When growing up my parents taught me to stand up to bullies. (We’re talking about verbal abuse and manipulation, not physical bullying.) Following that advice as a kid led to mixed results yet it’s stuck with me into my adult years.
These days though, using this advice only seems to backfire. When I give them what they’ve given me, the bullies just get more angry and use that to justify their continued bullying. They see themselves as the victim.
Any suggestions that would be more helpful?
One moral of this story is practice your punches before you get into a fight.
If they had landed the punch, chances are they would have been expelled instead of the bully.
That’s very possible actually. They technically listed me as suspended for the next 2 weeks myself, but I think they only did that as a technicality for sake of the superintendent’s office records.
They never actually told me I was suspended though, and I didn’t miss a day of school. Everyone at my school knew the whole thing was messed up, and they knew I didn’t do anything wrong.
I guess that could have been useful too, if that’s what you want to take from my story.
But nah, seriously I was trying to swing around behind me, I was looking out of the corner of my eye, beyond the angle of my glasses. That was my only significant mistake, and an unavoidable mistake at that.
Since I was looking beyond the edge of my glasses, my vision had a distorted shear where everything was doubled (seeing the same thing outside of the glasses and also magnified within the field of my glasses).
It apparently really screws with one’s depth perception when looking out of the corner of their eyes while also wearing really strong glasses.