I had a couple people challenge me to fights who didn't show up when the time came.

The most physical fight I ever had was when my eldest brother (one year younger than me), called someone in my grade "faggot" (which was unbelievably stupid...but we were raised in a family where that word was thrown around to mark anyone you didn't think was cool or manly enough *sigh*). I was walking home from school and could hear him behind me yelling for help. He was being chased by about 6 guys from my grade.

I put my foot out just like in the cartoons and it worked. The guy closest to him in the chase went flying. Then I continued walking to catch up with the gaggle who'd caught up to him and were pinning him down on a neighbor's lawn while punching him. I punched my way through the guys and picked my brother up and we went home. This is the brother I get along with least but our family has always been the type to think "Hey, *I* can punch him but I'm damned if I let *you* punch him!"

"Hey, *I* can punch him but I'm damned if I let *you* punch him!"

That's what families are for!

one of the things I'm learning in my middle age is that we make a lot of assumptions about people and even the people we think are doing very well may not perceive things that way or may be hiding some private pain the world never sees.

I read this and thought "Earshot". And yes.

one of the things I'm learning in my middle age is that we make a lot of assumptions about people and even the people we think are doing very well may not perceive things that way or may be hiding some private pain the world never sees.

Oh, that's what I was told almost verbatim if I complained when I got shit. "There are things about his/her life you don't know/understand."

It took growing up for me to learn to not give a crap about the motivations of a person being abusive to me. If you're nasty to me I don't care why. If I could go tell 12 year old Trudy anything it would be that.

I need to find out if my sister ever felt put upon. I think she was never even slightly weird (eta: until after uni). But I know I'll find out something different.

Yeah, any fighting I did was mostly informal. There was never any meet you after school stuff. It was mostly running and grappling. And then more running.

Timelies all!

I was painfully shy, smart and unfashionable. You do the math.

Meanwhile, something is wrong with our landline, so anyone who tries to call us gets a busy signal.

I got bullied a bit when I started high school (years 7-12 here), but there wasn't really anything after the first year. This despite being smart, small, young, odd sense of humour and nerdy-looking. We had an exercise in the final year on a retreat where we had a bunch of students sitting in a circle, and then we went around the circle and the others would say what they liked or admired about that person. I still remember being told by people I would never regard as friends that they respected that I would never give in or change just to fit in better. (I also remember one guy saying he enjoyed it when I showed up the teachers.)

Trudy, I wasn't trying to say that people who bullied should be given a pass. I was commenting as to someone like Teri Hatcher, who according to my friend was a popular cheerleader, could conceive of themselves as being a geek, not popular, etc.

Of course, in the case of celebrities they may truly be fibbing because it plays better in the press if you *weren't* always popular.

You're absolutely right that someone being bullied shouldn't be handed a line about empathy as if that makes it all better.

I was quiet and socially awkward in high school, but I was part of the brain and art student crowds, and had a small circle of good friends I'd geek out about Middle Earth with that I'm still friends with to this day (more lasting friendships than my college and post-college ones, actually). My PE coach was the laid-back one, and also a neighbor, so I didn't undergo trauma like the kids in the crazy hypercompetitive coach's classes. Really, pretty much any unpleasantness I underwent in HS was due to things I said without thinking them through first.