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The Bullied Bully

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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.  

Money: A Love Story

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“I spent most of my life making money for someone else,” Eduard Pennington said. “It wasn’t just one day, one week, or even one year, but at some point I realized I wasn’t just wasting my talent, I was wasting time. I enjoyed my time at the corporation, and they treated me better than they should have, but I wasn’t getting younger. I just got tired of doing it for someone else, and through a series of painfully slow, very boring investment platforms, I eventually had the money to do it for myself.”

Some people feel the passion when they hear tales of romance. I get the same charge hearing someone passionately talk about making money. I might be lonely in this corner of the world, but when I hear anyone talk about how they made theirs, I’m not the least bit envious. I’m inspired.  

Eduard Pennington is, was, and always will be a regular schmo. There was probably nothing fancy about his clothes or his car when he was a middle class employee, and nothing changed after he became the multi-millionaire next door. When we speak to him, we notice the confidence of a life well-lived, but we don’t hear the smug arrogance those of us who grew up on cartoons might suspect from such a character. Eduard Pennington is, as depicted in the 2010 book, The Millionaire Next Door.  

“When we look back on our lives, we remember the good, the bad, and the ugly,” Eduard said. “The years I spent working for myself were the highlights. It was so stressful, in the beginning, that it affected my health, and the idea that I made such an idiotic mistake leaving the comfy confines of the corporate world to do this kept me up many a night. I also worked so many hours, getting my business off the ground, that it took a toll on my relationships with my wife and my kids. I still regret missing out on some vital parts of their youth, but other than that, those were the best years of my life.”

Money is not the root of all evil. It is neither good or evil. It is contained wholly within the specimen on which it acts. We define it, and it defines us. If we are bad guys, the pursuit of money can make us worse. If we are good guys, the pursuit can make us better. In its finest form, money is a byproduct of human ingenuity, hard work, and entrepreneurial risk-taking.

“You can get rich working for money, my dad once told me,“ Ed said, “but you can get stinking I-hate-you wealthy when your money starts working for you. Money is power,” Ed added to his dad’s saying, “and power buys you freedom, and that freedom permits you to do what you want to do.”

In the middle of the decade Ed spent working for himself, his company eventually turned a profit. He began delegating most of the authority, and some of the work, to his employees as the profits increased. He trusted them to run the company the way he saw fit, but the resultant free time did not suit Eduard Pennington. He grew anxious and itchy, and in the the process of trying to find something more productive to do he “almost accidentally” developed a device (pre cell phone era) to help make the work of his employees easier. He did it for the money. He did it for the profit, and he did it so well that his company’s profit margin began to dwarf that of his nearest competitors’. After years of pounding them, the competition came-a-knocking. Eduard quickly patented the device, and he shared everything about it with them. He then permitted them to pour through his accounting books to determine the ins and outs of how he was beating them. They waked away believing the difference was this device, and they bought it. Then, their competitors bought it, and so on and so forth, until the device took off. It wasn’t long after the competition incorporated the device into their business that they couldn’t imagine how they got along without it.  

“Word got around, and they came-a-knocking,” Eduard said of a number of entrepreneurs who walked into with bountiful checks in hand. “They knocked loud and hard. I couldn’t believe the numbers they were writing down. I should’ve seen the bidding war that ensued, everyone said I should’ve seen it, but I didn’t. I was wholly unprepared. The problem for me was, they didn’t just want the device. They wanted my whole company. My company, my little baby, and the thing I built from a little granular idea was now a number. It was a gigantic number, for me, back then, but it was still just a number.

“I hated them for putting me through this, and I loved them at the same time,” Eduard continued. “Ten years into this company, and I never wanted to do anything else. My plan had been to see this company to its bitter end, my end, my retirement, or whatever came first. If I told you the number they wrote down, you might consider it an easy decision, but this was my whole life, my routine, and my identity that they wanted to buy. It was the hardest decision I’ve ever had to make, but I just couldn’t imagine, in my wildest dreams, ever turning down the kind of money they were offering.

“I took a month of long-sweaty nights mulling over the plusses and minuses of selling my company. They thought I was playing a card. They thought I was being strategically patient. I wasn’t. I was making sure giving up what I spent ten years building, was the right decision. I hired corporate analysts to project the growth of the company ten years, twenty years out, and I paid advisors, lawyers. I even contacted other owners in my industry to see what they thought.

“Even with all that, I still regretted selling it,” Ed continued. “I regretted it before I signed the documents, I regretted it after, and I regret it to this day. I don’t think I would’ve done with it what they did. Maybe I would’ve, I don’t know, but they took it to another level. God love them, they knew what they had, much more than I did, and I knew a lot, but they took it to the stratosphere. They gave me a lot for it, but if they ever decide to sell, they’ll probably get fifty times what they gave me, based on what they did.”

Eduard Pennington lived the last thirty years of his life The Millionaire Next Door. He took two extravagant vacations to celebrate the prize of his ingenuity, and he bought a verified and minted Babe Ruth-signed baseball to give his reward a tangible quality. Eduard then took care of every one of his immediate family members, in ways big and small, and he made sure they never had to struggle in life the way he did. Then, he did something revolutionary with the rest. He invested it.

“I went boring,” he said. “Boring, old blue-chip stocks with high dividends, bonds, and real estate. I have no creative investments, other than maybe the Babe Ruth baseball, and no sexy, innovative stocks are in my portfolio. My plan was to live on dividends, interest, and appreciation. My financial plan was to go so boring that you might fall asleep before I’m done telling you what I invested in, but that was my plan.”

There are a number of reasons I find Eduard Pennington’s story so beautiful, but one of them is purity. He pursued the American dream from his nook of the world, and he found it. His journey did not involve backstabbing, fraud, or deception. It involved some appreciation of his business, but that was thanks mostly to his hard work and ingenuity.

Eduard Pennington was a good man who worked his fingers to the bone, and he learned so much about his industry that he developed a revolutionary product that eventually went international. He surrounded himself with good and honest men and women based on merit, and they proved their value to his company for a decade and beyond. If you’re reading this with the notion that somewhere around right here in this article, the other shoe will drop to expose some of Eduard Pennington’s character defects, this isn’t that story.

The streamers and Hollywood would never pay one dime for Eduard’s tale, because he loved his wife and children, he didn’t cheat anyone, and he never hurt anyone. He wasn’t a bad guy, and they want bad guys, because we want bad guys. Bad guys are the angle, the promise they make in their summaries, and the selling point to get us to click on their movies. We want tears and pain from the side characters, and a ruthless bloodlust from our main character. No one wants to read a story about a man who loved his wife almost as much as he loved his mother. No one wants to read a story about a nice man who never faltered in his dream to make the most honest money he could, that’s just boring.

***

“Money is not the root of all evil,” someone far smarter than us once said. “Money provides definition. When a bad guy pursues money, it can make them worse. A good guy pursuing his dreams can become a better man in the pursuit.” The idea of money is intangible quality with no definitions of its own. We define money and money defines us.  

Once he took the money and ran, some might suspect that Ed did it all for the money. That seems so obvious to us now that it’s not even worth discussing for many of us. Yet, Eduard loved what he did, and he regretted getting out. “My friends and family said things like, you’re still a young man, and with that money you can do whatever you want,” Eduard said. “I thought that was right and logical and all that, but the truth was I didn’t want to do anything else. I still don’t, but I couldn’t turn the money down, because I didn’t want to be known as the person who turned that money down. I didn’t want people to there goes Eduard Pennington, the guy who turned down big money, and right after he did it, his business fell apart. Every industry, hell every business, goes through cycles, and it was possible that the value of my company could’ve gone down. It didn’t, but it was possible.”

Eduard Pennington did it all for the money. He worked for someone else, because they paid him. He opened his own business for the expressed purpose of making more money, and like all upstart businesses he skimped and saved during the early, desperate years. He even dipped into his nest egg to see to it that his employees were paid on time. He didn’t do this because he was a good man. He did it, “Because it was good business,” he said. “I interviewed and hired every single one of these talented men and women, and I paid them top dollar for their skills, because I knew they could make me more money. I don’t care how loyal your employees are, if they find someone who is going to pay them so much more than you, that will test their loyalties. It’s just good business to find the market for their talent and pay them more than that.

“Why else do you do anything in business?” Eduard asked when asked if he has any concerns that we might view him as a greedy capitalist. “I spent most of my life making money for others. When I went into business for myself, my goal was to make as much money as I could.

“Let me amend that slightly,” Ed said. “If you do it solely for the money, you’ll end up miserable. If you love what you do, and you’re good at it, money is more than a byproduct of all of your efforts, it’s the reward. If you’re not getting paid what’s the point?”

You Could Be the Entertainment. You Might Be the Genius 

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“A genius is the one most like himself.” —Thelonius Monk.  

We’ve all heard jokes about you being original. “You think you’re original? I wonder what percentage of the nearly 8 billion in the world consider themselves original? What percentage of the billions who lived before us thought they were original?”

What is original? Is it even possible to be original? Was Homer, author of the Odyssey original? What about Leonardo da Vinci, Dostoyevsky, or The Beatles? Most music critics stopped using the word ‘o’ from their reviews, because anytime they drop the word, the snipers come out to talk about all the influences they hear. If it’s impossible to be original, is it possible to create something uniquely personal? Is it possible to take all of your influences, artistic and otherwise, and do your thing so often that you find you? Will it be without influence? What is? No work of art is free of influence, and no influence is free from personal interpretation. Should you even try to be original if it’s impossible? With nearly 8 billion in the world and billions who have preceded us in history, the chances of you being somewhat redundant or derivative are pretty high?

If you can get passed the lengthy confusing originality-is-not-possible algorithm, you could do something that is so you that you might feel naked when it’s over. You might want to consider deleting the vulnerabilities that incriminate you, or you might not. If you leave it all in, it’s possible that some long-dead artist, who many consider one of the most original artists to walk to planet, might’ve considered you ingenious.    

Everyone started out wanting to be somebody else. We don’t start out all pure and raw. We lacked knowledge, skills, and the sense of security necessary to expose ourselves completely. We felt icky about ourselves when we started. We were insecure, we feared we had no talent, and we thought we were boring, or at least we’re not as entertaining as that guy.

Look at him, he’s got it all figured out. Every woman I know wants to sit with him and chat, he’s got a wad of dough, and everybody likes him. And funny, ohmigosh, if I could be just a little bit like him for one minute of one day, people might want to be around me, they might like me, and they might read me. We add a pinch of ourselves along the way. The other guy over there, he’s all calm, cool, and collected. He’s radiating self-possession. If I could wrap his aura around my neck for just one night, it could all be different. We add a dash of ourselves to it. At some point, in the painfully gradual process, we shed their skin and become more like ourselves, and if we become more like ourselves than anyone else can, it might be ingenious. Monk’s quote might be my new favorite quote.  

2) “We might as well be ourselves,” Oscar Wilde said, “everybody else is taken.”  

“I wish I could be more like Jarod,” Todd said. “He doesn’t care if anyone likes him.”  

Most of us don’t say such things aloud. We might think it. We might think Jarod has something ingenious going on, but we don’t talk to him to find out what he has. It’s understood. We develop a construction from afar, and we try to become it.

I talked to one of my constructed images once. As much as I tried to avoid it, I couldn’t help but convey how much I thought of him. I didn’t say anything along those lines, but I was so obvious about it that I could see it on his face. We were walking away from football practice, and he started dropping a slew of swear words on me. He wasn’t cursing at me. He was swearing in the smoothest manner he could find. I picked up a strange vibe. He appeared to be trying to live up to whatever image he thought I had of him. The idea that he tried so hard confused me, because he was the guy everyone wanted to be, and I was the anonymous nerd who faded into the background of whatever room I was in. I needed to develop skills to stand out. This guy accomplished it by just being him, or so I thought. In our brief exchange, I realized that I didn’t want to be him anymore than I wanted to be me. I realized that if I was going to continue to try to live up to the constructed images I had of people, the pursuit was probably better than the prize. I also realized that if I was going to project images upon guys like him, I probably shouldn’t talk to them.  

“You’re the entertainment,” I told Todd after he wrapped up his gripes about Jarod. “You’re the entertainment in the room, and you don’t even know it.” 

3) “You are who you are when nobody’s watching.” ― Stephen Fry

My goal in life is to control situations as often as I can. If I encounter a situation fraught with failure, I take over, because I would rather blame myself for failure than someone else. I see parents put their kids in awkward situations, and when these kids fail, the parents are shocked. They evaluate their kid’s failure by their own standards. I might over correct at times, and I might be what they call a helicopter parent, but I either try to frame failure according to age, or I try to prevent failure by taking control of the situation.

When my boy went to the refreshment stand in a restaurant to refill his cup, every instinct told me to just take the cup from him and do it myself, but I knew he had to learn, and I wanted to see who he was when he didn’t know anyone was watching. I stood back where he couldn’t see me, and I watched him. As he refilled his cup, I took a step back. It was painful to stand back and watch, but I couldn’t stop looking. After he spilled, I stepped back further. I wanted to see if he would clean it up himself. I wanted to see if he would look around after the spill. I didn’t realize until I smelled it, but I accidentally backed into the sphere of influence of an elderly woman. My first thought, when she expelled gas on me, was this might be her defense mechanism, warning me that I was too close. I thought of the octopus expelling an ink cloud to thwart the approach of predators. She couldn’t know if I was a predator, because she didn’t know me, so she probably considered it better safe than sorry when she let it go. I abided by her silent admonition by giving her distance. My boy cleaned up his mess without looking around, and he double checked his work to make sure his mess was all cleaned up. I made the right move by allowing him to make his own mistakes, and he unknowingly defined his character for me, but I paid a price for it. 

4) “Be it a song or a casual conversation. To hold my tongue speaks of quiet reservations. Your words, once heard, they can place you in a faction. My words may disturb, but at least there’s a reaction.” Slash, Dave Lank, and Axl Rose. 

Back when I talked to my constructed image of the star football player, I considered offensive vulgarity the more honest approach. No matter how confusing I considered his effort, I thought he was being real with me. He fit the prototype teenager, but we don’t see that when we’re teens. We were influenced by movies, TV, and music. We had lists of which movies used swear words, and how many times they swore in such movies. If we were movie critics, we would’ve awarded stars accordingly. We also loved music, and while we all appreciated great pop songs, a song without at least a little vulgarity or innuendo, too safe. We wanted to hear dangerous, risky music, and we craved that in all artistic venues. We demanded the same of ourselves. The more vulgar and crude the more honest. We wanted to hand the holy grail up to the person who didn’t care if we considered them offensive. The truth is offensive, we thought. “I speak truth, and what does it say about you that you can’t deal with it.” What does it say about you that you said it? “I gotta be me!” So, you’re an offensive person? It took us a while, but we realized that a cup is handed down to the artist, filled with their offense.  

Due to the fact that the material nature of Rilaly.com is relative and subjective, we cannot guarantee our readers will be entertained or enlightened. We are introducing our new insurance policy that a reader can purchase if they don’t know if they want to take a risk by reading it. If you are not entertained, or enlightened, we will refund any amount the reader paid to us to read this, minus the cost of the non-refundable insurance.