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Mike Potter shares his personal experience with bullying and how it impacted the rest of his life. Were you bullied when you were younger? How did it affect your life when you look back? Share your story.
This is a comment by Mike Potter on the post “Should We Forgive Apologetic Bullies?“
Mike Potter said:
I was bullied as a kid. I dislocated a bully’s shoulder in the 6th grade, so they either stuck to words or jumping me in groups. I was a scrawny kid with braces and Star Wars spaceships drawn on the back of my notebook – all I needed was a pair of glasses and I’d have been the ideal of a nerd. The verbal abuse was constant – it wasn’t so much any given thing they said, as much as the fact that from 7:30 in the morning until 3 in the afternoon, it was non-stop. Every day of the week. For 6 years (it ended in high school). At one point, when I was in the locker room, a bunch of my classmates broke their pencils and threw them at my back until I was all cut up and bleeding. Took the nurse half a container of band-aids to get me ready to return to class.
I say all of that to establish that I know what bullying is. I lived it, I endured it, and it took me a long time to get over it (a decade). I was miserable, and I struggled around people – I was terrified of them. I admit that to this day I still get enraged when I see a group picking on an individual. I do something about it.
And that’s why I can forgive those kids who did that to me. Because I am so clearly not that scared kid getting pencils chucked at him anymore. And they aren’t those immature, inconsiderate boys who had no idea they’d play a part in 12 different suicide attempts. How could they know? They were, at the oldest, 14. This recovering alcoholic still thought he’d never touch alcohol when he was 14.
By acknowledging that they aren’t the people they were then, I’ve been able to build – if not friendships, then friendly aquaintanceships – with a number of them. And by knowing that I’m not that powerless boy I was then, I’ve been able to forgive myself for my weakness and face down my fears.
We aren’t who we were in the past. We are who we choose to be in the present.
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The post “The kids that bullied me had no idea they’d play a part in 12 different suicide attempts. How could they?” appeared first on The Good Men Project.
