The Bullies I Outlived

Still not in therapy. Still flinching a little.

Another Thursday. Another market day in my hometown.

And here we are. Picking fruit and veggies like we’re choosing who gets to stay on our apocalypse team. We tap the tomatoes. Sniff the cantaloupe. Look judgmentally at the zucchinis. We act like we know what we’re doing.

But it hit me today – while I was pretending to assess a nectarine for firmness like a Top Chef judge about to ruin someone’s career – that this whole scene reminded me of P.E. class in middle school.

More precisely, that sacred ritual of choosing teams.

Two kids stand in front of the group. They take turns picking classmates for their team. One by one. Publicly. Mercilessly.

The sporty ones go first. Then the loud ones. Then the funny ones. Then the girls who can sort of run. Then the ones who are “okay, I guess.”

And then me.

I was never, ever picked first. Nor second.

Always almost last. Just close enough to invisibility to still feel the sting.

It never got easier.

I hated it. The choosing. The sorting. The public display of who matters and who doesn’t.

School was… complicated

I have to admit something:

I loved school.

I loved academics. I loved the smell of books and the thrill of underlining things with a color-coded system that probably hinted at undiagnosed OCD. I loved writing essays. Knowing things. Feeling safe in the structure of it all.

But I hated school.

And by that, I mean everything that wasn’t academic. The social jungle of lunch breaks. The awkwardness of sitting alone. The cliques, the giggles, the whispering you just knew was about you. The politics of teenage girlhood, which is basically Game of Thrones without the dragons (but with more eyeliner and backstabbing).

It was social Olympics – and I didn’t even qualify.

I hated being me at school.

And that’s a hell of a thing to say, but it’s true.

I was too sensitive, too observant, too serious for a world obsessed with popularity and glitter eyeshadow.

And when you’re different at that age, you don’t just feel left out. You feel like the problem.

Top 3 Bullies I Still Check Up On

You probably think it’s behind me. That it’s all processed and boxed up in the attic of my psyche with a neat little therapy-bow on top.

Hell no.

Sometimes – and I’m not proud of this – I check their Facebook profiles.

Not to reconnect. Not to “heal”.

To see if karma worked.

Not because I want revenge.

But because I want to know if life ever made them feel as small as they made me feel.

It’s petty, I know. But when you’ve been shoved, ignored, ridiculed, exiled – sometimes for existing in the wrong body with the wrong hair and the wrong clothes and the wrong energy – you want receipts. You want proof that life is fair.

So here they are – my all-time favorite emotional terrorists.

(Names changed. Obviously.)

1. David

David bullied me from 6th grade to 9th grade like it was a full-time job. Son of a firefighter. Popular. Good grades. Good at sports. Small-town royalty. He and his little crew ruled the school like a micro-mafia.

I don’t know what I did to piss him off. Maybe I wore the wrong t-shirt (he nicknamed me the Salmon girl because I once wore a salmon-colored t-shirt). Maybe I existed too loudly. Whatever it was, one day during P.E., he walked up to me and slapped me in the face.

No warning. No reason. Just a full-on, open-handed humiliation.

I still remember the hot sting, the sound, the silence that followed. Nobody moved. Nobody spoke. Nobody helped.

He would call me names, call me ugly, trip me (yes, actual tripping), mock me. I would try to avoid him, sometimes fall, hide, cry inside.

In 9th grade, something changed.

We went on a school trip abroad. One evening, while hanging out with my penpal’s group, I smoked a cigarette and drank cheap beer in a kids’ playground. And suddenly, David looked at me like I was cool.

He started to acknowledge me like I was a human. Even said hello. Like nothing had ever happened.

And I let him.

Because that’s what we do when we’re desperate to be picked.

David is now a nurse.

He helps people for a living.

Go figure.

Sometimes I wonder if he remembers the slap.

2. Georgia

Georgia and I were both part of the invisible crowd. The leftovers. The ones nobody picked – but at least we had each other.

Until we didn’t.

One day, she stopped talking to me. Rolled her eyes when I spoke. Whispered to others while I sat next to her, pretending not to notice. Made me feel really uneasy.

She turned the group – our little bubble of social survival – against me.

And I was alone again.

She kicked me out of the only group I belonged to – my last little island. The only place I could sit down without feeling like an intruder.

And she didn’t just stop talking to me.

She rewrote the script.

Suddenly, I wasn’t just excluded. I was talked about.

She would make up stories. Petty, cruel, stupid things.

None of it was true, obviously.

But truth doesn’t matter at school.

Only volume does.

She turned 7th and 8th grade into a two-year performance – where I played the villain in a play I didn’t audition for. And she made sure everyone got front-row seats.

It broke me.

She now works in teen mental health.

That’s not a joke. She literally helps teenagers not feel what she made me feel.

The irony is so sharp it could cut glass.

3. Nicole

2004. Senior year of high school.

Things were… calmer. I was almost 18. Less “problematic”. Less weird, maybe. People grow up.

I had a group of friends. A solid group. We went out, laughed a lot, shared inside jokes and burned CDs for each other. We talked about love like we knew anything about it. It felt good.

Nicole was part of that group.

We’d met in 11th grade. Got along fine at first – I even went over to her house once. We weren’t inseparable, but we were close enough I didn’t see the storm coming.

And then, just like that – she turned.

No fight. No betrayal. No warning.

She just decided I didn’t deserve to exist in her field of vision anymore.

I’ve thought about it a lot. Tried to figure out what went wrong.

Maybe it was jealousy? Maybe it was because my parents had just divorced, and for a while, I became the one people checked in on. The one you supported, included, maybe even centered a little.

Maybe she didn’t like that.

Or maybe it was just my face.

(That’s not even sarcasm. I’ve genuinely wondered.)

Whatever her reason, she started doing what middle-class teenage girls do best: a quiet campaign of social assassination.

She trashed who I was. Casually. A dig here, a smirk there. She worked hard to convince the other girls that I wasn’t worth the effort. That I didn’t belong. That I was too much, too dramatic, too broke, too… me.

The rest of the group didn’t pick a side.

They just floated – awkwardly, neutrally – between us.

Like my humiliation was a minor inconvenience to be managed.

Nicole made it clear: if I was coming, she wasn’t.

If I existed, she’d vanish.

The twist? I never had anything against her. I kept trying to talk, to understand, to fix it. But I’d been fully deleted. Not blocked – ghosted in real life.

Was she a bully? Not in the textbook sense. But she chipped away at my self-worth with surgical precision – and yeah, that counts.

That’s how my final year of high school played out.

Me, constantly second-guessing myself.

Her, constantly reminding me that I didn’t deserve the seat I was sitting in.

Today, she’s a holistic therapist and energy healer.

She realigns chakras. Lights sage. Talks about healing the inner child.

Do you think she’d give me a 10% off a chakra realignment?

Plot Twist: My Biggest Bully

And now we get to the one that still stings the most.

My biggest bully wasn’t a classmate.

It was my dad.

Yes, my own father.

From early on, he made comments. About my clothes. My voice. My body. My personality. Nothing was ever right. I was too shy, too emotional, too weird, too me.

He’d look at me and say I looked like “a fat truck driver”.

Only because I would wear oversized zip-up rollneck sweaters. To hide myself.

I was 13.

I remember once, I was eating a bowl of cereal – just after school. Not even a binge, just a snack.

He lost it.

Yelled at me. Called me fat cow. Made a whole scene.

He’d randomly sing the Laurel & Hardy theme song at me.

I was Hardy, obviously. The fat one.

It was humiliating. Constant. Casual.

Poison served with a smirk.

And here’s the worst part:

I believed him.

I thought I was fat. I thought I was disgusting. I thought I was too much. Or not enough to please him.

But when I look at pictures now? I wasn’t even fat. Not even close.

That’s what bullies do.

They change your mirror.

They make you question what you see, who you are, what you’re allowed to be.

And when the bully is your own parent?

It rewires you.

What Do You Do With All That?

I’m 38 now.

A mom. A partner. A grown woman who pays taxes and remembers to charge her phone.

But still – deep down – I feel like I’m waiting to be picked.

Still scanning faces for signs of approval. Still performing. Still flinching when someone raises their voice. Still checking Facebook to see if David got ugly or if Georgia divorced.

I’m still carrying the ghosts of people who wouldn’t even recognize me in a crowd.

So what do you do with that?

You name it.

You drag it out. Write it down. Laugh at it a little, maybe. Cry if you need to.

But you stop pretending it didn’t happen.

Because healing doesn’t come from pretending you’re over it.

It comes from saying:

Yes, it hurt.

Yes, it shaped me.

Yes, it still lingers.

And then – slowly, quietly – you pick yourself.

Not perfectly. Not every time. But enough.

And when you do, you stop waiting – for apologies, for karma, for closure.

You give yourself what they never gave you.

Peace.

Kindness.

And the right to eat cereal without shame.

Final Thought: Karma & Nectarines

Do I still wish karma would do its job?

Sometimes. Of course I do.

But more than that, I wish I could go back in time, find little me sitting alone at lunch, and whisper:

“You’re not weird. You’re just early.”

Early to feelings. Early to reflection. Early to pain and poetry and people-pleasing and people-reading.

And one day – maybe now – you’ll be early to something else.

A Thursday morning where you buy your nectarines, smile at the fish guy, and think:

“This version of me? She’s not waiting anymore.”

And here’s the kicker:

Bullies grow up too.

Some become kind. Some become therapists. Some become amazing grandfathers. Some never change.

But that’s not our job to manage.

Our job is to choose ourselves.

To heal loudly.

To eat the f*cking cereal.

To laugh at markets and pick nectarines like queens.

To write things down.

To remember our stories.

And to stop flinching when no one’s even looking.

Next time you’re buying nectarines, take a moment.

Breathe.

Choose them like you’re choosing yourself.

Firm but sweet.

A little bruised maybe.

But still whole.

See you in the next overshare

♡