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Old 03-27-2008, 06:39 PM   #28 (permalink)
SaltPork
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I was bullied mercilessly for a couple of years until i decided i was done taking it. There was a group of people that used to bully me, I hated them. One summer I had finally had enough. We were at the town pond swimming and a kid came up to me a pushed me down, laughed at me, called me some names and started to walk away. Instead of burying the rage I exploded. I ran at him, tackled him into the water and started to drown him. It took two lifeguards and two other parents to pull me off of him. After they got the water out of his lungs and decided that he was going to be okay, i was banned from the beach for the summer. From that point forward I decided that I wasn't going to tolerate anything anymore.

When school started again, word had gotten around to the group about what I had done and the first day of school I got cornered by one of the biggest kids at school. He was easily a foot taller than me, but i wasn't going to run scared. I decided that as much as it might hurt I was going to stand and fight rather than run. He pushed me and I pushed back and then he hit me real hard with a roundhouse to the face. Everything moved in slow motion at that point. I swung my scrawny little arm as hard and as fast as I could at him catching him in the jaw and knocking him flat out. I got the hell out of there as fast as I could thinking for sure I was a dead man. What I didn't realize was that my single act of standing up for myself, despite the terror and the pain of the punch in the face, ended the bullying completely. The following year we moved and it started all over again at a new school.

With my new found resolve and knowing i could take a punch I was much less scared than before and was able to end it quickly, but i still had to fight, which I hated, but it was necessary. The incident at the new school was much shorter as I didn't wait for him to hit me first, he pushed me and I broke his nose, end of bullying.

Admittedly, it could have gotten worse after both incidents, but I think given the size difference between me and the bullies in both cases and the lack of fear I showed gave me some credibility and oddly some respect from them. At the new school the group of bullies actually started watching out for me, or left me alone entirely. Kind of amusing in retrospect.

The bottom line is if they don't see you as a threat, if they know you won't fight back, you will always be a target. My parents wanted to call the schools in both cases, they wanted the names of the kids, but i knew that would make things worse, so I kept quiet and dealt with it my own way eventually.
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