[legion]

I was bullied pretty consistently from grade school to high school.

I think there are two kinds of bullying, and not everyone who does it is a bully.

First, I was an odd kid, so I was picked on by other kids for my strangeness. This is a mechanism that is normal and is designed to reinforce social norms. Many kids today have never been picked on, have been told their whole life that they are special, have always had a hovering parent there to protect them, and they get out into the workforce as adults and they expect to land a six figure job as a director in their field. But their expectations don't match reality, and they don't really know how to behave around other people. Further, they are used to putting in minimal effort and being praised immensely for it. Without ever facing ANY adversity, they don't know how to deal with it.

Given the above, when a kid really does get bullied, it can cause them extreme cognitive dissonance. I don't think the Internet makes it that much worse, I just think kids today have no skills for dealing with adversity. I remember feeling like the bullying was coming at me from all sides at certain points in my life, and I did fantasize about "getting back" at those who were picking on me, but I never thought about going Terminator on the school to do it.

I remember getting picked on pretty much since I started school. I remember a bully picking on me in 3rd and 4th grade (same kid). Sometime around the end of 4th grade another bully started picking on me too. Then a strange thing happened: the first bully got jealous and beat up the other bully. Then he and I became friends and he was sort of my protector. (And the fact that he had been held back twice in grade school made him a big protector.)

I got picked on by pretty much everyone in middle school, once again, mostly because of my own, odd behavior.

I've never been one to back down, and when things got bad freshmen year of high school and I couldn't take it anymore, I challenged each and every person that was picking on me to a fight. (I later learned that one supposed friend was egging these guys on telling them I was bad-mouthing them, but that's another story.) Most backed off, but about 10 of them did show up at my house one day. I called the cops, they backed off after that as well.

By the time I hit junior year in high school, I'd stopped most of my odd behavior in an attempt to fit in. I started making a lot of friends. I pretty much stopped getting picked on, and when someone did say something, it just rolled off my back. By senior year, I was at the center of a large group of friends. I wasn't in with the self-proclaimed popular group, but I was one of two people that pretty much decided what 20-50 people were doing every weekend.

You know what all being bullied taught me? It taught me how to behave normally around other people. It taught me that I could make my own friends and the more friends I had, the less attractive target I was to bullies. Most of all, it taught me how to solve my own problems and that it was my responsibility to solve them.