I don’t know if this is something people say in other countries, but in my country, there’s this common cliché or “wisdom” where adults will assure you that the people who picked on you in environments like school will universally develop lives of hardship later on, one way or another getting into mayhem.
I asked my mother one day what happened to all those people growing up. I can sense she may have been sugar coating it, but she said something along the lines of “well, I waited, and waited, and waited, and waited, and waited, and became a teacher, and waited some more, and finally watched as my bullies had to go into retirement five years late, yay” (okay, not really like that, but it might as well have been).
Yeah, common theme in my experience that what we hope for is never “that” set in stone. No matter where in the community (or even long-distance communicating) you knew them from, based on life, how much approximate correspondence do you associate with that mindset in the first paragraph?
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Why would I spend any effort on keeping tabs on people who made my life miserable?
This lol.
I’m fucking 40, anyone I grew up with who made my life miserable are people who I have had no exposure to or communications with since I graduated high school June 16th 2002. Anyone since then who makes my life miserable for more than a few minutes gets told to fuck off on the spot lol.
You graduated on a Sunday? My school always did graduations on weekdays. I graduated about a week earlier than you did. Juuuust about to turn 40 myself.
And yes, I’ve either befriended my old bullies (a lot of them were just lashing out because they had a shitty home life/no one to listen to them), or they’ve gone off to live their lives and I never heard from them again.
My class is finally at the age where they’re keeping tabs on who has died since the last reunion, and the list is very short with none of my former bullies on it.
Might have been a few days off with the date, it’s been a minute lol.
Did you look that up or are you one of those people that knows days from dates ?
I looked it up, because my high school graduation date was right about that time. I was curious if I graduated on the same date.
To preserve one’s childlike belief in a just world, of course.
Yeah I forgot about those chucklefucks aeons ago
To see if it backfired on them?
I haven’t met a single person I went to school with, since I left my home town to go to university. So, no idea.
Living the dream, the best revenge is a life well-lived.
I’ve no idea, I haven’t thought about them since I left school and now I can barely remember their names.
There was a kid in grade school growing up that was a bully. He made a kid cry while we were waiting for our class picture to be taken in the 6th grade, and you can see that kid crying in the picture. I still think about it often.
The bully ended up being one of the greatest running backs my county ever knew. He was a game changer.
I randomly decided to look up the crying kid from the school picture a couple years ago. He is now a very successful man. I couldn’t be any happier seeing that. It almost brought me to tears.
The bully was shot and killed in the streets a couple years after graduating high school.
I read country instead of county and this hit differently.
The school must’ve not taken care of the kids well if they just let the photographer do a one-take like that.
They’re all very successful now. This whole notion that bullies and assholes would be bagging my groceries and asking me “you want fries with that” in adulthood is BS.
I myself am somewhere in the middle on this. All my classmates were basically this to me because the school allowed it, then when time came to get a job, they were so used to the school environment which disfavored me at their benefit that they ran into a speed bump and ended up feuding with each other. By a rare good stroke of luck, this means I’m my employer’s favorite.
There may be one exception. A kid in the year above me who I didn’t personally know but looked like one of the many people that bullied me was killed on a night out when he tried to break up a fight.
It made national news, but mainly because it led to an underage drinking scandal where it turned out loads of pubs weren’t checking ID. He was only 17.
When we were both five years old, I knew one of my classmates would end up in prison.
Most kids can be jerks on occasion, and I can think of a few examples where that applied to me as well as it could to anyone. I haven’t generally kept track of people who bullied me in school; I imagine most of them grew out of it, and a few didn’t. This guy was something else, as if cruelty was the only thing that brought him joy.
At 19, he and two others beat a taxi driver to death. He was convicted of manslaughter and spent more than a decade in prison. A quick web search suggests he’s out of prison and working as a car salesman now.
He must’ve been unbearable if you knew his fate at five years old. I barely had any concept of prison when I was that age, in fact I was one of those kids who thought it would be easy to just slip through the bars if that ever happened.
I certainly didn’t have an adult understanding of what prison is, but I knew people who committed really serious crimes like murder went there. I expected this person to do something like that, and I wasn’t far off.
No idea. I don’t pay any attention to them. I hope they’re happy and doing fine.
I never saw them again after graduating
I assume that’s the best outcome generally. Just forgetting they existed
My bully from grade school is serving up to life in prison for attempted murder (he shot two teenagers while he was an adult, something gang related I think) and also sex with a minor.
Not that he doesn’t deserve it, he absolutely does, but part of me feels bad for him. He never stood a chance. His home life was fucked, he was always on this path and nothing was going to stop it.
tbh I can’t even remember any of their names, neither of the ones that were being friendly with me.
I can relate, I often can’t remember the names of the ones I work with.
I have no idea, I don’t hang out with bullies.
One of my former bullies ended up working for a local carwash, I found out when he had to wash mine.
Omg samsies, I went home and got my second car and came back and had him wash both.
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How would I know? I left my hometown.
I did see my high school bully occasionally in college. I was in my 5th year of undergrad and he looked like a grad student. But I was usually walking from my fwb’s dorm to class, so i was doing plenty fine myself.
I hope these people are better and happier but I don’t care to find out.
Many people who were assholes as kids turned out to become chill adults. I had a person who I considered a best friend suddenly turn on me in my last year of primary school. He always targeted me specifically and Istill remember coming home crying from the bullying. However, our lives diverged and we didn’t really meet until late in highschool somewhere in a bar in the city. We were both already a bit tipsy (alcoholic age was 16 y/o at that point here), and when he ran into me he basically just acted as if we had never not been friends. It was like the old friend was back, rather than the guy who caused so much pain. It was like he never realized what he had done. At that moment I realized we both had changed so much since the moment that he was bullying me, and I chose to just be glad to reconnect with an old friend.
This story goes for quite a few people who bullied me. Pretty much all of them, when I met them years later, seemed blissfully unaware of the pain they caused and just greeted me as an old friend or classmate. And with all of them I also recognised that they had grown into chill people, and had changed so much that they weren’t really the same person anymore. So I chose to also consider them old friends or classmates, and if I ran into them now I’d probably just have a nice chat about what our lives became.
As friendly as the two of you are, I would encourage you to not be afraid to explain to him the pain he caused.
