Have you ever been bullied? Have you ever bullied? Have you ever unwittingly played both roles, in the king of the hill landscape we call childhood? Decades after grade school, I met a fellow classmate. When we met, after decades apart, he seemed reluctant. I noted it, but I attached that to a reluctance to reliving the past. Some of us don’t enjoy a walk down memory lane. They don’t even enjoy talking about all the funny memories we share. I love it, and I had that smile I had on my face when we met. I couldn’t believe it when I found out he worked for the same company I did. I couldn’t wait to start reminiscing. Bruce was not near as anxious. Over the course of a week or so, he dropped his defense shield, and the two of us began sharing some of the happiest moments we had in grade school. We brought up names we hadn’t thought of in decades. We brought up events we jokingly hated and loved way too much when we were kids. I remembered certain hilarious incidents of our shared youth that he didn’t, and Bruce remembered many I didn’t. Eventually, after months of these interactions, a conversation turned to the bullies who picked on us in grade school. We talked about the worst offenders, the worst of the worst, and we both agreed on a top three. We shared a certain level of animosity that resulted in smiles and some laughter, but we achieved such distance from those years that we could finally discuss the matter dispassionately. After a seven-second lull, that conversation turned ugly. 

“You know you bullied me, right?” Bruce said with a mild level of confrontation. 

“What?” I asked. He repeated himself with another level of confrontation. Bruce wasn’t one who looked another in the eye, so that made it a little more intimidating when he did. He looked me in the eye and held me there, watching me squirm. We had been adult friends for months at that point, as I said, so I think Bruce thought our friendship could either survive the confrontation, or some part of him thought this was a matter we needed to deal with before he could continue being friends with me. 

“There’s no way,” I said, stunned. “You’re mistaking me for someone else. There’s just no way.”

Bruce recalled specific moments, incidents, and the nature of my bullying. And just like that, as if Bruce pulled a curtain back, I was there, decades younger, laying into him. “You weren’t a mean kid,” he said when he saw recognition color my face. “You weren’t one I would call a ruthless bully, but your teasing was so…constant that it got to me at times. It got under my skin.” 

Prior to hearing that, I basically accused him of having faulty eyewitness testimony, but after hearing it, I realized I was the one who colored my version of history in such a way that I was always the victim never the villain. A lyric from the famous Sweet song Ballroom Blitz popped in my head, “He thinks he’s the passionate one!” except my version of that lyric went, “He thinks he’s the virtuous one!” 

I didn’t feel like a fraud or a hypocrite for my selective memory, but it did put me in an unusually vulnerable position. I thought of saying, “Those were just jokes, Bruce. I was needling you, and you shouldn’t have been so sensitive.” Yet, those were the exact lines my bullies said to me to diffuse or deflect my complaints.  

I could’ve also used the time-honored, “That was so long-ago Bruce” rhetorical tactic, and it was. It was decades ago, but it obviously bothered Bruce so much that he remembered it, and he still harbored some resentment. I then thought of how I would deal with it if one of my bullies used a rhetorical tactic on me. In that uncomfortable space, with Bruce still glaring at me, I swept away the excuses that would’ve made me feel better, and I said, “I apologize for any pain that I caused you.” I could’ve qualified it by saying, I was just a kid, a dumb kid, who was just as dumb, scared and insecure as you were, but I didn’t. I could’ve said, “Hey, I was bullied too,” and I was. I could’ve said a number of things, but I offered him what I would’ve wanted to hear from one of my bullies, a sincere apology without qualifiers. 

Prior to Bruce putting me through the paces, I was the bullied. I was the nerd who didn’t do what was necessary to keep up with the cool kids. I didn’t do things the right way, and they mocked me for it. How did I deal with that? I bullied someone else. I looked for someone I considered lower in the hierarchal chain, and I put it to him.

Why did I perpetuate that vicious cycle? Why do kids do anything? They’re confused, they don’t know how to handle their complexities, and they seek a release valve to relieve the pressure and/or a tool to help them define themselves. These might sound like excuses, but they’re a genuine search for answers. What’s the alternative? Offer a heartfelt apology and attempt to rectify it over time? I did that. Feel terrible about it? Did that. Go back in time with my current knowledge and don’t do it? I obviously couldn’t do that. 

Those who were bullied will never forget the damage our bullies did to us, our childhood, and our resultant adult mindset, but what do we do with all that rage? Rage goes through a person, and it can spiral out onto the ones we love. Can you imagine bullying your own kids? How do we deal with the mistakes they make now, in their youth? Is the manner in which we correct our kids’ mistakes similar in nature to the way our bullies dealt with our mistakes? We don’t intend to do it, but bullying can prove cyclical. That anger, that rage, might also please the bullies to learn that what they did, decades ago, still haunts us. We all know the line “Success is the best revenge”, right? How about we replace the word success with happiness. “Happiness is the best revenge.” It’s easier said than done, and for some it’s impossible, but if I were still boiling raging about it, I would consider it their victory.

“It helps to know that our bully probably peaked in high school,” our fellow bullied say. “If you ever run into them, or find pictures of them on social media, it’s so gratifying to see that they put on weight, to know they can’t hold a job and that they’ve been married a number of times, and their kids hate them. It’s thrilling to see how miserable they are now.” 

“Right on!” Is our impulsive reaction. We love to learn details of their suffering, because they caused us so much, and I’m not immune. The idea that my bullies experienced some setbacks in life suggests that high school was their peak, and that used to give me some short-term satisfaction, until I thought, “Who cares?” How does it benefit me to learn that he is now a bank vice-president, a Walmart greeter, or homeless? Do you delight in the fact that he’s been divorced twice, filed for bankruptcy, or his kids hate him? Was he so awful to you in high school that when you find out he has a heart defect now, thirty-years later, you cheer? If so, he’s still living rent-free in our brain. Let him go, because chances are that he, like me with Bruce, may not even remember his offenses. If you consider that doubling down on the offense, think about how much you’ve forgotten from decades prior. You might have your own Bruce who was so insulted by something you said, or did, that it affected their lives decades later. You didn’t do anything to anyone, right? You were always the victim, never the villain. Yeah, that’s what I thought.

When were you bullied? If the peak happened in fifth grade, you were ten-years-old, but so was your bully. Take a look at a ten-year-old now. Do you honestly think he acts in a malicious manner? You didn’t know how to deal with him at ten, and that messed you up. He didn’t know how to act either. He was a dumb kid like you were, and everyone else you knew. He acted impulsively, and he said the first thing that popped into his head. He, like me at ten, and your worst bully doesn’t full gauge the ramifications and consequences of his actions. He didn’t think, he just did. That ten-year-old you see now is not only dumb, he’s scared, insecure and vulnerable, and he doesn’t want to be any of those things, so he looks for someone lower on the hierarchal pole and he tries to mentally or physically squash him, because it makes him feel better about himself.

I had another person confront me at an employee reunion with an offhand comment I made about them a decade prior. She hit me at the door with it, and she badgered me throughout the afternoon. I offered her the unqualified apology I gave Bruce, but it didn’t work with her. “Oh, no. No! No! No!” she said. “You’re not getting off that easy. You are an awful person. Everyone thinks you’re nice, but you’re not. A nice person wouldn’t say something like that about someone else.” There was nothing I could do or say to this woman, she obviously planned to ruin my afternoon in the manner I had presumably ruined so many of hers. I had to just sit there and take it. There was really no lesson, or takeaway from this moment, for me, except that some of the times even the bullied becomes the bully.   

Bullying is wrong. It doesn’t matter if you were making an offhand comment just to make someone else laugh, whether you were just joshing, or you considered your comments relatively harmless. It’s possible that someone out there might misinterpret what you said or did, and they’ve been harboring rage for you in the same manner you just can’t let go of the rage you have for your bully. 

They shouldn’t do it that way, and if our kids are handling all of their pressures that way, we should correct them, but psychologists say that our brains don’t fully mature until we’re around twenty-six-years-old. That’s a relative number, of course, as some mature faster than others. If that number is any where close to true, though, we’re not mature enough to handle the complexities of life until we’re approximately a third of our way through life. I don’t intend to write any of these as an excuse for all that happens between birth and twenty-six, but to try to explain that for most of us, our mechanisms for dealing with the complex matters of life aren’t refined with maturity yet. We’re dumb kids, confused teens, and worried young adults who don’t know how to deal with everything that’s being thrown at us. Instead of focusing, internally, on how to do it right, we poke fun at others who we think are doing it worse, because we want to think that we’re doing it better. The full-fledged adults who continue to do it, and we all know who they are, are another matter altogether.

As we gain distance from our childhood, we accidentally assign adult motives to the 10-year-olds who bullied us decades ago. If we know a 10-year-old, or we have the chance to talk to one, we might find out that they are not nearly as advanced as we remember. We might fall prey to the “But my bully knew what he was doing” conceit when comparing them to the current ten-year-old we see. If anything is possible then it’s possible, but if psychologists are correct in their assessment that the human brain doesn’t fully mature until age 26, it just seems unlikely. What’s more likely is that as you’ve aged, you’ve assigned matured motives to those who bullied you.  

If you were bullied, and you ever encounter someone who accuses you of bullying, my advice to you is offer them the unqualified apology you would’ve loved to hear from your bully, and follow it up with a whole lot of kindness. It worked for me, as Bruce and I are still good friends in the years that have followed our initial conversations. I would love to go back in time to correct undo, erase, or find some way to ease his pain in some way, but I can’t. The only thing I can do is try to reverse what I’ve done by showering him with kindness today.