Category: Commentary

I don't know why, but when I woke up this morning, it finally dawned on me: I'm a bully. I'm not the kind of bully who beats you up and takes your lunch money. I'm really a nice guy who goes out of his way to help (certain) people. So how am I a bully? I always seem to be targeting someone for ridicule. See, everyone around me will have no problems from me, but there will always be one guy who has to take the brunt of my sarcastic and mocking comments. I don't really do it on purpose, it just kind of happens. I'm not even trying to be mean; usually I'm trying to be funny. And it works: people laugh. But that's me now. I wasn't always trying to be funny. Sometimes I was being mean. But I never thought of myself as a bully. Until this morning.

But why? Why do I do this almost uncontrollable thing?

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I'm going to lay this stuff out for you. I'm not proud of most of this. Some of it I'd rather people didn't know. But I'm being honest and I feel like I should get this out there. I want to clear my conscience. I'm repenting.

Well, it goes back to my childhood and my reactions to the social interactions I had with other children. Like most children, I had to deal with kids who wanted to pick on me. I didn't have it as bad as some; nobody ever beat me up or took my lunch money, but there would be the occasional kid who would find something about me to mock. I didn't know why I was being chosen, just that I was. Fortunately, most of the kids doing this were older and eventually moved on to other schools, setting me free. But they had an effect on me. If I had to deal with this crap then so did other kids. And they would get it worse than I got it.

One of the things I can recall doing, which I feel really bad about now that I think about it, was done to someone I used to be able to call a friend. My experiences in kindergarten made me a mean little first grader. I actually "enslaved" my friend at recess. Every. Single. Day. If he didn't do what I wanted, I would hit him. We'd go around the playground doing only the things I wanted to do. And how did we get around the playground? Horseback ride. He was the horse. I was too young to realize it at the time, but what I was doing was inexplicably cruel. He was black and I'm white. I'm truly sorry.

Then there was the time (still in first grade) I, for no good reason I can recall, held a kid down on the ground for several minutes and shoved pebbles down his pants. Lots of pebbles. Then I gave him a wedgie. You can just imagine where those pebbles went. For years I somehow justified (in my mind) what I did, because "nobody liked that kid, anyway."

I don't recall exactly when this next incident happened, but it was sometime in elementary school. I was a trouble maker on my school bus. I soon earned a permanent seat directly behind the bus driver. So did another kid, for entirely different reasons, I'm sure. The bus picked me up first. I'd take my seat and wait. When we reached this kid's stop I would spread out my stuff and take up the entire seat so he would have no room to sit. Every. Single. Day. After awhile the bus driver got pissed and got me kicked off the bus for a few days. I'm not one who enjoys punishment, so I stopped doing that. One day a friend and I went over to the kid's house. We knocked on the door, apologized for being mean, and asked if he wanted to be friends. He said. "yes." We thought it would be fun to climb the cool tree in his front yard. So we did. Once we got up as high as we dared to go, we pushed the kid out of his tree. Then we jumped down onto him. Then we beat the crap out of him.

Amazingly, I would later end up really being friends with the kid. We were good friends for a few years. I'd be over there playing video games almost every day. One day he wanted to borrow my favorite game, Super Mario Kart. It being my favorite game, I told him, "no." That wasn't the answer he was looking for, so he grabbed it and tried to keep me from taking it home. I responded by beating the crap out of him. He put up a fight for a little while, so I decided to end it. I gave him a deliberate punch to the eye, blackening it instantly. He threw the game against the wall, which caused it to crack open. Now I was pissed, but there was nothing I could do about it. At that moment, his mother came home. She didn't care that my game was broken, just that her son had a black eye. She kicked me out of the house. I stood outside the front door, demanding $50 to replace my broken game. She yelled at me to leave, so I spent twenty minutes kicking the door. I could hear the wood splitting and cracking, but I wasn't making progress fast enough. I looked around for something to smash the window. All I had were my fists. Then some sense kicked in. What, exactly, was I going to do even if I did gain access to the inside of the house? I jumped on my bike and went home. The first thing I did was try my game. It still worked. I was never friends with that kid again.

For whatever reason, the next few years I can't recall doing anything really mean to anybody. There were kids I'd make fun of, but nothing out of the ordinary. Once I got to middle school, I started to get fat. I soon found myself the target of ridicule. I went through a bad couple of years.

In the seventh grade a bully had it in for me. Throughout the year I had to deal with this idiot. He wasn't the only one, but he was the one that would pay. One day, near the end of the school year, he and his friends thought it would be fun to hit me with paper rolled into tubes while the teacher was out of the room. Then one of the paper tubes scratched my eye. Without thinking, I leapt across the room and put the bully, who was five inches taller and fifty pounds heavier, into a headlock. My fingernails extended like a cat's claws and I ripped into his neck and face. I could feel the blood flowing from his neck. He screamed in pain. Five of his friends surrounded me and took turns punching me in the face and head. Adrenaline made sure my grip was tight and I felt no pain. The somebody yelled that the teacher was returning. I let up. "You psycho!" yelled the former bully. He was so ashamed he never messed with me again and he never told on me. He soon transferred to another school. His friends stopped messing with me, but that didn't stop other people from trying.

By eighth grade, I wasn't going to take it anymore. I started to get into fights in order to establish my dominance.

We had a new kid in our school. We nicknamed him "Waldo" because he looked and dressed like Waldo from the Where's Waldo? books. One day I watched as another kid beat the crap out of Waldo. Other kids praised him as Waldo fell to the ground, bleeding. That was it! If I beat up Waldo, too, then people would think I was great. So a week later, in the same place Waldo had been beaten, I challenged him to a fight. He wouldn't fight me. "Just hit him!" I heard a kid yell. I couldn't do it. I couldn't just hit this kid unless he was going to fight back. I could, however, push him into a locker, knock his books from his hands, and then kick them down the hallway. Other kids joined me in kicking his books down the hallway. I got some lunch detention for that. But I didn't get the respect I so desired.

I had to deal with a really annoying group of kids in my art class. Every single day I had to deal with some form of harassment. Add to that a teacher who hated me because of my talent (I was often accused of tracing or other forms of cheating, none of which I ever did) and I was in Hell. One day I got up to get some supplies. When I returned to my desk, I found my seat was missing. The bully next to me started laughing. He had moved my chair across the room. That was it! I went and got the chair. The kid was still laughing as I returned with the chair. I lifted it above my head and then smashed it down on top of his. The face he made as the chair came down upon him was remarkably similar to the face made by the teacher.

I was sent to the principal's office immediately. As I walked down the hallway, I figured I would be suspended for sure. That's not a good thing when you're a mostly straight-A student. What actually happened still shocks and amazes me. The principal read the paper explaining what I had done. He cracked a smile. Then he laughed. So I laughed. "You hit him over the head with a chair?"

"Yeah," I responded. "He's been messing with me all year."

"He had it coming," said the principal. "That kid is in here all the time. How about we just have the teacher move you to another desk?"

"That would be great," I said. I was empowered. I could do whatever I wanted because my actions were justified.

For the next few months, I chose my victims carefully. Armed with a combination lock around my middle finger, I would punch in the back of the head all the kids I didn't like. They never saw it coming and they never reported me. I felt invincible. One kid had a bad habit of standing by a door frame during lunch hour. I had a bad habit of walking up behind him and smashing his head into that metal door frame.

There was a kid who would hang out with the same group of people I did. He was annoying. Nobody liked him. After awhile it was suggested that I "do something" about him. So I challenged him to a fight. He said, "no." So one day after lunch on the way back to class I, along with around fifteen other kids who knew what was about to go down, followed him into a short hallway which cut across the school. One end of this short hallway lead to the main hallway; the other end had a door. I had a very large kid block the door. The group following behind blocked the main hallway. There was nowhere for this kid to go.

I told him we were going to fight. He didn't want to. So I pushed him a few times. Soon he'd had enough and he caught me off guard, putting me into a headlock. He then started punching me in the face. For whatever reason, I can take a punch to the face and it doesn't even faze me. All I had to do was free myself from the headlock. [Note: If you want to easily win a fight, get your opponent in a headlock as they are very difficult to free yourself from.] Somebody yelled that a teacher was coming. His grip loosened and I escaped. With a single punch thrown with the entire weight of my body, he was taken out. First was the sound of his jaw popping, then the sound of his skull cracking against the brick wall, then the sound of his body hitting the floor. I quickly went to my class before the teacher got there. All along the way I felt like a hero. "You really kicked his ass!" "It's about time somebody taught him a lesson!" "Way to go!"

It didn't take long for the office to send somebody to retrieve me. I knew the knock on the classroom door was for me. I got many thumbs up as I left the room. Despite the trouble I would almost certainly be facing, I was happy. I had earned respect.

I could hear his sobbing from the hallway. And so could many other people, as I would later be told almost every single day for the rest of the school year. I did good. Inside the principal's office we both told our side of the story. The principal gave him three days of lunch detention and sent him to the nurse to get checked out. I didn't have a mark on me, which looks really bad when you've just been in a fight and they're trying to determine fault. "I'm going to have to suspend you," said the principal. My heart sank. My grades were going to go to hell. I was going to be in so much trouble at home.

Then I remembered my secret weapon. "He's been messing with me all year." Bingo.

The principal decided to review my file. "I see you've been in a couple of fights this year." He read the one about the chair and cracked a smile. "You seem to be a good student. How about we make it one week of lunch detention instead."

"Sounds good to me," I said.

I truly was invincible. But it was the end of the school year. The next year I'd be in high school, which means I'd have to start all over with a principal who would not have my back. Fighting was no longer an option.

I switched to my current form of bullying: finding the weakest (not necessarily physically) person in the room and establish my superiority. Other bullies would then target him, rather than me. And it worked, for the most part. My entire attitude changed in high school. I no longer cared about my grades and spent most of my time trying to make people laugh. This usually included a victim.

Not everybody was happy about my sudden transformation (which included no longer being fat; quite the opposite, in fact). But this didn't pose any major problems until my junior year. I ended up in an art class that was filled with bullies from my past. No amount of mocking other kids was going to get me out of this. My jokes worked on most of them, but one in particular absolutely hated me and the long hair I had grown. One day he decided he would cut my hair for me. He cut the very tip of some of my hair. It was so little you wouldn't have noticed the difference. But I was pissed. I turned to my friend and asked, "Wanna see something funny?" I pulled out a sheet of paper and coated it in rubber cement. I turned around and tapped on the bully's shoulder. He happened to be wearing a nice shirt that day. He turned around and I put the paper on his shirt then I rubbed it to make sure it stayed on.

Once what I had done sunk in, he shot up out of his chair. I did the same. I knew we had to fight. But we didn't. The teacher spotted us immediately. Out in the hall. The teacher demanded to know what was going on. We both told our side of the story. Mine included, "He's been messing with me all year."

"He'd better watch himself, I'm a pretty big guy and I'll kick his ass," said the bully. He sealed his fate.

"Well I'm a bigger guy and I'll kick your ass," said the teacher. "Stop messing with him."

"He's gonna have to pay for this shirt," said the bully.

"No he doesn't," said the teacher. "You had it coming."

My actions were justified. I had no further problems. I was invincible.

To this day, I continue to seek out the weak, just like those who bullied me. The difference being I wasn't weak. The bullies picked the wrong target. Unfortunately I became a bully myself, all without realizing it. And now I don't know how to stop. I've been doing this for so long now, it's a part of who I am. I don't want to be mean, really. I usually don't realize what I've done until I've done it.

If you find me or anyone else bullying you, stand up for yourself. That's what worked for me. Just try not to become a bully yourself. You don't have to fight to stand up for yourself. Just explain to the bully that you don't have to take his abuse. Do it without sounding whiny. Don't let your lip quiver. Chances are, he doesn't even realize he's being a bully. It's just his way of trying to earn respect. One day he'll wake up and realize the same thing I did. And he'll feel bad about it. That's your revenge.

For all those who have been unfairly bullied, I apologize. I really do.