Bully and bullied: two sides of the same coin
What happened when my childhood bully reached out to me as an adult to apologize
When I look back at my memories of elementary school, specifically third through fifth grade, I don’t have glowing childhood memories. If I had good experiences, they have been eclipsed by memories of misery, times when I cried nearly every day because of things my peers had said or done to me.
People don’t believe me when I say that my childhood wasn’t sunshine and rainbows. After all, my parents were together in one household until I was about 10, and they both treated me with love and tenderness. I have “nothing to complain about.”
Some common responses to putting the label of “bullying” on the experiences I had as a child are that “everyone gets bullied when they’re kids.” But if it’s the case that everyone experienced some sort of teasing or negative peer treatment when they were kids, then why are some so much more negatively affected than others? Is it because they are overreacting — are they simply too sensitive, as seems to be the general consensus?
I was often labeled as sensitive; a phrase I heard a lot growing up was that I needed to “get thicker skin.” But experiencing bullying doesn’t develop thicker skin — consistent humiliation from one’s peers in your developmental years makes one more sensitive, I would argue from personal experience. Bullying doesn’t have to be physical or dramatic to have an impact. In fact, what is traumatic for one person may not be traumatic for another. It is often the buildup of such experiences that creates trauma.
Such dismissals of bullying experiences — that it happens to everyone, that you are being too sensitive — are gaslighting and victim-shaming. And while as a 22 year old, I no longer dwell on the pain I experienced as a child, I do have to deal with the consequences to my mental health and socialization.
My reflection of the topic of bullying comes now because I have had the unique experience of someone who bullied me as a child reaching out to apologize to me as an adult. I wanted to share my story and her story for the purpose of providing insight into what it is like on both sides of the coin: bully and victim. And the truth is, you might have more in common with the person who bullied you than you think.
Neurodivergence and my bullying experience
Before I talk about the reflections that conversations with my former bully have instigated, I want to establish the background of my own experience.
I was a curious, imaginative, passionate child, and I was silly and loud, constantly singing made-up songs, asking questions without a filter or spouting information my curious mind had absorbed— normal childlike behavior, right? But looking back at that child, I have to smother the disgust that wells in me at how naive, gullible, stupid, and annoying I was.
This is the only explanation that fits with how I was treated by others. That’s the insidious thing about bullying. You start to believe you deserved it.
Why didn’t I have any walls, a shell to protect myself? Why wasn’t I smart enough to shield myself, to not be so open and trusting, so vulnerable?
I didn’t fit in with my peers at my small town school. My clothes were bad and I was socially oblivious. With the help of time and a deeper understanding of myself, I can point to neurodivergent behaviors that may have contributed to my social ineptitude. At the time, I merely thought that my peers bullied me because I was stupid and that there was something wrong with me.
When I was very little, I was intolerant of sock seams on my toes and getting water on my clothes or skin, to the point where I would have meltdowns if that happened. My family thought I was odd, but they dismissed these behaviors as me having a quirky and dramatic personality. Instead of being tested for autism, like many girls who went undiagnosed, I tested into the nonexistent gifted program at my school and received very little support.
I didn’t get sarcasm — my peers quickly discovered they could say almost anything and I would believe them because I couldn’t understand anyone saying something they didn’t mean literally. They found this hilarious. (I still have trouble identifying sarcasm, but I’ve gotten better.)
My teachers failed to intervene in the subtle bullying I received from who I considered my friends. Because I didn’t know anything different, I thought it was my fault that I was treated this way. Though I no longer have cringing, deeply upsetting flashbacks to specific memories where I experienced isolation and humiliation from my peers, the consequences of such experiences have been long-lasting.
Why did this bullying dynamic happen?
Research has speculated that bullying is an evolutionary adaptation in humans designed to establish social hierarchy. This certainly fits with my experience (neurotypicals singling out a neurodivergent), but I have often wondered why it is that some people display bullying behavior while others do not. What in their internal or external environment is prompting them to act out social aggression towards others?
Someone who bullied me when we were young reached out to me as an adult, 10 years later, and apologized to me. I hadn’t thought about those experiences in a while, and though the damage is done, I appreciated the intention behind her apology.
I also felt curiosity about these intentions, and because this unique situation presented me the opportunity, I asked her why she had treated me the way she did.
“I remember being extremely, cripplingly jealous of you. I know that’s the typical thing for parents to say when there’s an @$$h0le at school, but it’s true in this case,” she replied. She went on to explain that she was intimidated by her perception of me — that I was smart, “had a lot of try,” and seemed to “accomplish my goals with ease.” These things felt threatening to her “fragile ego and low self-esteem,” in her words. So, it turns out, we both had low self-esteem, and we were both jealous of one another — in my case, I was envious of her apparent ease in social situations.
I was truly surprised to learn that she viewed me in this way, because I believed that she along with my other peers bullied me for the opposite reason — that they thought I was stupid, as I remember overhearing them calling me. Certainly nothing about those years was easy for me, and my ability to perform academically improved drastically once I left that school.
I find it quite interesting that the aspect of me that I felt was insulted the most (my intelligence) was also the reason that she felt intimidated by me, because in fact she viewed me opposite to how I felt she treated me and viewed me.
She also said she was jealous of the openness, communication, and supportiveness that she saw in my household, because she felt her home environment lacked those elements. I found this eye-opening because I had never considered how her home environment may have contributed to her treatment of me. The situation she was in, living with her mother and a series of her mom’s boyfriends, and how the passive aggression and judgment from those men made her feel small, ironically mirrors my home life after I moved schools and we lost contact (my parents’ divorce being fully realized at that point).
The peers in our mutual circle loved to gossip, and because she was being “relentlessly bullied” by our mutual friends at the same time, she wanted to fit in and felt “it was important to have a common enemy to keep the negative attention off” herself. Her role models, adults in her life, also apparently would talk about me in “negative ways,” which encouraged her to target me.
This idea that adults were targeting my child self for criticism is deeply saddening for me, but not surprising given the toxicity that she described directed toward her child self from the adults in her life.
I have struggled with loathing the child version of myself who was hurt by her peers. But abuse by adults during one’s childhood brings even more of a sensation that perhaps you deserved it, due to the greater power imbalance — an experience I’m not unfamiliar with myself.
She reached out to me ultimately because of an overwhelming sense of guilt and responsibility for her actions.
What I have taken away from this conversation with my former bully, although I truly would rather consider her a hopeful friend, is that such dynamics are not so straightforward as they seem. Your bullies might not think what you think they think about you. They might regret what they have said or done for years.
By attempting to understand her point of view, I am feeling compassion for her difficult experiences as a child. And while I am not necessarily arguing that you need to forgive your bullies, I believe that feeling compassion and forgiveness for her is helping me to forgive and feel compassion for myself.
And that is everything.
