The persistent and pervasive impact of bullying in childhood and adolescence

Essentially I was trying to find out why I procrastinate, beyond "it's just the ADHD lol"

Boiled it down and down and down until we hit the core of the issue and realised I don't want to poke my head up and ship code/sites/ideas/etc because I believe I'll be bullied for it. In school doing anything that lifted you up (e.g. good grades) made you a target.

The realisation was that that will probably not to happen now. If I do something exceptional at 34 I probably wont be bullied by my peers (or heck, even if I actually was bullied for it.. who cares lol, my peers don't understand the market I work in)

I'd never reevaluated the internalised rule "If I excel, I will be bullied" until the other day.

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On a slightly more positive spin the whole thing made me quite sensitive to deception. If someone is trying to deceive or manipulate me my subconscious might as well be flashing up a Metal Gear Solid exclaim noise for how obvious it seems.

MGS Exclaim for reference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qbeEO58Hlfo

This is endemic in modern culture. The need to treat two opposing opinions as equally valid and balance them against each other as if there's some sane middle-ground to be found. There's no middle-ground between slavery and non-slavery. Or between the earth is flat and science.

I was picked on a fair bit in school. The nature of "zero-tolerance" meant that fights were quick. I recall one day just being shoved into a a door threshold unexpectedly. I had had it at that point from this person, so I took my heaviest book out of my bag and slammed him in the head with it as he was already walking away triumphantly. Looking back, he could have been seriously injured. Many people witnesses and laughed at him.

He never bothered me again.

But how can you know someone will leave you alone or just escalate things?

Exactly my experience as well. Fighting back is the only thing that ever made the bullying stop. I fought back once in the locker room against a boy two years and two feet older and taller than me, basically lost the fight immediately, but because I fought and wouldn't submit, everybody else stopped the fight and after that day I was never bullied in school again.

The reason I never fought back sooner is because I was scared of the rules even more than the bullies. The "Zero tolerance" rules made clear that if I fought back I would be just as bad as the bullies, and in just as much trouble (except I'd actually be in more trouble, because my parents would be livid at me for getting suspended while the bullies' parents wouldn't give a shit.) "Zero tolerance" means zero due process. It's the school administrators essentially siding with bullies by default because it makes the paperwork easier. Absolutely immoral. It should be their responsibility to figure out who actually started the fight and punish the perpetrator but not the victim.

In the end I didn't get in trouble after all, because locker room fights were beyond the eyes of adults and nobody ratted anybody out. I resent the teachers and the administration the most, for making me afraid to stick up for myself. The kids who bullied me were psychos or broken people, and I find it easy to forgive them. But the administration did harm to me by being lazy bureaucrats.