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.
Fuck me if I know what any of them are doing with their lives. Part of me sure wishes that the shitty people from my past are getting what’s coming to them, but also what difference does it make to me what karmic justice may or may not await them.
My life is objectively better than when I had to deal with their shit. Why waste my mental energy on them?
I know at least one of them was arrested for B&E and possession with intent to sell of meth (though it was immediately after high school and I’m sure he’s out by now). The rest, don’t know don’t care.
A town near where I grew up had an epidemic of that. The teachers treated the bullies like their favorite children, the next thing you knew they had burglarized every single unlocked vehicle in the entire town for drug money on multiple occasions and were arrested right before they would’ve graduated from high school. My friend was one of their brothers and I remember it got so bad they graduated him despite him not passing just to remedy the memory of trying to overshadow him.
I ended up ghosting/ditching most of my own age group, since most of them got hooked on various substances and going down the wrong path.
Yeah it kinda sucks, but I don’t wanna find myself in and out of jail for the rest of my life.
