As a kid and teen I got bullied a lot. I suppose I acted strange or something, but I was also top of the class most of the time, so kids disliked me. It was both physical and verbal, and they always did it after school time because that was when the teachers just went "well, it's not happening during school hours so it's not our responsibility".
In grade school the worst thing that happened to me was that when a kid decided to get into a physical fight with me, he kicked me square on the thumb and I couldn't move it for about 4 months. No lasting damages, so ultimately it wasn't that bad.
Once I got to high school, the bullying got much worse. I didn't know any of the kids there, so there was no history with them, but that didn't seem to matter anyway. I was beaten up almost daily, and as the first year progressed they started shoving me into traffic, in front of trams, cars, buses, and once even pushing me in front of a subway train. Throughout the next two years I had many days where I got beaten to a bloody mess, I had knives pulled on me, was thrown in traffic some more, and during days where teachers would cite their anti-bullying bull****, I would have bullies literally turn to me and say "don't think this makes any sort of difference".
Also I call the teachers' words bull****, because no matter how many times I went to them for help they never did anything. Two of the class mentors I had in those years even straight up told me that it was my own fault and they couldn't help me. In the third year I finally hit back and nearly choked out one of my bullies, and I was immediately called into a meeting with the mentor where he said that such behavior from students is unacceptable.
The year after that was when the bullying started affecting me greatly and my grades started failing because I couldn't concentrate anymore. Eventually I dropped out because just getting dressed to go to school in the morning stressed me the **** out. I didn't hear anything from the school anymore at that point, apart from a phone call at the end of the year where my mentor sarcastically asked me if I wanted to know whether or not I passed that year. I just hung up.
I thought I'd gotten over it, but when I was learning how to become a teacher for English, I ran into one of my old mentors at one of the schools I had to practice teaching. She was the first to say that the bullying was my own fault. Meeting her again didn't do much to me, I'd always expected that I could run into one of my old teachers. But she didn't even recognize me. She's one of the people carrying most of the responsibility for what I went through and I felt like she never even cared. That screwed me up more and I had to drop out of that course as well and seek psychological help. Now it's two and a half years later and I'm still just sitting home, trying to work on myself with my therapists.
