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.

Hrm. All this reminiscing has shaken loose a memory of being a gang leader in the 2nd or 3rd grade. The girls were the cats (my nom de guerre was Persian, if I'm not mistaken) and the boys were the dogs. Lots of hissing and such. I recall now that it went terribly wrong when the social order I tried to impress on the troops fell apart and somebody got violent. As the ringleader, I took the fall.

Huh. I wonder what I was thinking, other than that it was nice to have people 'on my side.'

I was a geek, bullied an pretty friendless until my senior year.

Not physical, but people were pretty mean to me -- I was socially awkward, had no fashion sense, and lived in my head a lot. I had one good girlfriend.

Amazingly enough, it was freaking LATIN CAMP that toughened me up. I hung out with people who didn't have this preconceived notion of me, so I got to be myself, and they thought I was pretty cool and smart and funny. So I started saying all the sarcastic, bitchy stuff in my head. And, like ita, I slapped this guy who was being a little bitch to me.

After that, it was much better. I hung out with some more kids from the gifted English class, smarted off to this popular boy in front of his friends (he was all making blow job jokes, and I was shaking inside, but managed a cool look and a "I don't eat rotten meat") and that was received well.

So, I guess my recommendation for teen girls would be learn Latin, smack a bitch, buy a purple bra and become bitter and sarcastic.

I just wish I'd discovered all this in 6th grade. I've never been bullied after that, and am The Girl I Want At My Back in all of my friends' books.

So, I guess my recommendation for teen girls would be learn Latin, smack a bitch, buy a purple bra and become bitter and sarcastic.

I should do this with the heroine of my next YA novel!