Unfiltered Story #296071

For a few years in primary school, I was bullied by this one older kid who’d get away with everything because the teacher in charge had been babysitting him for years. Not only was he never punished for the things he did, since the teacher never believed me over him, but he also made stuff up that I’d end up getting in trouble for and even encouraged the other kids to get involved.
I had a lot of anger management issues back then, and the resulting frustration this caused was… grating, to say the least.
A few years later, I was in secondary school and traveling to take part in a junior band run by a county service that accepted kids from multiple schools in the area. I was minding my own business on the bus, when I heard a familiar voice.
Bully: Oh hey, ‘my name’!
I turned and saw him standing there with a huge grin.
Bully: We used to go to after-school-club together!
I’ll be the first to call myself out for what I said next, but I was a teenager suddenly experiencing a flood of anger at seeing this guy again.
Me: ‘With my own grin’ Oh yeah! I think I actually threatened to kill you a few times, didn’t I?
He turned around and didn’t speak to me again.
A little bit psycho? Maybe. But if you do somebody wrong, you apologise. You don’t just pretend it didn’t happen. I ran into the teacher a few years later. When she laughed about the ‘fibs’ I used to tell, I got a lot of closure from setting her straight.
I’m in therapy now and know how important it is to move on from this kind of anger… not that a few petty victories now and then don’t help :)