Listen, You Need To Stop Sacrificing Your Happiness For Other People

Tom Kuegler
The Post-Grad Survival Guide
3 min readOct 21, 2021

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Photo by ActionVance on Unsplash

“Just punch him, Tom.”

My Dad was telling me to punch a kid who was bullying me.

“You have my permission to punch him.”

I was 7 years old when he told me to do that.

That rocked my world view.

“What if I get in trouble?” I asked.

“I don’t care,” he quipped back.

The silence in the room after that was remarkable. I’ll never forget it.

I felt like I had a license to kill after our conversation, but I was still reluctant to punch anyone.

Let me back up.

From kindergarten to 6th grade, I was bullied. I was viciously attacked every day by a group of boys doubling as demons spawned from the depths of hell.

And my parents paid a lot of money for this education even though they couldn’t pay for much else at the time.

It was a waste of money.

I should’ve just gone to a public school.

I remember the first time I punched one of the jerk-offs who was bullying me. He turned his back after laying into me and I hammer fisted him right at the top of his fucking spine.

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