My school bullies are not doing well and I‘m happy

My mind has been racing a lot lately and as the kids on TikTok would say „the vibes are off“ with me. In a month I‘m turning 24 years old, so that means I‘ve been out of high school for at least 8 years now, but it just feels that I cannot escape it.

I was bullied by my peers, which is very sad, but unfortunately very common in this society. At my old school, there was this one girl, who had a marvelous time making the lives of me and my friends (and literally every other person in that school, including teachers) living hell. Just thinking about her stupid smile and her stupid brown cowboy boots on her feet when she called me „ugly“ in front of her friends gives me a rash and makes me want to go out into the woods and scream until my throat starts bleeding. Her bullying had such a negative effect on me growing up. And the sad thing is, it wasn‘t just her. It was her own agenda-friend-group, too. I was the typical bullying victim: I had glasses and braces, still played with toys, loved boy bands and had no idea what to do with my hair. And I was like 11 years old. They, however, were already 12. Every morning it seems that they woke up and planned how to make my day the worst. Every day, they were talking behind my back (loud enough for me to hear it), told me to my face how much I suck or how much of a „childish“ kid I am. It‘s been a long time and these moments all haunt me in the middle of the night when I wake up and immediately start sobbing, because the pain that they gave me as a child still endures and still hurts me.

These scars won‘t heal… unless?

We‘re humans. We‘re all made of intergalactic dust, atoms and muscles. We‘re magical. We‘re supposed to treat each other with kindness. Does it seem unnerving if some of us seemingly missed this message?

I was 12, when my bully… no, let‘s give her a name. Let‘s call her Stella. You should name the things that scare you the most, right? Anyway, I was 12 years old when she called me weird and stupid, when I stood up for myself after I was so sick from all the bullying of her and her friends that my mother had to take me to a doctor.

And I was 23 years old, when her account was recommended to me on TikTok. I was a grown person, staring into the perfectly shot and edited profile picture of my old archnemesis and almost vomitted when I saw the “love your life” in her bio. I almost felt like I stumbled upon the greatest secrets of the world, as if I‘m entering a sacred temple filled with an answer to the question of my life: did you change like I had to, because of you?

Scrolling through her videos gave me a creepy feeling. That person that is dancing to a Jason Derulo song and laughs in a shy way, when she misses the step, was the same person that told me so many times how ugly I was. This person was out at beaches, taking “candid” photos of herself in front of the sunset and 10 years before that she said to my friend she‘ll beat her up if she sits at “her” seat in the school bus again.

Are you actually fucking kidding me?, was my first thought. But that surprised, yet shocked feeling quickly turned into rage and anger, as I opened the comments.

“You‘re so cool and nice!”

“God I love ur energy, ur so amazing”

Amazing?! Yeah, amazing at making people‘s lives miserable! I could feel the steam coming out of my ears, I was so tempted to send my own dissertation about her and her stupid friends down there in the comment section of a TikTok video, in which she pretended to be a little baby talking to her mother about phones (it was literally a sound of a real baby. Make with that, what you want).

Yet, I stopped. I stopped it and left her account.

Yes, inside of me was this huge amount of rage, like a pile of dynamite that‘s been sitting inside of me throughout my puberty and adolescence and it suddenly just went off - but I didn‘t let that come and win over me. I thought to myself, I‘m gonna be the bigger person. I could do the same harm to you, but what would it give me? Satisfaction? No, the real satisfaction is realizing that these people made your school life living hell, but now you‘re grown up and can look back at your time as a student and say: I‘m glad that I wasn‘t a raging cunt to everyone.

Another one of my bullies used to be my best friend, actually. We were both the stereotypical nerdy girls and then one day she suddenly realized that I‘m stupid and she wants to hang out with the cool girls that already wore bras. Like real bras! She was still friendly to me, although that sort of just meant presenting me to the other friends as a weird scientific experiment: “look at her now, she‘s eating a sandwich!” No matter what I did, it resulted in quiet gossiping from them. Although the worst moment was whenever I just stood there and they all turned around, looked at me and started laughing so hard that tears were streaming down their eyes. With their fingers, they just pointed at me and their silver-braced-teeth were shining deep down into my soul.

“Why are they laughing at me? What did I do?”, I asked my friend. That‘s when she confessed that they‘re laughing, because she told them my secrets. And that she feels bad. But they asked about me, so she told them - weird statement, but sure, that‘ll definitely fix this fucked-up situation!

We stopped hanging out with each other and after we‘ve graduated I didn‘t see her for five years, until she made a crazy appearance at a party in my hometown. She was so drunk that she couldn‘t walk properly, pushed everyone around on the dancefloor and requested a song from the DJ, who shook his head and told her to go away. Getting denied from a DJ must be one of the most humiliating experiences a human being can ever imagine. After this, she almost threw up on the dancefloor and got kicked out of the party. I felt bad for her. Maybe that‘s what makes me different from them.

I think the sad truth is that each and everyone of us got bullied at some point in their lives. Whether it‘s at school, or at work. And I honestly think that‘s the saddest thing ever. I‘ve never had a conversation with my old bullies, ever since school stopped and I don‘t think I want to. Inevitably, however, this might just happen. My sister once met her old bully at a party and she acted all nicely and friendly, asked my sister what she‘s up to and recalled all of the fun they had at school, to which my sister just asked: “do you even remember what you did to me?”

It seems that when you‘re such a terrible person, you just have zero feelings or empathy towards all the bad stuff you‘ve ever done and just forget about it all. I wish I could forget. I wish I could forget of all the pains and horrors and just let go of my body image issues that all of these people gave me, because they were a kid that was just angry at the world. I don‘t wish them any harm, nor do I wish them to experience anything remotely like that. I do, however, wish that at some point in their lives, they think about all these moments, all the laughter and taunting, and then realize: I was a monster and I deeply regret it.