thoughts-of-an-x-factor:

candidlyautistic:

autasticanna:

Facts that adults don’t tell you about bullying

– Communication doesn’t work on bullies. Telling a bully they’re making you feel bad is the wrong way to go. They want to make you feel bad. That’s the point.

– being kind to a bully doesn’t always mean they’ll stop. Sometimes it means they’ll just use your kindness to manipulate you while still continuing to bully you.

– not every bully has a sympathetically tragic home life. Sometimes people are just mean. Sometimes people just get off on hurting others.

– on that note, a tough home life is a reason, not an excuse. You don’t have to put up with bullying because somebody’s life sucks, just like you don’t have to let someone mug you because they’re broke.

– in order to forgive someone, they have to apologize first. If your bully has not apologized to you, you do not owe them anything.

– getting bullied as a kid can still mess you up in adult life. Maybe kids grow out of being bullies, but the marks they left often don’t go away.

– there are ways to get people to stop bullying you, but they almost all involve being mean back.

– as long as parents keep raising shitty bullying kids, there will be bullies. No amount of assemblies and hand-drawn posters will fix the problem. It’s the parents’ fault.

– It’s not your responsibility to fix your bully or to stop the abuse they send your way, but some adults sure will act like it is.

I just want to reiterate one of these points in particular:

“a tough home life is a reason, not an excuse

“

Everyone deals with shit differently, but if your way of dealing with shit is by  going out of your way to make other people feel terrible, you’re a bad person.

If I could go through my childhood, essentially stuck between an abusive piece of shit, and a drug addict who clearly wasn’t ready for kids, and manage to be a semi-decent human being, even in spite of the fact that I was bullied at school -and- at home, then you really should be able to as well.