Normally it's the latest insidious stuff from our Government or some insanity from Trump or Putin. For me though it was randomly following a link that one of my followers posted that brought my past crashing back to me in a pretty horrible way. (Virtual) face to (virtual) face with one of the worst school bullies I ever had to suffer at the hands of.
The person (who will remain nameless) became famous as part of an indie band and it still seems that in their 50s they're still rattling around playing gigs and recording songs. That's not really important though. What was important was the feeling of seeing someone again whose face was irreparably tied in to feelings of anxiety or even terror. Though my school days were donkeys years ago, it brought it all back in such harrowing detail.
What was worse was the fact that I instantly, as a fully grown up adult, wanted to exact some form of revenge. Shitposting or trolling the person to point out what a vicious psychopathic homophobic bastard he was at school and how many folk (myself included) actually left school to get away from him and his cronies (because as we all know, bullies are too gutless to operate alone in the schoolyard, they've always got plenty of muscle to back them up and this nasty little sod always did).
For a couple of hours I went through the whole spectrum of emotions about this and my mind raced with what I was going to do about it. It's difficult to explain how a normally mild mannered bloke can turn into such a ball of viciousness. I was, at the very least, determined to kick up a stink online in some way. How pathetic!
It took the wisdom of my wife (as usual) and an example we'd tried to set my daughter to bring me back down to earth with a (sensible) thump.
The thing is, after 35 years, this person might well still exist but their memory of you almost certainly won't. You may have harboured hatred for this person for all that time, perhaps not remembering their reign of terror every day but recalling it - in my case - usually whenever the name of his band comes up, though thankfully they were never successful enough to hit any of the playlists of radio stations I listen to).
Learning to adapt to that knowledge can be tough if you've held on to your hatred for that long. When my daughter talked about it, she quite rightly pointed out that my life has not been horribly scarred by what happened at school (thankfully I left and went straight to college where I began what would eventually be the course that would lead to my current career). I married, had a wonderful daughter and have a pretty comfortable and nice life despite all that - and so many others cannot make that claim which really hit this home for me.
I've read stories, heard anecdotes of what happens when bullying victims meet their aggressors some years on and I can honestly say that it would not go well if I did that. Though my wife defused my anger, I still have no confidence that I would be anything other than a ball of fury in the unlikely event that our paths ever crossed again. But seeing that face. still with the narrow eyes, the slight sociopathic look of nastiness about it, brought feelings back that I wasn't even sure I was capable of any more.
To be fair though my main anger has also always been channeled at the school and the ineffective way they dealt with all this, in fact enabling this bully and his cronies to a huge extent. There wasn't the help, the counsel nor even a way to get through to the teachers or head that this was causing so much distress. "Man up and deal with it" was always the doctrine at school and I'm so thankful for the high profile that bullying now has, and the amount of help that kids can get in order to help deal with it.
But you will always still read about the ones that don't get that help, that slip the net, and could end up in the same stupid mindset as me, fixated on someone who, in the grand scheme of things, would register a tiny few seconds in the rich and glorious technicolour movie that will play out at the end of our lives. For the time being though I'll continue trying to follow my wife's advice and my daughter's sage wisdom too.
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