If you’re a kid, I want you to pay very close attention to what I’m about to say…

DON’T BE A BULLY!

It won’t end well for you…trust me on this one.

And this story is a perfect example of what I’m talking about!

Take a look and see what happened.

Middle school bully destroyed my self-confidence so I turned the whole school against her.

“My family moved to a new state when I was about to start middle school. It wasn’t the first time I had to start off a new year in a new school with none of my childhood friends, and it’s never a fun experience, but this time was different.

This new school was a private school and it was SMALL. Like, there were three kids in my entire grade small.

I went to a public elementary school before this, and I was very much the tomboy in the all boys friend group, with a couple of less girly girl friends who also preferred things like video games and cool bugs.

I’d always been pretty selective about who I made friends with, and before, I had plenty of other kids in my grade to choose from, but not here.

Here, it was just two other girls, Hannah and Jessica.

They were girly girls.

Hannah and Jessica seemed like pretty typical girls to me and I’d seen their type before in elementary school.

Hannah came off as a standard “popular girl”, though without the clique due to the population shortage, and Jessica sort of served as her one person clique/henchgirl.

Mostly Jessica was just quiet and went along with whatever Hannah did.

Given a choice, I definitely wouldn’t have been friends with either of them- not because I had anything against them, but I just prefer to hang out with other kids who share my interests.

She was in a tough spot at the new school.

But I didn’t really have a choice here.

We were stuck together all day, five days a week, and I had no extracurriculars or young neighbors to befriend, so I just tried to make the best of it.

When birthdays or sleepovers happened, it would be me, Hannah , and Jessica- and it wasn’t awful or anything. I had fun doing the stuff they liked, and I did my best to engage them with my more universal interests, like drawing or info-dumping about fairies or mythology.

I basically became the slightly awkward second member of Hannah’s posse.

There was a new girl at school.

Things were okay for the first year and a half/2 years.

The second year another girl even joined our grade (we had the same first name, so for a year I could say that half of our grade had the same name, which I thought was hilarious).

It did feel like Hannah and Jessica preferred the new girl to me, but I didn’t mind as much since I’d started making friends with a couple of the boys in the grade above ours and some of the girls in the grade below.

She ended up only staying for one year though, and the year she left is when things suddenly changed.

She thought 8th grade would be a lot like 7th grade.

I came back from summer break for that last year of middle school expecting things to be par for the course.

The private school only taught up to 8th grade, so my friends in the grade above were gone, but we still hung out outside of school and I even started “dating” one of them (as much as 13 year olds can date (I was held back in 2nd grade after the first time my family moved so we were the same age at least)), and I still had friends in the grade below.

Things were about to change…

I assumed Hannah, Jessica and I would all still be on friendly terms, but this was not the case.

Suddenly Hannah was treating me like her mortal enemy.

She only talked to me to make snide or belittling comments, and every time I raised my hand in class to voice a thought or ask a question, she would scoff and roll her eyes, acting like whatever I said was the stupidest thing she’d ever heard and disagreeing with or arguing against me on everything.

At one point she even started acting like I was diseased or something, going to ridiculous lengths to avoid getting close to or touching me.

She had been bullied before.

I was a very outspoken and engaged student, and I loved to ask questions and talk to my teachers to learn more and discuss my thoughts, but the way Hannah was treating me was just so… demoralizing.

I’d had boy bullies in elementary school who’d teased me for things like my speech impediment and hanging out with other boys and including the special education kids at lunch and recess.

I have ADHD and I had really strong RSD that meant I usually responded to that kind of bullying with aggression, and I got in a lot of trouble for beating up any kid who tried to bully me or my friends.

How sad!

This was different though.

All the things that Hannah did were these small, subtle things that I just didn’t know how to react to, but they chipped away at my self-confidence until I just… stopped raising my hand in class. I stopped speaking up and voicing my thoughts and opinions.

I completely clammed up and went from a bright and confident extrovert to an uncertain and reserved introvert. It’s a shift that honestly to this day I have not recovered from.

Girl bullying is something else man.

The story doesn’t end there!

At least I have the solace of knowing I got her back pretty good.

As this was going on for the first half of the year, I was getting closer with my friends in the grades below.

The school was still small, but expanding, so the two grades below ours had maybe a couple dozen kids all together, and they were all pretty intermingled with friendships because everyone just kind of had to hang out together regardless of age difference due to the size of the school.

Everyone sat together at lunch and hung out during recess, though the 8th graders had always gotten the first pick of the outdoor picnic tables when the weather was nice.

That’s where Hannah and Jessica always sat, and whatever other kids felt like sitting outside that day would hang out with them.

She wasn’t the only student who disliked Hannah.

As time went on though, the other kids started noticing the way that Hannah was treating me. It was pretty blatant- at least after she started acting like I was some kind of leper.

Hannah had never made much of an effort to really engage with the kids in the lower grades, usually treating them more like an audience to her stunted popular girl aspirations, and more and more, the other kids in school started being turned off by her.

I was so demoralized and silenced by Hannah that it took me a while to even realize that the other kids disliked her and were rallying around me.

By that time, we were in the last quarter of school, and being surrounded by friends and people who agreed that Hannah was being horrible to me started to restore a little bit of my confidence…

She was gonna turn things around.

For the rest of the year, I started to be more vocal about all the things Hannah had said and done to me.

I’d tell my friends while they were hanging out with their friends until the whole school wasn’t just a bit put off by her- they knew just how much of an awful, pointless mean girl she was being, and they were all fully against her.

No one in the lower grades would talk to Hannah or Jessica anymore, and no one would hang out with them or sit with them at lunch, while I was always welcomed and surrounded by friends.

One last detail about this school.

Graduating from middle school was a very big deal.

Since it only went up to 8th grade, it made middle school graduation a much bigger deal than most other schools seem to.

There were plans to rent out a small venue with flowers and snacks and have a little party afterwards, and since it was just the 3 of us graduating that year, it was going to be pretty intimate and personalized to us three.

Our families were all very involved in the planning and we got dresses to wear under our little robes and fancy graduation pictures taken beforehand and everything.

She decided to talk to Jessica when Hannah wasn’t around.

Maybe 2 or 3 weeks before the end of the year, basically the entire school had fully turned against Hannah, and Hannah and Jessica sat alone together during lunch and recess at the picnic tables because everyone refused to hang out with them.

Now, Jessica had always gone along with Hannah with everything from day one, and even when we were friendly for the first couple years, we’d never talked a ton because she was mostly just very quiet, but that day I came out of the lunchroom while Hannah was getting her food and I sat down with Jessica.

I said hi and asked how she was, and she was maybe a little weirded out and standoffish but she shrugged and said fine.

I told her how I know her and Hannah had been sitting alone, and I mentioned to her how mean Hannah had been to me… and how she wasn’t really very nice to Jessica either. How Hannah always got things her way, and how she spoke for and over Jessica a lot of the time.

Join us!

Finally, I offered that if she wanted to, Jessica could come and sit with me and my friends. That she deserved better friends, and that we would all be happy to have her.

By the time Hannah got outside to the picnic tables, Jessica was gone, sitting inside with a table full of kids ready to welcome her and treat her like a friend and not like a henchgirl.

I heard it secondhand from some other kids that Hannah called her mother in tears to come and pick her up from school.

She wasn’t in class that afternoon, and I literally never saw her again.

She didn’t even go to graduation.

She never came back to school, and she didn’t show up at graduation, so it was just me and Jessica and our families there, with 1/3rd too many seats and snacks.

I ended up going to boarding school for my first year of high school so I lost touch with Jessica, but I made some incredible lifelong friends there who helped me to open back up and re-realize a lot of my passions.

I still second guess myself a lot about speaking up and I still have worries about coming off as stupid whenever I open my mouth, or people not caring about what I say, but knowing I ruined Hannah’s graduation and traumatized her back for what she did to me at least gives me a little bit of sweet satisfaction…”

Hannah deserved it, but I wonder what she told her mom to convince her not to make her go to graduation.

Check out what folks had to say on Reddit.

This person nailed it.

Another individual shared their thoughts.

This Reddit user was impressed.

Another reader chimed in.

And this person has been there…

Bullies never win…

If you liked that story, check out this post about a group of employees who got together and why working from home was a good financial decision.