
  - seattle_spring 4y ago
    To be fair, both "weird life insurance" and "knives" are references to MLMs. The ones that come to mind are Northwestern Mutual and Cutco, respectively.
- pyuser583 4y ago
  Or trying to recruit you for a contract position.
- nthj 4y ago
  “I have an idea for an app”
blueflow 4y ago
Could we normalize that being emotionally strong and having some amount of resilience is like, something desirable for all adults? Why can't these people shrug it off? Just by math everyone can be expected to meet abusive people during their lifetime. Would be really useful...
- pavel_lishin 4y ago
  Sure, if we can also normalize accepting that emotional pain and injury is no less serious than physical injury. Some people can't just "shrug it off" any more than some people can't just "walk off" a broken ankle.
  - peoplefromibiza 4y ago
    > if we can also normalize accepting that emotional pain and injury is no less serious than physical injury they are not. they are in fact worse. I suffered so many physical injuries when I was a kid that I stopped counting them, none of them traumatized me. They are now good stories to tell. On the other hand emotional pain was so unbearable that there are people I still don't talk to 35 years later, because I don't want to remember. You know why they are so terrible? Because people wanted to "share the pain" and made a big fuss about it and forced me to "confront my feelings" "live the pain" and all that hippie stuff, that only made it worse and gave me the idea that suffering was something you couldn't escape from. Now that I am a full grown up adult, I'm still sometimes scared by having the feeling of feeling something. If people could just normalize the fact that everything pass and everything goes away with time (except of course real traumas, like war or being abused) kids would realize that there'll be a day when they will stand up for themselves and the high school bully did a really bad job at ruining your life, there are so many worse things in life, that you kinda admire how stupid they were. > than some people can't just "walk off" a broken ankle. actually, most of the times you can walk off a broken ankle. Typically, a minor ankle fracture won't prevent you from walking.
    - seattle_spring 4y ago
      It's disappointing but not unexpected to see your comment downvoted. There's a reason CPTSD is considered even more difficult to treat than PTSD.
      - peoplefromibiza 4y ago
        > It's disappointing but not unexpected to see your comment downvoted. There's a reason CPTSD is considered even more difficult to treat than PTSD. As you have correctly pointed out: disappointing but not unexpected. I'm actually happy, it means that usually for people their worse experiences are high school bullies or broken ankles. It's a good thing. I wish it was true for everybody.
vmception 4y ago
I agree with the shadowbanned comments here. This article is hilarious to read, but I am willing to be cognizant of how common this level of anxiety is. This person receives a follow and a couple DMs from someone that used to undermine their self esteem. Instead of saying anything, instead of just ignoring them, they wonder about a half dozen scenarios of horniness that completely misunderstand men in general, then they go to Twitter and to a PhD Sociologist (a "doctor") to get a variety of explanations. The culmination being this dissertation style thought piece. Talk about spiraling. Wow. Are a lot of people like this such that I should stop laughing and "validate" this behavior? I can do it. But only if consensus says so. My whole modus operandi is blending in for status.
- throwawayboise 4y ago
  Yeah. I'm becoming more and more convinced that the modern adult's emotional maturity now stops developing in middle school. I guess I would blame social media? I don't know. Or maybe we just don't teach kids how to deal with this anymore. That a grown adult would still be dwelling on shit from high school is something that I cannot fathom. I was a complete backwards nerd in high school, didn't know how to socialize, didn't know how to talk to girls, didn't play sports, loved math, science, and computers, all the stereotypical attributes. In many ways I still am that person. I got the stereotypical treatment back then, but it's ancient history. High school kids are idiots for the most part, why would you be letting their idiocy back then affect you as a grown, independent adult today. Have some self respect for pete's sake.
  - Sakos 4y ago
    > Yeah. I'm becoming more and more convinced that the modern adult's emotional maturity now stops developing in middle school. I guess I would blame social media? I don't know. Or maybe we just don't teach kids how to deal with this anymore. As a millenial, I agree with this. It took me until I hit 30 before actually reaching something resembling healthy emotional maturity. It took a lot of really painful experiences for me and a lot of self-reflection for that to happen.
  - silverpepsi 4y ago
nonameiguess 4y ago
This is interesting to me. Back in the "Facebook is cool" days, two people from middle school friend requested and reached out to me to apologize for crappy things they'd done when we were kids. In one case, I remember the girl quite well but could not remember what she did. In the other, it was a dude who punched me in the face during a basketball game, which I definitely remembered, but it was still a weird experience, because I got a black eye, healed in a few days, and was fine. No hard feelings. Sports get emotional and kids fight. But apparently this guy had been haunted by it and by his general pattern of violent behavior for decades. He'd become a karate instructor for kids. He was like a real life version of Johnny Lawrence in Cobra Kai, atoning for his sins. Even though I had no hard feelings and never felt bullied just because a guy hit me one time, why would I deny these people their atonement? Whether it's part of some pseudo 12 step thing or just them feeling crappy about who they used to be and trying to be better, let them. It seems wildly uncharitable to assume someone is still the same person they were 20 years ago and is trying to get in contact to resume the abuse, let alone because they want to hook up with you. Bullies tend to become bullies because their parents beat the crap out of them when they were kids. They didn't exactly have ideal childhoods. Much worse than mine. If this helps them overcome it and break the cycle of abuse, I'm all for it.
- tmp538394722 4y ago
  I’m all for respectfully seeking atonement, so long as it’s understood that the victim doesn’t owe the perpetrator anything. Parts of the article made me uncomfortable, like how after the perpetrator had been blocked, they went through friend back channels to continue to try to communicate with their victim. Maybe that kind of stalking will ultimately work out for the best for everyone, but that’s pretty presumptuous, and seems more about assuaging the perpetrator’s guilt complex than victim recovery.
stakkur 4y ago
Happiness is giving up all hope of a better past.
- 725686 4y ago
  That is a great aphorism!
powersnail 4y ago
How common is bullying in schools where you live? I've never been bullied, or bullied others, or witnessed bullying in school. We had fights, but mostly short fist fights between equal opponents that quickly ended up drawing the attention of teachers, and mostly due to arguments, rather than someone being harassed or squeezed for lunch money (that might be because we had no lunch money). The only case of bullying that I'm familiar with, is how the school treats its students (hitting, forced confession, long detention, school ending at 10pm). Is bullying among students a common occurrence in your schools? Is it like the TV dramas, where athletic sports students bully the bookish ones?
- RankingMember 4y ago
  > Is it like the TV dramas, where athletic sports students bully the bookish ones? absolutely, that's a common dynamic in bullying. I'm in the US, though- perhaps you're somewhere else?
  - powersnail 4y ago
    Yes, I grew up in China (but I won't say that my experience represents Chinese schools in general; I was probably just lucky).
- basisword 4y ago
  >> or witnessed bullying in school It doesn’t tend to be like in the movies where the big kid hits the little kid. It’s often something you wouldn’t notice and friends of the person being bullied wouldn’t notice. Subtle but continuous and because you have to go to school you can do nothing to avoid it. Also keep in mind words can hurt much more easily when you’re a kid.
- macksd 4y ago
  I've wondered about this, because I hear about bullying a lot on various neighborhood social media groups, etc. When I was in school I felt like I was a victim of bullying. Looking back with my grown-up perspective and having gone to talk to a therapist about a lot of it, there was definitely some legit bullying, and I absolutely buy that that happens to other people now. Kids can say or do some pretty cruel things, sometimes without even realizing it. And I think our hyper-connected world has made some of these dynamics worse or harder to escape. There was, however, also just the fact that I was extremely awkward, having immigrated multiple times at key times in my social development, and I just didn't really feel connected to anyone or know how to relate to the other kids around me. I acted pretty unlikable in a lot of ways, and other kids could have been more sensitive to that but at a certain point that's just an unreasonable expectation. I interpreted the way they acted to me as bullying, but looking back that was what helped me grow out of it and be able to relate to people better. I don't want to extrapolate from my experience and say that kids feeling bullied need to just deal with it and grow through it, but I think that's a factor in at least some other cases. What I thought of reading this article was my own experience on the other side: I moved back to near my home town after a decade away, and I messaged some people who I had felt had bullied me at one point in time but with whom I had been Facebook friends for a while. We ended up having a really good chat over lunch or something, and it was healing to feel "Hey - grown-up-you is actually pretty nice and cool, and grown-up-me is capable of talking to you and feeling mutual respect". It stopped feeling like they had bullied me, and felt more like man, growing up can be weird.
protoman3000 4y ago
Why does bullying even happen?
- vmoore 4y ago
  Because we're human. Kids can be very cruel. They don't know the emotional toll and cascade effect of mean comments or actions. In a sense kids can exhibit psychopathic traits, completely devoid of empathy for the bullied victims.
  - protoman3000 4y ago
    Even if they knew about the emotional toll, they still would feel the urge to be cruel. The question is why this urge appears and what we can do about it.
    - vmoore 4y ago
      It's my understanding that they don't know the emotional toll, since they can't relate or empathize at all so they run an experiment to try and tease out emotions, but ultimately fail, that is, if the victim is a stoic, (so I would just shrug off these types of actions as being 'kids will be kids'). There are psychopathic people who can't feel emotion and will run these experiments so they can have 'the feels' but again, usually fail.
- munificent 4y ago
  It gives the bully a real sense of power and control, both personally and socially.
  - drewcoo 4y ago
    And we live in a society that values victimhood highly. The victims score some kind of merit badge for their self-sacrifice sashes, I think.
fallingfrog 4y ago
David Graeber wrote a really good essay on the nature of power and bullying: https://thebaffler.com/salvos/bullys-pulpit https://thebaffler.com/salvos/bullys-pulpit
tempnow987 4y ago
" the effects of which I'm still working through 15 years later." " slide into my DMs like a thirsty fuckboy trying to curry favour in my Insta inbox." " Did this person look me up and realise that I'm actually pretty hot? " Got to love this type of writing. Feels a bit dramatic, but don't know their relationship. I once said something that was a saying I used all the time, but was highly offensive to a friend (very rightly, as soon as I said it I realized it could be taken the wrong way). We never talked again. I was too embarrassed and immature to know how to apologize. I ended up crossing paths with her on facebook and sent a friend request. She accepted. I've sometimes felt that an apology can be an intrusion - I've not msg'ed her at all. But to say I felt better is a huge understatement. She is happy and married with two kids so that was even better to see. I'm married with two kids too. There are perhaps 3-4 people I feel bad about how I treated them. One was in elementary school when I was maybe in 3rd grade. I hope they all went on to do amazing things. Can someone feel badly about what they did? For sure. I wouldn't mind if one or two folks who bullied me said hey man, I'm sorry about it. I'd say don't worry. But even more I wish I'd never been an occasional total jerk.
snorkel 4y ago
I was well into high school before I realized that many supposed many class bullies teased everyone, and especially their friends. From their perspective they often meant their teasing to be playful rather than hateful, but recipients of teasing could take it either way.
- deathanatos 4y ago
  Perhaps some bullies are this way, but I encountered physical and verbal abuse that was well beyond "teasing" or "playful".
drnonsense42 4y ago
Reading this is like a manifesto on the maladjusted millenial mind (sorry, this sentence was a coincidence). Didn’t we used to have movie tropes about deranged people who could not move on past high school? Is this “caught up in trauma from slight bullying (getting called ugly) in high school decades ago” the new normal? I’m just going to go out and say this- the author and likeminded people are just weird, and this shouldn’t be considered normal. Just tell the bully to piss off, like an adult, threaten something legal if they keep harassing you, and go back to enjoying your life. This cloying coddling of something that should be a nonissue a decade+ later is a both alarming and repulsive. And look- there are people who experience actual trauma in childhood who deserve sympathy- I’m absolutely not commenting at all on them.
time_to_smile 4y ago
I was always under the impression that part of growing up was realizing that everyone in high school was going through their own pain, felt isolated, reacted to this in a variety of ways (some focused on hurting others, some focused on wallowing in their own hurt) and that we've all done shitty things (most of which we probably don't even realize we did) and had shitty things done to us. Realizing that my pain didn't make me special and wasn't, in fact, unique to me was precisely where I divide being a teenager from being an adult. I was beat up as a teenager (and of course teased etc) and can't for the life of me imagine holding a grudge about this into adulthood. It's not even clear the bully "sliding into the author's dms" is even aware that they were a bully. I have a distinct feeling that plenty of people I thought were being assholes to me as a teenager never really realized the extent they were giving this impression. Teenagers tend to both take things harder than they should and at the same time express themselves potentially far more aggressively than they realized. But the article has made me realize that a surprising number of people apparently never make it all the way to this stage of life.
drewcoo 4y ago
Written by someone with a huge victim complex. Incapable of seeing anything except their own victimhood.

27 points by optimalsolver 4y ago

flatearth22 4y ago

bombcar 4y ago

Strange, zero mentions of trying to sell you some weird life insurance or knives.

artogahr 4y ago
or MLM schemes.
- seattle_spring 4y ago
  To be fair, both "weird life insurance" and "knives" are references to MLMs. The ones that come to mind are Northwestern Mutual and Cutco, respectively.
pyuser583 4y ago
Or trying to recruit you for a contract position.
nthj 4y ago
“I have an idea for an app”

blueflow 4y ago

Could we normalize that being emotionally strong and having some amount of resilience is like, something desirable for all adults? Why can't these people shrug it off? Just by math everyone can be expected to meet abusive people during their lifetime. Would be really useful...

pavel_lishin 4y ago
Sure, if we can also normalize accepting that emotional pain and injury is no less serious than physical injury. Some people can't just "shrug it off" any more than some people can't just "walk off" a broken ankle.
- peoplefromibiza 4y ago
  > if we can also normalize accepting that emotional pain and injury is no less serious than physical injury they are not. they are in fact worse. I suffered so many physical injuries when I was a kid that I stopped counting them, none of them traumatized me. They are now good stories to tell. On the other hand emotional pain was so unbearable that there are people I still don't talk to 35 years later, because I don't want to remember. You know why they are so terrible? Because people wanted to "share the pain" and made a big fuss about it and forced me to "confront my feelings" "live the pain" and all that hippie stuff, that only made it worse and gave me the idea that suffering was something you couldn't escape from. Now that I am a full grown up adult, I'm still sometimes scared by having the feeling of feeling something. If people could just normalize the fact that everything pass and everything goes away with time (except of course real traumas, like war or being abused) kids would realize that there'll be a day when they will stand up for themselves and the high school bully did a really bad job at ruining your life, there are so many worse things in life, that you kinda admire how stupid they were. > than some people can't just "walk off" a broken ankle. actually, most of the times you can walk off a broken ankle. Typically, a minor ankle fracture won't prevent you from walking.
  - seattle_spring 4y ago
    It's disappointing but not unexpected to see your comment downvoted. There's a reason CPTSD is considered even more difficult to treat than PTSD.
    - peoplefromibiza 4y ago
      > It's disappointing but not unexpected to see your comment downvoted. There's a reason CPTSD is considered even more difficult to treat than PTSD. As you have correctly pointed out: disappointing but not unexpected. I'm actually happy, it means that usually for people their worse experiences are high school bullies or broken ankles. It's a good thing. I wish it was true for everybody.

vmception 4y ago

I agree with the shadowbanned comments here. This article is hilarious to read, but I am willing to be cognizant of how common this level of anxiety is. This person receives a follow and a couple DMs from someone that used to undermine their self esteem. Instead of saying anything, instead of just ignoring them, they wonder about a half dozen scenarios of horniness that completely misunderstand men in general, then they go to Twitter and to a PhD Sociologist (a "doctor") to get a variety of explanations. The culmination being this dissertation style thought piece. Talk about spiraling. Wow. Are a lot of people like this such that I should stop laughing and "validate" this behavior? I can do it. But only if consensus says so. My whole modus operandi is blending in for status.

throwawayboise 4y ago
Yeah. I'm becoming more and more convinced that the modern adult's emotional maturity now stops developing in middle school. I guess I would blame social media? I don't know. Or maybe we just don't teach kids how to deal with this anymore. That a grown adult would still be dwelling on shit from high school is something that I cannot fathom. I was a complete backwards nerd in high school, didn't know how to socialize, didn't know how to talk to girls, didn't play sports, loved math, science, and computers, all the stereotypical attributes. In many ways I still am that person. I got the stereotypical treatment back then, but it's ancient history. High school kids are idiots for the most part, why would you be letting their idiocy back then affect you as a grown, independent adult today. Have some self respect for pete's sake.
- Sakos 4y ago
  > Yeah. I'm becoming more and more convinced that the modern adult's emotional maturity now stops developing in middle school. I guess I would blame social media? I don't know. Or maybe we just don't teach kids how to deal with this anymore. As a millenial, I agree with this. It took me until I hit 30 before actually reaching something resembling healthy emotional maturity. It took a lot of really painful experiences for me and a lot of self-reflection for that to happen.
- silverpepsi 4y ago

nonameiguess 4y ago

This is interesting to me. Back in the "Facebook is cool" days, two people from middle school friend requested and reached out to me to apologize for crappy things they'd done when we were kids. In one case, I remember the girl quite well but could not remember what she did. In the other, it was a dude who punched me in the face during a basketball game, which I definitely remembered, but it was still a weird experience, because I got a black eye, healed in a few days, and was fine. No hard feelings. Sports get emotional and kids fight. But apparently this guy had been haunted by it and by his general pattern of violent behavior for decades. He'd become a karate instructor for kids. He was like a real life version of Johnny Lawrence in Cobra Kai, atoning for his sins. Even though I had no hard feelings and never felt bullied just because a guy hit me one time, why would I deny these people their atonement? Whether it's part of some pseudo 12 step thing or just them feeling crappy about who they used to be and trying to be better, let them. It seems wildly uncharitable to assume someone is still the same person they were 20 years ago and is trying to get in contact to resume the abuse, let alone because they want to hook up with you. Bullies tend to become bullies because their parents beat the crap out of them when they were kids. They didn't exactly have ideal childhoods. Much worse than mine. If this helps them overcome it and break the cycle of abuse, I'm all for it.

tmp538394722 4y ago
I’m all for respectfully seeking atonement, so long as it’s understood that the victim doesn’t owe the perpetrator anything. Parts of the article made me uncomfortable, like how after the perpetrator had been blocked, they went through friend back channels to continue to try to communicate with their victim. Maybe that kind of stalking will ultimately work out for the best for everyone, but that’s pretty presumptuous, and seems more about assuaging the perpetrator’s guilt complex than victim recovery.

stakkur 4y ago

Happiness is giving up all hope of a better past.

725686 4y ago
That is a great aphorism!

powersnail 4y ago

How common is bullying in schools where you live? I've never been bullied, or bullied others, or witnessed bullying in school. We had fights, but mostly short fist fights between equal opponents that quickly ended up drawing the attention of teachers, and mostly due to arguments, rather than someone being harassed or squeezed for lunch money (that might be because we had no lunch money). The only case of bullying that I'm familiar with, is how the school treats its students (hitting, forced confession, long detention, school ending at 10pm). Is bullying among students a common occurrence in your schools? Is it like the TV dramas, where athletic sports students bully the bookish ones?

RankingMember 4y ago
> Is it like the TV dramas, where athletic sports students bully the bookish ones? absolutely, that's a common dynamic in bullying. I'm in the US, though- perhaps you're somewhere else?
- powersnail 4y ago
  Yes, I grew up in China (but I won't say that my experience represents Chinese schools in general; I was probably just lucky).
basisword 4y ago
>> or witnessed bullying in school It doesn’t tend to be like in the movies where the big kid hits the little kid. It’s often something you wouldn’t notice and friends of the person being bullied wouldn’t notice. Subtle but continuous and because you have to go to school you can do nothing to avoid it. Also keep in mind words can hurt much more easily when you’re a kid.
macksd 4y ago
I've wondered about this, because I hear about bullying a lot on various neighborhood social media groups, etc. When I was in school I felt like I was a victim of bullying. Looking back with my grown-up perspective and having gone to talk to a therapist about a lot of it, there was definitely some legit bullying, and I absolutely buy that that happens to other people now. Kids can say or do some pretty cruel things, sometimes without even realizing it. And I think our hyper-connected world has made some of these dynamics worse or harder to escape. There was, however, also just the fact that I was extremely awkward, having immigrated multiple times at key times in my social development, and I just didn't really feel connected to anyone or know how to relate to the other kids around me. I acted pretty unlikable in a lot of ways, and other kids could have been more sensitive to that but at a certain point that's just an unreasonable expectation. I interpreted the way they acted to me as bullying, but looking back that was what helped me grow out of it and be able to relate to people better. I don't want to extrapolate from my experience and say that kids feeling bullied need to just deal with it and grow through it, but I think that's a factor in at least some other cases. What I thought of reading this article was my own experience on the other side: I moved back to near my home town after a decade away, and I messaged some people who I had felt had bullied me at one point in time but with whom I had been Facebook friends for a while. We ended up having a really good chat over lunch or something, and it was healing to feel "Hey - grown-up-you is actually pretty nice and cool, and grown-up-me is capable of talking to you and feeling mutual respect". It stopped feeling like they had bullied me, and felt more like man, growing up can be weird.

protoman3000 4y ago

Why does bullying even happen?

vmoore 4y ago
Because we're human. Kids can be very cruel. They don't know the emotional toll and cascade effect of mean comments or actions. In a sense kids can exhibit psychopathic traits, completely devoid of empathy for the bullied victims.
- protoman3000 4y ago
  Even if they knew about the emotional toll, they still would feel the urge to be cruel. The question is why this urge appears and what we can do about it.
  - vmoore 4y ago
    It's my understanding that they don't know the emotional toll, since they can't relate or empathize at all so they run an experiment to try and tease out emotions, but ultimately fail, that is, if the victim is a stoic, (so I would just shrug off these types of actions as being 'kids will be kids'). There are psychopathic people who can't feel emotion and will run these experiments so they can have 'the feels' but again, usually fail.
munificent 4y ago
It gives the bully a real sense of power and control, both personally and socially.
- drewcoo 4y ago
  And we live in a society that values victimhood highly. The victims score some kind of merit badge for their self-sacrifice sashes, I think.

fallingfrog 4y ago

David Graeber wrote a really good essay on the nature of power and bullying: https://thebaffler.com/salvos/bullys-pulpit https://thebaffler.com/salvos/bullys-pulpit

tempnow987 4y ago

" the effects of which I'm still working through 15 years later." " slide into my DMs like a thirsty fuckboy trying to curry favour in my Insta inbox." " Did this person look me up and realise that I'm actually pretty hot? " Got to love this type of writing. Feels a bit dramatic, but don't know their relationship. I once said something that was a saying I used all the time, but was highly offensive to a friend (very rightly, as soon as I said it I realized it could be taken the wrong way). We never talked again. I was too embarrassed and immature to know how to apologize. I ended up crossing paths with her on facebook and sent a friend request. She accepted. I've sometimes felt that an apology can be an intrusion - I've not msg'ed her at all. But to say I felt better is a huge understatement. She is happy and married with two kids so that was even better to see. I'm married with two kids too. There are perhaps 3-4 people I feel bad about how I treated them. One was in elementary school when I was maybe in 3rd grade. I hope they all went on to do amazing things. Can someone feel badly about what they did? For sure. I wouldn't mind if one or two folks who bullied me said hey man, I'm sorry about it. I'd say don't worry. But even more I wish I'd never been an occasional total jerk.

snorkel 4y ago

I was well into high school before I realized that many supposed many class bullies teased everyone, and especially their friends. From their perspective they often meant their teasing to be playful rather than hateful, but recipients of teasing could take it either way.

deathanatos 4y ago
Perhaps some bullies are this way, but I encountered physical and verbal abuse that was well beyond "teasing" or "playful".

drnonsense42 4y ago

Reading this is like a manifesto on the maladjusted millenial mind (sorry, this sentence was a coincidence). Didn’t we used to have movie tropes about deranged people who could not move on past high school? Is this “caught up in trauma from slight bullying (getting called ugly) in high school decades ago” the new normal? I’m just going to go out and say this- the author and likeminded people are just weird, and this shouldn’t be considered normal. Just tell the bully to piss off, like an adult, threaten something legal if they keep harassing you, and go back to enjoying your life. This cloying coddling of something that should be a nonissue a decade+ later is a both alarming and repulsive. And look- there are people who experience actual trauma in childhood who deserve sympathy- I’m absolutely not commenting at all on them.

time_to_smile 4y ago

I was always under the impression that part of growing up was realizing that everyone in high school was going through their own pain, felt isolated, reacted to this in a variety of ways (some focused on hurting others, some focused on wallowing in their own hurt) and that we've all done shitty things (most of which we probably don't even realize we did) and had shitty things done to us. Realizing that my pain didn't make me special and wasn't, in fact, unique to me was precisely where I divide being a teenager from being an adult. I was beat up as a teenager (and of course teased etc) and can't for the life of me imagine holding a grudge about this into adulthood. It's not even clear the bully "sliding into the author's dms" is even aware that they were a bully. I have a distinct feeling that plenty of people I thought were being assholes to me as a teenager never really realized the extent they were giving this impression. Teenagers tend to both take things harder than they should and at the same time express themselves potentially far more aggressively than they realized. But the article has made me realize that a surprising number of people apparently never make it all the way to this stage of life.

drewcoo 4y ago

Written by someone with a huge victim complex. Incapable of seeing anything except their own victimhood.