What was bullying like when you were growing up?

I had a unique experience in that I was on both sides of the fence. When I was younger I was a shy, scared, abused, sad kid. To make matters worse, I skipped grade 4, so now I was also noticeably smaller than the other kids too. The bullying at school was there but because it was so much worse at home, it didn’t bother me nearly as much as it probably should have. I mean, how much could a 10 year old really hurt you by calling a nerd or fat or ugly when your mother reminds you that the only reason you were born is that abortion wasn’t legal yet? That said, things started to change around the time I was 11. Puberty was afoot and I shot up to 5’6. Though the poking at school didn’t bother me as much as it should have, that didn’t mean I didn’t keep receipts. When I knew I was changing schools in September by mid-May, I started using my new frame to absolutely terrorize the same kids who had fucked with me for years after spending most of the year silently growing. By the end of that year I’d pummelled no less than eight kids who had been especially shitty to me. On the second to last day of school my grade 7 teacher pulled me aside and asked me WTF was up with me lately? And I told her I was untouchable because I was going to a different school in the fall and that I had scores to settle. She got my principal involved. He’d seen me sitting on the bench in the office waiting for the nurse many times over the years. He just told me good luck on my last day and stressed that he’d have to get involved if I did anything again on school property. The message I heard was please beat up the last two kids on your list in the church parking lot next door. Done. That was easy. However, my new body yielded a new confidence, and that same summer, after my mother mule kicked me with stilettos (still have those marks) as yet another violent act towards her only child, I was reminded that I was 5’6, 160 and she only 5’1, 95. I remembered her yanking my hair out so hard a few times it drew blood and right in the moment, I grabbed her by the hair and threw her face into a door jamb. I’ve never struck a woman again, but my dad came home and came to kick the shit out of me in response. Not today, Frank. He got KTFO. That September, at my new school, I began my reign of terror. My parents were literal fascists. My dad used to get me to zieg heil as a little kid. When I was 8, one of their friends gave me The international Jew and Mein Kampf to read. I was successfully brought up to believe my skin (though I am part Samoan as well as Italian) rendered me superior. This is the attitude I sadly took with me into grade 8 and into high school, purposely targeting any remotely effeminate or emotionally weak young boy for absolutely horrific ridicule and public humiliation. I will never be able to apologize for the kid I was until I was 14 and my English teacher gave me Howl to read at a perfect time in my life when I was questioning everything I had been taught to believe. Though this was several years before American History X, that same teacher asked me, as Sweeney asked Derek “has anything you’ve done made your life any better?”. I, unlike Ed Norton, did not answer him, but I blubbered like a baby when I saw that scene years later. But anyway, it was around then that I just stopped being a piece of shit to kids who were unacceptably different to some bullshir standard I no longer believed in. After reading more Ginsberg, I found the Beats and then Lacan and Derrida which led me to Nietzsche, Marx and Lenin. Fortunately, or unfortunately, my terror wasn’t ended when I got my comeuppance. It ended when it was clear that I was wrong.