I was never hurt or even just beat up. I don’t think I was ever in a fight or ever threw a punch (to this day). I can recall two incidents of physical bullying. One was two bullies blocking my path to the school with their bikes (I drove into them full speed which made them call me crazy and go away), and one was the same two bullies taking away my backpack and throwing it down a bridge.
Also, I find the way you discount non-physical bullying extremely troubling. No, you can’t just ignore mean words if that means isolating yourself from many vital social interactions. It’s not like you have much choice on who to interact with in school. You will be together with those people, you can’t flee it, you can’t close your ears. They can get to you if they want to.
This pervasive violence must be an American thing or something, or maybe it’s a class thing in Germany (where I grew up, middle class, school that directly qualifies you for university)? It just never happened to me at all.
I also don’t have a solution when you are being bullied. For me it just stopped at a certain point. Bullies turned into people who just left me alone. They didn’t want to have anything to do with my, but they also didn’t bully me at all. I think they grew out of it and it had nothing to do with me at all, only them.
(Hm, maybe I should add an example of emotional bullying to balance out the descriptions of physical bullying: We were on this trip to Berlin in the huge lobby of the foreign ministry and a kid was driving around the huge space, all alone, on his tiny tricycle. I was really into photography at the time and this made a great motive, so I snapped a few photos … which lead one bully to constantly call me a pedophile for the next two years or so. He even managed to sneakily and in an obscure way put a reference to that in our graduation newspaper. That’s emotional bullying and it was much worse for me than any physical bullying I ever received. Also, hard to ignore. We were lining up to get security checked before going into the ministry, so hardly a place where I could ignore him. Also, am I supposed to ignore our graduation newspaper?)
> I drove into them full speed which made them call me crazy and go away
haha ... yeah! good on ya. I'm curious, was this a case of straw-that-broke-the-camel's-back and you snapped; or were you ... you know ... kinda crazy back then? :P
I don’t know … I didn’t really know those kids, to this day (I don’t even know their names). I have no idea why they started. I think my frame of mind was mostly set on ignoring that and not even investigating where it came from. Or maybe I just wasn’t very perceptive.
I think I was just grumpy that morning and really didn’t want a vocal confrontation. I suck at those. I can’t deal with them. I wanted to do something else, anything else and driving into them was apparently the only thing I could think of. It kind of worked. (“Full speed” was slight hyperbole. I was fast enough to make us all fall over, but not fast enough to make it really dangerous.)
I was never hurt or even just beat up. I don’t think I was ever in a fight or ever threw a punch (to this day). I can recall two incidents of physical bullying. One was two bullies blocking my path to the school with their bikes (I drove into them full speed which made them call me crazy and go away), and one was the same two bullies taking away my backpack and throwing it down a bridge.
Also, I find the way you discount non-physical bullying extremely troubling. No, you can’t just ignore mean words if that means isolating yourself from many vital social interactions. It’s not like you have much choice on who to interact with in school. You will be together with those people, you can’t flee it, you can’t close your ears. They can get to you if they want to.
This pervasive violence must be an American thing or something, or maybe it’s a class thing in Germany (where I grew up, middle class, school that directly qualifies you for university)? It just never happened to me at all.
I also don’t have a solution when you are being bullied. For me it just stopped at a certain point. Bullies turned into people who just left me alone. They didn’t want to have anything to do with my, but they also didn’t bully me at all. I think they grew out of it and it had nothing to do with me at all, only them.
(Hm, maybe I should add an example of emotional bullying to balance out the descriptions of physical bullying: We were on this trip to Berlin in the huge lobby of the foreign ministry and a kid was driving around the huge space, all alone, on his tiny tricycle. I was really into photography at the time and this made a great motive, so I snapped a few photos … which lead one bully to constantly call me a pedophile for the next two years or so. He even managed to sneakily and in an obscure way put a reference to that in our graduation newspaper. That’s emotional bullying and it was much worse for me than any physical bullying I ever received. Also, hard to ignore. We were lining up to get security checked before going into the ministry, so hardly a place where I could ignore him. Also, am I supposed to ignore our graduation newspaper?)