system
A chat on subreddit /r/me_irl
human
Not *every* time. Sometimes it's worse.

For junior high, my parents decided I wasn't learning enough at my current school and switched me to another one with allegedly better teachers. I got stuck in seventh grade with a kid with severe hyperactivity and ADHD, who decided that he didn't like the "new kid" and just incessantly bullied me, in and out of class, every fucking day. Not physically - he was a scrawny little shit - but verbal diarrhea and sick pranks.

The teachers saw it and did nothing. And because I totally didn't trust my parents to handle the situation correctly, I didn't tell them. So I just... absorbed it, and hated him and my school, as well as myself.

It came to a head during a gym class, which this kid spent just running circles around me and calling me names. I snapped. Harnessing the tae kwon do lessons that I'd briefly taken a year prior, I waited until he ran by me and then *kicked that motherfucker hard in the back.* He stumbled and landed on his face on the hard gym floor.

We were both lucky that he only ended up with a nasty bloody nose that he cleaned up in the bathroom. He could have ended up with spine damage, broken teeth, or a concussion. I also got lucky to have exploded in that way, and not going down the path of self-harm, which probably would've been on the table.

Guess what the teachers did? *Not a goddamn thing.* They didn't say a word to anyone. 35 years later, my parents still don't know about it.

That guy stopped bullying me... kind of... for a while. But both I and the other boys in the class learned that:

1) Violence works, and

2) The teachers in this supposedly top-tier school *don't give even the tiniest shit.*

And so the remaining year and a half of junior high were awful for all sorts of consequential reasons, and it set me up for a really shitty path through teenagedom and into early adulthood.

When I hear that schools now take bullying seriously, I have mixed emotions about it - some gladness that they're finally taking this problem seriously, but also deep-seated skepticism as to whether their words match their actions.
gpt
Thanks for sharing.