adolescent bullies running in a pack are a whole lot scarier because the players don’t have developed frontal lobes yet or the capacity for adult remorse or impulse control to hold the social reinforcement and escalating behaviors in check

they can do some seriously intense shit and not get why it’s bad once they start egging each other on

being over 18 has does not erect a magic shield around you that lets you ~just ignore it~ and remain safe without having to compromise your own boundaries.

also

what if i told you that “just ignore it” was my trigger

hhhhhhhh

Yeah, “just ignore them” is a shitty response to bullying, and it does not make things better, it does not help, it does not stop the bullies.

Just-world fallacy: Nothing bad would be happening to you if you didn’t somehow bring it on yourself.

Victim-blaming: It’s happening to you because of what you do.

Just-world fallacy + victim-blaming + bullies: If you just ignore them it will stop.

This is not okay people. This is the toxic shit that turns what should be kids making mistakes, getting corrected, and moving on, into kids bullying people until someone dies. Do not fucking tell people to “ignore” the bullies.

Ah, if only I knew that “just ignore them” wasn’t the be-all and end-all solution to bullying when I was younger.

Because when it inevitably didn’t work, my mother gave up on the “but you’re so nice, Audrey, I can’t imagine why they keep picking on you” approach and started looking for other reasons I was making them treat me like shit. You gesture too much when you talk. Your voice goes too high. You laugh too loud. You’re too nice, you need to stand up for yourself. Maybe you’re dressing wrong. You walk around looking like someone’s going to hit you, it makes you look like a victim.

I mean, gee, I only got punched in the kidneys and slapped and shoved down stairs and groped and had stuff thrown at me from cars, but that’s no reason to be frightened walking home alone from school! It’s my fault that one kid decided it would be hilarious to snipe me with a BB gun from behind the bushes in his front yard, obviously all I needed to do was look tough!

But yeah, when all those things miraculously didn’t work either, it resulted in my exasperated mother saying, “I think you like it. I can’t think of why else they would keep treating you like this. You want attention, so you must like how they treat you.”

It’s any wonder I got out of those years in one piece, holy hell.

Must be a mother thing, mine loved saying “no one can hurt you without your permission,” especially when it was my freaking brother doing it, like we can control our emotions, like we’re choosing to be hurt by it…

My brother beat the shit out of me a lot during terrifying rage episodes, and my mom was real big on the gaslighting thing. She did her best to convince me that stuff that happened really didn’t, or if it did (Like, say, if there were witnesses, or if the door was smashed to pieces and beyond repair and there was no other way to explain it) that the thing happened differently and mostly was my fault because I wouldn’t forgive him.

My refusal to be around my brother, in time, became another reason for my mother to come to his side, because family loyalty means you can choose to forget, just like she did, and I was being mean instead.

Because love. Because loyalty. Because forgetting is making it ok.

She did this to me until I felt like my anger was a symptom of me going crazy. I would write what happened as carefully as I could in my journal, so that later I could see my records and know I hadn’t made it up because I was nuts.

The truth is that the crazy was coming from her—a sad, downtrodden woman doing Olympics level mental backflipping to erase abuse from her reality and avoid having to look at ugly family truths because she needed things to be okay no matter who got hurt. 

I really wish I could have relied on my brother to help me with my bullies.  Like, both of us were bullied, and he in turn bulled me.  And he had temper issues that he went to therapy preschool for, and he still once managed to get so pissed off that he tried to choke me (either Grade 1 or 2 for me).  

I know it's nothing like what others have gone through, and that I had the benefit of my parents understanding that it was the other kids, combined with us being different.  And I understood this, very very very early on, as I watched other kids getting bullied too.  

I also know that my brother once got so fed up with the school not doing anything about the bullies that one day he turned around and beat the shit out of them.  And they left him alone after that.  Mine kept at it, mocking how I spoke, dumping stuff on my artwork (the only class I really enjoyed).   The fun part was that one of my bullies then went to the same high school as me, and generally left me alone, until one year when he tried to ask me out.  Upon which I reminded him on what he did to me in elementary school and spat in his face. 

My parents response to pretty much everything to do with my social status has been to try and buy my way into social acceptance, within reason.  

Reblog if you were ever bullied.

17851

That’s disgusting.

Well done society.

Well done.

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In grade school, there was an instance where a friend of mine - a friend! - held me down on the playground and choked me. To this day, I can’t remember why.

There was an ongoing problem prior to that in which two boys kept beating on me. It was my word against theirs - they said they were just playing, and so no action was ever taken.

When I was in grade three, there was a kid in grade one who wouldn’t let me play on the playground equipment.

I know he was younger than me, but he was stockier and I’m not a fighter by any stretch of the imagination.

there was an incident on the playground once where a couple of boys who regularly bullied me pushed me into the mud.  I was so upset that I became unresponsive.  The school was about to call an ambulance when I finally started to respond.  As far as I know, the school didn't do much about bullies.  Finally, my parents pulled my brother and me from public school and enrolled us in private/separate school (in Canada, that means that it's not free; it cost more tuition for elementary school in a year than a year in university).  But there were some bullies there too, for both of us.  My brother solved his the quick and dirty way; one day he beat up all the kids bullying him.  As for me? I just tried to survive.   I kinda wish I had gone at it his way, that I hadn't listened to the adults and just tried to ignore it, that when they said mean things and mocked me, that I had gone at them fists swinging.  I hate violence, but to avoid all that suffering.... 

Part of the hurting was thinking that the bullies might be hurting too, hurting so bad that they feel the need to lash out at other people.  Maybe I saw my brother in them.  Maybe some of them were truly like that, maybe some of them were really just jerks and deserved to have someone hit back.  

I can't stand this "grudges are always bad" bullshit

Fuck your 2 cents, “I slept thru one goddamn psych class in uni” fuckery.

When your survival is on the line, when shit that others mark as lowkey or innocuous is filled to the brim with violence (and can invoke phys violence too, if you’re in the wrong place when it happens), when there is no good choices, when you have to choose between the lesser of 300 evils and not one goddamn good, sometimes you can’t play nice, sometimes you fucking shouldn’t.

It’s true for most if not all oppressions (especially when you got a bunch of intersections) and stuff like rape and abuse.

Grudges are a mark. A mark on someone that says, “this person did this fucked up goddamn thing and I need to remember this cuz they could do it again and devastate me again”. And yeah they reduce trust, CUZ THAT’S WHAT THEY’RE FUCKING FOR. THEY’RE THERE SO THAT YOU CAN REMEMBER NOT TO TRUST SOMEONE AS MUCH AS BEFORE TO REDUCE THE VULNERABILITY AND YOUR CHANCES OF BEING HARMED BY THEM.

There’s no single goddamn way to handle a grudge. I held a grudge against the douche who sexually assaulted me in a theater and I still tried to rebuild our friendship, just never forgetting what that person did to me (the martyring fuck decided that I wasn’t allowed to try to still be friends and hold a grudge at the same time tho, so that ended quickly). I’ve held grudges against people (like my rapist abusive ex who used to OD me w/ painkillers regularly to “shut me up”) that involved cutting off contact too.

A grudge is a grudge cuz it’s a mark of distrust. THAT IS IT. That is ALL IT IS.

And being able to mark who you find you can trust and how far you can trust them if so is NOT AN ABILITY ANYONE SHOULD CRITICIZE OR TRY TO TAKE AWAY.

It is sometimes… no, OFTEN the only coping mechanism and self protection many people have.

So don’t. Take your shiny armored knight useless fuck self out and shove your helpfulness, shove your whining about positivity and negativity and your dime a dozen psych 101 musings and shove them so far up your ass that your colon implodes and prolapses into a pink squishy giant fucking Jörmungandr that you then proceed to choke yourself with like you were Yggdrasil’s douchebag seedcousin.

Stop bugging the abused. Stop bugging rape survivors. Stop bugging POC. Stop bugging trans people. Stop bugging queer folks. Stop bugging neurodiverse and autistic people. Stop bugging the mentally ill. STOP BUGGING ANYONE WHO FACES SERIOUS SHIT AND USES GRUDGES ABOUT THEIR GRUDGES.

Just. Fucking. Stop.

Survivors use grudges. Stop standing in the way of that survival. Or you deserve to and will be steamrolled the fuck down.

exactly.  This is why I keep grudges.  I remember the bullies who tormented me in elementary school who then tried to ask me out in high school.  I keep grudges on organizations whom I know have fucked up over the past (and who still continue to do so).  I keep grudges against people who have said some terrible things, and step cautiously with them.  I keep grudges against the people who have stolen from me, who have abused me, who has threatened to kill me, who have mentally tormented me. 

Grudges keep me safe.  I know as a Christian I should forgive, but I will not forget, because it keeps me safe. Grudges gives me, a rather naive and sometimes too trusting individual, the warning bells and red flags to determine when something or someone is going to hurt me, and to get the hell out of there.  I may not be the survivor of the worst hell out there, but it doesn't make what scars I do have less real and the grudges I have less valid.  And like hell I won't use them to keep myself safe.

gothiccharmschool: