I don’t know if this is something people say in other countries, but in my country, there’s this common cliché or “wisdom” where adults will assure you that the people who picked on you in environments like school will universally develop lives of hardship later on, one way or another getting into mayhem.
I asked my mother one day what happened to all those people growing up. I can sense she may have been sugar coating it, but she said something along the lines of “well, I waited, and waited, and waited, and waited, and waited, and became a teacher, and waited some more, and finally watched as my bullies had to go into retirement five years late, yay” (okay, not really like that, but it might as well have been).
Yeah, common theme in my experience that what we hope for is never “that” set in stone. No matter where in the community (or even long-distance communicating) you knew them from, based on life, how much approximate correspondence do you associate with that mindset in the first paragraph?
Why would I spend any effort on keeping tabs on people who made my life miserable?
This lol.
I’m fucking 40, anyone I grew up with who made my life miserable are people who I have had no exposure to or communications with since I graduated high school June 16th 2002. Anyone since then who makes my life miserable for more than a few minutes gets told to fuck off on the spot lol.
You graduated on a Sunday? My school always did graduations on weekdays. I graduated about a week earlier than you did. Juuuust about to turn 40 myself.
And yes, I’ve either befriended my old bullies (a lot of them were just lashing out because they had a shitty home life/no one to listen to them), or they’ve gone off to live their lives and I never heard from them again.
My class is finally at the age where they’re keeping tabs on who has died since the last reunion, and the list is very short with none of my former bullies on it.
Did you look that up or are you one of those people that knows days from dates ?
I’ve no idea, I haven’t thought about them since I left school and now I can barely remember their names.
I haven’t met a single person I went to school with, since I left my home town to go to university. So, no idea.
The serious psychos are in and out of jail. The ones who were just kinda dicks sometimes (which to be honest probably includes me) are basically okay. And why shouldn’t we be? Being a dick when you’re still learning to be a person shouldn’t carry a life sentence of any kind.
There was a kid in grade school growing up that was a bully. He made a kid cry while we were waiting for our class picture to be taken in the 6th grade, and you can see that kid crying in the picture. I still think about it often.
The bully ended up being one of the greatest running backs my county ever knew. He was a game changer.
I randomly decided to look up the crying kid from the school picture a couple years ago. He is now a very successful man. I couldn’t be any happier seeing that. It almost brought me to tears.
The bully was shot and killed in the streets a couple years after graduating high school.
