A story about a bully from my school days

[Misery]

So, this is part of a back and forth between me and a friend on the forums here... I was telling him this story through the magic of TECHNOLOGY and figured, you know what, this came out well... why not just show it on the forums. No idea if anyone will give a fart or watch it at all, but... why not.

I've done videos before but this one is different... I had to learn a new program and a whole bunch of things to make this one. The previous videos did not involve any editing because I didnt know how (and didnt need to). This one involves a lot of it, and it'll become very, very apparent as the story progresses.

This is a story about bullies being cruel, and a very rare instance of me actually taking a stand against them out of anger. This happened during my school days of course, junior high to be specific... 7th grade, I believe.

I made this all dramatic in the telling (and with the editing) because I bloody well could, however the details of it are true. It might come off as silly to you perhaps, the "dramatic" aspect, but... it's all for fun and a good way for me to learn this stuff. This was done using VR, like with my other videos, because of course it was.

Also, certain bits at the very beginning and end were cropped out, as those were details meant just for the person the video was originally made for. So the video ends very abruptly.

Anyway, here:

Feel free to respond however you like. Any feedback or thoughts on the whole thing are certainly welcome.

Also yes, as you might have guessed, the bully was a bit of a maniac in a way... I dont think he felt remorse at all for that one, even despite how it COULD have ended, the sheer damage his action could have caused. I dont think any of that even crossed his mind. That level of unfeeling cruelty was actually very rare in my school... pretty much just him.

 

[Suzette]

I love that story! Thank you for sharing. Did you ever experience something like that again?

One time when I was working retail a man didn't like it when I told him we didn't have his size in stock. I am small. Just 5 feet and this man was over 6 feet tall. He started shouting at me and looming over me while standing very close. I looked him in the eye and took two steps forward. Suddenly he got a look of fear and totally backed down and appologized for his behavior. I don't know what he saw either but I imagine my eyes were flashing red with an unholy light! Haha!

I loved feeling so powerful and able to take care of myself. Unfortuneately, I could not remember this feeling later and I have been bullied a time or two since.

 

[Misery]

I love that story! Thank you for sharing. Did you ever experience something like that again?

One time when I was working retail a man didn't like it when I told him we didn't have his size in stock. I am small. Just 5 feet and this man was over 6 feet tall. He started shouting at me and looming over me while standing very close. I looked him in the eye and took two steps forward. Suddenly he got a look of fear and totally backed down and appologized for his behavior. I don't know what he saw either but I imagine my eyes were flashing red with an unholy light! Haha!

I loved feeling so powerful and able to take care of myself. Unfortuneately, I could not remember this feeling later and I have been bullied a time or two since.

Yeah, it doesnt always crop up when you need it, does it?

It was very rare for me... most of the time when bullied my mental/emotional response could be summed up as "uuuugh... this, AGAIN? Dont they ever tire of this?"

I mean seriously, the only response I usually gave them was just this disdainful glare, and I'd just hold that until they lost interest. Dont know why they didnt just give up quickly, I kept that up for so long...

 

[Shamar]

So, this is part of a back and forth between me and a friend on the forums here... I was telling him this story through the magic of TECHNOLOGY and figured, you know what, this came out well... why not just show it on the forums. No idea if anyone will give a fart or watch it at all, but... why not.

I've done videos before but this one is different... I had to learn a new program and a whole bunch of things to make this one. The previous videos did not involve any editing because I didnt know how (and didnt need to). This one involves a lot of it, and it'll become very, very apparent as the story progresses.

This is a story about bullies being cruel, and a very rare instance of me actually taking a stand against them out of anger. This happened during my school days of course, junior high to be specific... 7th grade, I believe.

I made this all dramatic in the telling (and with the editing) because I bloody well could, however the details of it are true. It might come off as silly to you perhaps, the "dramatic" aspect, but... it's all for fun and a good way for me to learn this stuff. This was done using VR, like with my other videos, because of course it was.

Also, certain bits at the very beginning and end were cropped out, as those were details meant just for the person the video was originally made for. So the video ends very abruptly.

Anyway, here:

Feel free to respond however you like. Any feedback or thoughts on the whole thing are certainly welcome.

Also yes, as you might have guessed, the bully was a bit of a maniac in a way... I dont think he felt remorse at all for that one, even despite how it COULD have ended, the sheer damage his action could have caused. I dont think any of that even crossed his mind. That level of unfeeling cruelty was actually very rare in my school... pretty much just him.

I think most of us have stories like that. Probably part of being autistic. Mine involved being picked on. Incessantly. Usually consisted of someone coming up behind me and knocking my books out of my hands in the hall. Rarely saw exactly who it was. When I tried to carry them higher and closer, I was accused of carrying my books like a girl. No win situation. One day this happened after lunch, and when my books hit the ground, ...... something broke. I went after him, yelling that I had enough, you've been trying to pick a fight with me for a long time and now you have one! Just try to hit me and make it official. He put his hands in front and backed away. He never bothered me again, and the harassment stopped for nearly a month.

 

[Misery]

I think most of us have stories like that. Probably part of being autistic. Mine involved being picked on. Incessantly. Usually consisted of someone coming up behind me and knocking my books out of my hands in the hall. Rarely saw exactly who it was. When I tried to carry them higher and closer, I was accused of carrying my books like a girl. No win situation. One day this happened after lunch, and when my books hit the ground, ...... something broke. I went after him, yelling that I had enough, you've been trying to pick a fight with me for a long time and now you have one! Just try to hit me and make it official. He put his hands in front and backed away. He never bothered me again, and the harassment stopped for nearly a month.

Yeah, people like that, they tend to crumble when actually confronted, dont they?

The difficult part of course is building up to actually doing that. Particularly when you're not exactly a violent person to begin with. Granted in most cases you dont really need to lay a hand on them but it can sorta feel like things will go that way in the heat of the moment, even if it really wouldnt.

 

[Sirius]

Being bullied seems to be something aspergers just have to face, as we apparently attract scum looking for an easy win. My way of handling it was a little different than the examples above.

When I was young, I was extremely skinny, and absolutely no match for anyone. But I wasn't going to lie down and take the beating, so I desided to make their win a painful one. I concentrated on finding their weak points (not physically) and attack them on that point.

One example was a guy with a motorcycle. One day I did something to the engine, so it was almost impossible to start. And if he succeded, he couldn't keep it going. He had to drag it 2 miles to get home, and later that day he called me at home to ask what I had done. I told him, and we never had a problem after that. He'd learned that a win against me was easy, but that it might come with a price, that he was too stupid to figure out in advance. So he chose to pick on somebody else.

Another example was at school, where I turned a bullies physical appearance against him and made him the laughing stock of the class. In a way I was bullying him with the strength of my brain against the strength of his body. Doing something like that might been seem as an invitation to being beaten up, but that didn't really matter as it was going to happen anyway. So what could I loose?

So I accepted that possibility as a necessary price to be able to charge a heavy price for messing with me. And the result was that the bullies chose somebody else as their victims.

 

[crazyoldhermit]

I loved your story! I was bullied all through school in the '50's and '60's but as I was very shy and afraid of them (it was a group of seven girls) I always hid instead of standing up for myself. I now wish I had stood up to them. You did an excellent job with your story and I would love to see some more of them posted.

 

[Raggamuffin]

"One study (Sterzing et al. 2012) found that 46.3 percent of autistic adolescents experienced bullying compared with 10.6 percent of mainstream others. It also found that autistic adolescents are almost as likely to become bullies themselves.

[...]

The participants who were picked on by another autistic considered it an especially disturbing variation of bullying. It may be related to what Brown (2015) calls “power-over chandeliering” (p.61), which happens when people take shame-based pain out on those more vulnerably positioned in the social hierarchy. It would be interesting to design a study investigating how much bullying and sexual harassment is associated with this kind of transference.

It is arrogant to make assumptions about a stigmatized group one is not part of, but this process brings to mind “shadism,” which is the term used when people of color stigmatize each other based on how dark their skin is (Adewunmi 2011). This happens across cultures largely as a result of slavery and colonialism. Stigma offloading is shame evasion behavior to be mindful of if we want to minimize our footprint of oppression in the world."

Ed