Bullying changed me for the better

Bullying is something that most people have grown out of by their mid teens, a brief phase that kids go through, either giving the person next to you a dead leg or being the guy who’s limping out of Geography lessons. I was the latter. Everyone is aware of the stigma attached to bullying, often quite rightly so, but for me bullying did far more good than harm.

The cheerful elephant was never there for me.

I don’t think I can say I had more than two friends at a time until I was about fifteen, although to be honest, I was asking for it. I had long hair, wonky teeth and a rash over half my body that bled down my jawline every so often, so naturally for several years I was bullied.

I was the butt of the joke, the kid everyone ran away from the moment we were outside, good only for beating up outside science or for ‘borrowing’ the answers to the maths homework. But do I regret these years? Do I look back on them with some deep seated sadness that haunts me to this day? No. In fact I am glad of my friends’ intervention in my formative years, else god knows who I would be today.

Being bullied taught me a number of things. It turned out that no one was interested in my latest exploits in Age of Empires, the kid who wants to be the smartest in the room is rarely the most popular and people don’t like it if you’re a whiny bitch who doesn’t know how to take a joke.

I also felt personally victimised by Regina George.

Perhaps these lessons could have been learned by methods other than being thrown under the older kids in the corridors, but I doubt any other method could have been a fraction as efficacious. I was a stubborn, arrogant eleven year old, too caught up in my own desperate quest for a sticker from a teacher to notice my very personality was toxic.

Had someone just taken me to one side and said, “Sam, you’re a bit of a dick, cut it out already.” I don’t think I’d have listened. Bullying humbled me into the realms of social acceptance.

Make no mistake, this isn’t a call to arms for every lunch-money-grabbing wannabe Nelson Muntz out there, but by the time you leave school you’re essentially an adult, and school should prepare you for interacting with other human beings outside of the classroom. My bullies taught me more about how to survive real life after school than PSHE and Citizenship lessons ever could.

My bullies back then were friends by circumstance rather than choice, we’d just been allocated to the same class. Now I regularly go out drinking with a number of them when I’m home, and they’re friends with me because of what (few) qualities I have. The qualities that they themselves instilled in me with every bruise I went home with, every second I watched them disappear across the playground and every name they called me.

I am glad the self obsessed goody two shoes version of myself died during my early teens, and I’ll be forever grateful to those heroic outlaws that killed him.