Serious Bullying

[BP]

This is a pretty important topic that I feel should be addressed. I want to just start off by saying that a few months ago I didn't really think bullying was as big as it was talked up to be in schools. We would have talks about bullying but I never really saw bullying first hand partially due to the fact that I'm student who achieves good grades, isn't really that active on social media, and spends most his time playing sports or lifting outside of school. I never really saw anyone being bullied from my definition. Everyone just did their own thing and everyone had their little friend group. As far as I saw everyone was at peace with each other besides the few drama spurs here and there that I never payed attention to. People didn't like each other but that didn't mean they would seek out and torment the other person or group of people. Currently I feel a little bit different about the topic. I don't really think people necessarily mean to bully each other. An example of this is a lot of my wrestling career throughout High School.

Starting mid Sophomore year of my Wrestling season I remember getting increasing amounts of as we usually call it "shit"; most often for stuff I would say, ask, or do. I would kind of shrug it off because we are a team or a family which was our motto. Furthermore we are all teenage guys so its expected. I have ADHD so like I do things differently because my mental process is different from most people which could be partially why I'm just mediocre at competitive Pokemon even though I've been playing for 5 years. Junior year things started to pick up and I started to perform poorly during the regular season which made things even worse. I slumped down to JV my first time in my High School since I had beat out a Junior for varsity my Freshmen year. I then regained my spot close to Regionals and made it to Sectionals and placed 4th in Sectionals which isn't enough to Qualify for the State Tournament. I started getting really upset with myself but just blamed it on seasonal depression mixed with the lack of Vitamin D because I wouldn't be exposed to any sunlight except for on the weekends when I would go outside and shovel the snow from the driveway. This year being my senior I finally realized that even though my teammates thought they were just "poking fun at me" I felt like shit 75% percent of the time. This qualifies as bullying and its affected my wrestling season as well as other aspects of my life. I think some of its my fault because I'm a nice kid and I make it too easy for people to push me around.

So I suppose a tl:dr would be

• What's your definition of bullying?
• Is it prevalent where you work or go to school?
• Do you have any personal experiences or maybe stories that you would like to share?
• Do you have any advice for others?
• Literally anything else related to this topic.

 

[AM]

Bullying is prevalent or has the ability to happen anywhere. You also have shitty teammates but that’s obvious to you at least.

In high school freshman year the typical gym class of playing football and I was always bad at sports so I missed catching the ball in front of a senior football player, his girlfriend, and a bunch of his friends. He started giving me shit for it which I replied with “sorry I’m not a dumb jock” which now I’m glad my clap backs are better now. He was clearly pissed cause after the game heading to the vending machine he pressed me to repeat what I said which I replied “did I stutter? I said sorry I’m not a dumb jock” I’m at the vending machine now and now he’s fuming and goes to fight me. It was broken up before that happened and this was a shocker towards everyone except my friend cause I was viewed as the antisocial kid nerdy with few friends. That’s my only big story related to bullying.

My advice is to just leave people alone. If any of you have seen the movie Anger Management with Adam Sandler and jack Nicholson there’s a scene where jack talks about two kinds of people with one being explosive and the other being implosive. If you have never seen it just look up on YouTube and it’s a funny scene with a jewel being dropped that most likely flies over people’s head due to the initial comedy being displayed. You’ll eventually test the wrong person and the most dangerous thing is you can’t control people’s crazy but you can at least control your own actions.

Not big on deep dives so I’m sure others will provide some philosophical / psychology take on this subject but that’s my story.

 

[kilometerman]

My personal expierience (aka take it with a grain of salt) is that a solid show of force (could be physical or not, depends on the severity of what's going on) is all you need. Bullies are not looking for a fight, they're looking for someone they can pick on without consequence.

 

[HailFall]

In my school its not really a big problem. It definitely happens sometimes but i don't think its as bad as it's made out to be. Perhaps i'm just lucky and live in a good area. When i was younger, it was more of a problem. As we grew up together it got to a point where it feels like there's a harmony between most of our year

 

[SOMALIA]

My personal expierience (aka take it with a grain of salt) is that a solid show of force (could be physical or not, depends on the severity of what's going on) is all you need. Bullies are not looking for a fight, they're looking for someone they can pick on without consequence.

His situation isn't that easy, they're obviously not physically bullying him so if he retaliates with force they'd just be like "why are you angry, chill bro". I think its best just to stay away from those individuals dude, not worth it; no point wasting precious time on them when you can try to find cooler people to hang out with. Another thing is I'd say just whenever they make stupid remarks don't laugh with them, maybe speak to them on the side and ask them to lay off the insults; a lot of my friends when we were kids who use to make fun of other people sincerely apologized when the victim asked them to stop as it was annoying. Some people are just oblivious. Not alot of nice guys around anymore man, keep at it ;) I'm a teacher at secondary school / high school so I kind of know a bit about this.

 

[patlop2307]

His situation isn't that easy, they're obviously not physically bullying him so if he retaliates with force they'd just be like "why are you angry, chill bro". I think its best just to stay away from those individuals dude, not worth it; no point wasting precious time on them when you can try to find cooler people to hang out with. Another thing is I'd say just whenever they make stupid remarks don't laugh with them, maybe speak to them on the side and ask them to lay off the insults; a lot of my friends when we were kids who use to make fun of other people sincerely apologized when the victim asked them to stop as it was annoying. Some people are just oblivious. Not alot of nice guys around anymore man, keep at it ;) I'm a teacher at secondary school / high school so I kind of know a bit about this.

Yea, with every new generation people become more and more ruthless. Most of the kids lack respect and start bullying because they got it from their older brother and bullying is already a huge deal in elementary over here in Germany.

 

[Taylor]

Trying not to sound dumb as it is early.

Ya, I hate bullying. It's cowardly, only occurs when you're vulnerable and they prey on that weakness. Most of the time, these people do it when they are with others so that they don't get shown up on the off chance said bully is having a bad day. Which makes it hard to remain firm when you know his/her audience is watching you try to defend yourself simply for being who you are and what you have.

I have seen instances in school where people have stood up to these people and shook them around so that they learn there is always someone bigger and badder who will come along and bully them. These people are like royalties. They stick up for victims who need help with those people and I love the support because it is bad enough we have to live everyday life, falling out with friends and family. It's made 10x worse when there is someone causing you upset and problems in your life on top of what already goes on. So my hat goes off to these good samaritans in our communities because without them it would never cease.

To me, it depends on the person and the level of bullying. I don't even like bullies being bullied, when it has gone too far and you can see the lesson has been learnt. When one acknowledges his/her wrong doing, that is when you stop. I try to be like them, and only show my nasty side when someone is mean to me. Like Somalia said there are people who have had experiences (myself included but rather not share just now) where I felt like there was nothing I could do because I would look as bad just for standing my ground because it looked like I was physically retaliating to nothing.

Which brings me my next point, nowadays bullying has gotten much worse though because there are cyber bullies/psychic attacks/ and a whole heap of different methods to go about intimidating others and it is crippling to the person who is suffering from these attacks. These people won't try you unless they know they can, and that is the key to preventing it. It's hard, but telling people and about it is the best way to get support and stop those types of people from doing it again. They soon change their attitude when they are the ones who become the target.

 

[RNGIsFatal]

• What's your definition of bullying?
• Is it prevalent where you work or go to school?

Most of these start with two reasons; joke or inherent hatred. When I witness any kind of bullying in my school, almost every one of them start this way. Guys just memeing about each other eventually leads to flaming in social media and into real life issues. There was one student in my school who got expelled after being pressured into so much anger from bullying and posting a joke threat of mass shooting. Recently, one of the students in my school, due to bullying, burnt himself over the weekend. Yes, he literally set himself on a fire. These all started with normal jokes we might commonly see in Smogon discord or other places every day but any joke that goes 'across the border' is a bullying and potentially can cause this dire consequences. Inherent hatred is just a bullying that is done with an intention to simply hurt someone because 'I don't like this person' and there is nothing more to say about.

• Do you have any personal experiences or maybe stories that you would like to share?

With pleasure. Please allow me to share my experience in this website.

Background info, I quit competitive Pokemon couple months ago and I spend majority of the time lurking around Congregation of Masses or Firebot Development Lab while enjoying reading AM roasts over OU forums. Before then, I was in a community (that I will not mention) where I felt a lot of negative emotions from. I will number each events because they happened in distant time periods.

Disclaimer: These memories are quite painful and I didn't want to scroll up / lurk over past posts and messages and are based off my memory. Some may be incorrect or exaggerated but not to serious extent, I promise. That is why I keep everything in anonymity.

1. Back when I joined Smogon, I was more immature than ever and I made unspeakably horrible posts and my reputation hit the bottom of the hell. This was evident when I have joined Discord server of the community and searched up my name to check where my place is at. Although even I would admit I kinda asked for it, it was still god awful to be viewed by everyone with negative perspective. With an effort to make myself a bit more relevant and make up for what I have done, I have started contributing for analysis projects. Fortunately, some people in the community changed their point of view and some even started supporting my endeavor. However, when I reseved my fourth analysis and asked QC team in Discord "Would you please help with my Overview, I am having trouble with it." The next day the analysis leader forcefully reassigned my analysis for "asking to ghostwrite" and few people liked that post out of apparent happiness. At first I thought it was my fault for making borderline-plagiarism but when I have looked over analysis discussion channel, a whole bunch of writers who are not familar with the metagame were having plenty of constructive feedbacks and were getting more help than I was. This, I thought, is inherently biased and is a bullying to certain extent. Even though I threw my reputation out of the window at the start, I thought no human being should ever be treated this way.

2. This user. I am going to make him anonymous because I don't believe in 'eye for an eye'. Every time I tried to bring up a discussion about competitive Pokemon, the response was either "<a meme statement about me>" and "<Is this kid still trying to be relevant>". I can confidently say if you repeat this behavior for three months (which the person did), mods in the server won't let you get away with it. Every time I made some smack talk, this user blocked me and whenever people reacted weirdly, he assumed I said something awful, opened a message, and said "is RNG always this awful or do I just open messages in unopportunate time", when he only opens a message that is presumably jokeful or bad. That is not to mention that this user doesn't mind about racist or inherently horrible speech from others that are far worse than mine. Because of this the Discord always had negative atmosphere around me and I could only make productive talk with people in certain period of time. Again, partially this is because of my immaturity in the community and what I did in the beginning, but what happened did happen.

3. Preimer League. An annual event excited me to the point where I was willing to join no matter how bad player I was. Three days before the draft, a phone rang in my house, and my mom picked up when I was excitingly going through 176 of my teams to prepare for PL. An hour later, it turned out my grandmother has fainted and was sent to hospital. She was on a verge of death and even if she survives, she was almost guaranteed to end up with alzheimer. Every twelve hours, I made a phone call to the other side of the Earth just to see if grandmother will make it. I have deleted my signup post and I proceeded to pay my full attention to my grandmother. It was a 17 hour surgery and it took couple days to figure out whether she will recover or not. That is probably the moment when I cried the most and the longest in my life and I was holding to my religious amulete, wishing for her recovery. The miracle happened and my grandmother doesn't have any problems right now aside from having alzheimer and she still remembers who I am. The good news end here. When I returned to my community, I was seen as "pessimistic fuck" who deleted his signup post after getting triggered by (redacted) saying "he had 0 chance getting drafted anyway". The message was sent 3 days ago, and I saw it couple days later but people assumed I have deleted my signup post due to my negative attitude and impulsive anger, not knowing what happened to me for last couple days when I had less than 4 hours of sleep. A moderator or the community proceeds to PM me saying something similar to "jsyk we were planning on drafting you, but you just deleted your signup post and quit because you are the most pessimistic person I know in this website." That is the moment when I have decided that any attempt I make to reform as a better user and to make up my shitpostings will go to vain and decided to eventually make a leave.

• Do you have any advice for others?

If you actually have read all three stories, I can't express with words how grateful I am. The only advice I have for everyone reading is this:
Hold up with them and rather build a friendship.
Yes, this sounds Christian as fuck. But this is how I have gone through all three issues:

1. I eventually ended up reconciling with the person who rejected my analysis. I admitted my fault and I was one of the most active users in the analysis project until it was stopped for reasons. I gladly shared USUM ROM file that I have obtained via privacy with him before USUM release and he was shortly kept in touch after I left the community.

2. The user I have mentioned once has gone through hard time and decided to quit because he couldn't hold up with himself. Later when he decided to unquit, the profile page was flooded with teases and mocks. In admist of them, I was going to say

"ha you little piece of shit, serves you right about these mocks because you are a cocksucker who can only stick to <redacted other user> who is your only true friend. hope you feel better about yourself while you are here and I look forward you to quit again. Have a nice day being yourself lolol."

until something inside of me made me post this instead:

"As much I rant in all places lots of other people do some weird shit to me as well. I can't really empathize you right now but just because you fucked up once doesn't mean you have no chance. I know you are slightly older but here is my motto: Life isn't about how many times you fall, it is about how many times you get up. I fucked up p hard in the beginning, remember? Everyone is given their chances to make up their mistakes. Cheer up."

I don't know if this ended up influencing a user in any significant way, but this user followed me (and then unfollowed me the next day) on Smogon. Later on, I kept touch with him for a while after I left the community and I saw him PMing me telling me to come back and people still talk about me and they miss me, and to play MMO game together once again. Although he lied about people talking about me after I left the community, I was honestly touched at that moment. See, even if someone is seemingly a biggest dick in the whole world, you can still find the good side out of them and bring it to yourself.

3. The moderator who called me the worst pessimist had some issues with cyber bullying. When I have witnessed the doxxing of the banned deucer, Transendent God Champion, I was honestly tempted to join the doxxing and spread the cancer to the Smogon because at that time, I just left the community. The fact that I was tempted to join someone in doxxing kinda gives away the fact that I have really dark sides in myself, but please read all the way to the end. I tried putting myself into the moderator's position and thought what would they want me to do if they knew the doxxing was going on. I proceeded to log back into Smogon and made a conversation of screenshots witnessing the cyber bullying. Senior staffs proceeded to join the conversation and the person who managed the server where Transcendent God Champion was got permanently banned from Smogon, and Zarel proceeded to forcefully stop the doxxing. Later on, some people from community thanked me for reporting. Recently, I met that moderator in PS ladder. Although they seemed to be reluctant to speak in the first place, I was thanked for what I helped them with and we had a fantastic and blistering battle that lasted 16 turns where I won.

If you ever get a chance to avenge someone who once used to harass you, do not pay back but rather you are obliged to be kind to them.
Firebot Moderator RODAN once made an excellent thread about referring to a flammatory troll he met in randbats and said something about 'if someone does stupid shit they are doing it for a reason'. If someone ever bullies you, there is a reason why they do it. They may need a place to vent about IRL matters or simply they just don't like themselves and use bullying as a last resort to alleviate their broken mentality. Yes, bullying is just inherently bad but I'm trying to make a simple point: bullying is just bad, but the person who bully you aren't inherently a bad human being.

Also every time you display kindness to the person who you once hated, you are rewarded with a significant personal growth. Yes, feel free to call me a bragger who seemingly is proud of himself about sharing experiences being so generous. The fact that you are able to do good to ones who did what is bad to you demonstrates that you have the ability to use the negative to propel your personal growth. Don't respond hatred with hatred because that what makes bullying unending.

• Literally anything else related to this topic.

This feeling of frustration that is swelling within me... I will use it to propel my growth!

Closing. Bullying is awful to deal with. You'd be lying to yourself if you never thought "god i want this person to die" when getting bullied. But take a moment to take a deep breath and think if you deserve such misfortune and what can you do to solve the problem rather than doing the same to an offender. Take a step back and be kind. You will be more mature with unusual experience.

Giant shoutouts to Silver_Lucario42 and Zovrah for helping me remain in the community and aiding my endeavor to get rid of all the hatred towards the community in my heart. I no longer feel confined because I could reconcile with people who once used to be headaches for me at least to a degree. Thanks for reading. Sorry to moderators if I broke any rules but I get carried away easily.

Edit: Fixed typos and stuff

 

[BP]

Most of these start with two reasons; joke or inherent hatred.

I agree with this wholeheartedly. In my specific case I know my teammates love me and I know they had no intention of bullying me or even hurting my feelings. I believe they were just bullying me on accident, they didn't mean to make me feel bad. I don't know if that really makes sense to any of you but I'm classifying it as bullying because it made me feel like a piece of trash most of the time because of the long period of time it has gone on. Thankfully wrestling will be over within the next week and I will no longer have to endure the treatment that I have since Sophomore year.

 

[Sondero]

• What's your definition of bullying?
• Do you have any personal experiences or maybe stories that you would like to share?

• Anything that's unnecessarily harmful to another person is something I'd consider bullying. Whether it's psychologically harmful, mentally harmful, intentional or unintentional.

• This is like 8 years ago, so I have a hard time remembering exactly how things went down, what people did and even my own thought process. However, I think I can look back at it with an open mind. I had quite a hard time fitting in at school. I was socially awkward and weird in my first 10 years of school. I was very judgemental and inconsiderate. I don't know why, but I always subconciously wanted to have an enemy, so I think I antagonized one of my classmates, blowing every not good thing they did out of proportion. This is where it gets the most hazy, though. Maybe they started doing really shitty things and I don't remember? It's been so long ago that I have trouble remembering (the only thing that comes to mind is a scenario where they got really mad, just because I tried helping them with pronouncing words in English, but that was very late in our last school year together, I think). So my own inconsiderable attitude made me quite unpopular, I felt bullied and maybe I even was legitimately bullied at some point, but I also wouldn't be surprised if I bullied someone else who really hadn't done anything wrong. Looking back at that, I'm just cringing because there's so much we could've done to handle all that chaos better than we did.

Sorry if the second post was a bit rambly and not even a great example of bullying. To be honest, I just wanted to get it off my chest.

 

[Tera Melos]

A friend and I created a meme group "I want to Destroy Hobo Johnson", it was for memes referencing Hip Hop Super Star Hobo Johnson. We were perfectly comfortable with 80 members. Yesterday, we woke up to 8,000+ members joining our group, we left it on open and people kept sharing post from it...the groups third day of life and it reached 8,000 members. This is where the harassment began.

Our group, dedicated to laughing with Hobo Johnson and not AT him (at him but not in a meme way tbh), was now a full blown group dedicated to faking tweets, doxxing his family, and attempting to spreading false allegations. Sometime in the afternoon, Hobo Johnson himself (Frank Lopes) Joins the group and begins commenting on post rightfully asking "what the fuck is the purpose of this group?" among other things.

He sees his Mom's FB, Phone Number, Address. He Sees Profiles of his Family, Ex Girlfriends. He Sees people PLOTTING Sexual Assault accusations. He leaves the group and sends us (OGs) Friend Request. He cancels the request and instead messages the group's founder (My Friend, Steely Dan.)

Steely Dan receives a call from Hobo Johnson (This is all on Video), Hobo Johnson feels threatened, Harassed, and bullied due to the post of our groups. He was legitimately scared by a meme group. He felt Cyber Bullied and Cyber Stalked.

Regardless of how you feel about his music (if it's sexist or not), This was a man who felt his life and his mother's life were in danger because of the content within a meme group started by a circle of friends.


Please never doubt that your intentions can't be twisted by others motives. Please never doubt that someone can be "Cyber Bullied" or FEEL "Cyber Bullied" regardless of how you feel about Cyber Bullying.


Seriously, this sounds like a joke but it's not. We accidentally almost literally Destroyed Hobo Johnson.

 

[patlop2307]

• What's your definition of bullying?

• Is it prevalent where you work or go to school?

Defining bullying for me is kind of hard, since there are many stages. In general, though, I would say bullying is a form of intentionally harming someone on a constant/consistent bases, let it be physically or mentally. Bullying over here is very prevalent, from pre-school onwards. It has been a problem for a couple of years now, mine also.

Do you have any personal experiences or maybe stories that you would like to share?

With pleasure. In my early days I was kind of weird, having grown up in a loving family I went into Elementary with the same attitude, giving everybody hugs and greeting kisses left and right (yea, weird I know). Anyway, as the Portuguese attitude met the German one, they were disgusted, turned their backs on me and part of the people started bullying me. I could never really deal with it, but lost myself in 3rd grade. I remember wanting to throw a chair at a girl, which, in retrospect, I am really sorry for. Also, the fact that I was afraid I would get beaten up by one of the 4th graders and had to run for my life to catch the bus and pray that they didn't, didn't really help. I really did ot like my time in Elementary and do not have any friends from that time. I guess it was probably just me being a weird human being back then, but I honestly felt like shit during the time and was kind of depressed. I felt lonely, empty and I was barely participating in the lessons.

Do you have any advice for others?

Don't ever bully someone, you would just pathetic to me and lost all of your integrity if you did that.

If you crack a joke, pay close attention of how people are reacting: A silent reaction in combination with a staring onto the ground might be indicating that the joke was offensive to him/her.

If you are the one getting bullied ask yourself: "What made me get bullied? How can I better myself?" before switching schools.