@MentORPHEUS

relentlessly bullied me

Did they most filthily and uglily insult you such as with "you don't go well" or smth?

Kidding around aside, I got bullied a lot too. Partly by smaller kids who thought they could prove their worth by starting shit with one of the larger kids (me), preferably one with bad social skills and few friends (also me). Partly by older kids who somehow got their jollies by making younger kids' lives suck a bit more. Partly by just shitheads being shitheads.

Some of the platitudes you were complaining about turned out to be true in many cases. Many of them had shitty home lives and didn't know how to deal with it, and so took their anger and frustration out on other kids. Some just needed a good punch in the nose.

Funny thing: by 9th grade, most of the bullying directed at me had stopped, and by 10th grade it just didn't happen at all anymore. Some of my previous bullies even apologized to me, and we ended up being on fairly friendly terms. I think the cessation of the bullying is partly due to everyone being somewhat more mature in high school than in middle school, and partly due to my hitting the weights and getting scary-looking along with a reputation for being one of the better wrestlers.

Heh. I hadn't thought about some of this shit in years. Some of it was my own stupid fault for failing to avoid the places the bullies were. I stubbornly kept trying to make friends in the neighborhood area instead of just sticking to other areas that were bully-free.

@Typo-MAGAshiv

Too many schools expect little boys to behave like little girls, and try to force it, instead of giving healthy outlets for aggression, etc.

VERY MUCH this. I sensed, without yet being able to understand much less adapt to in a healthy way, that school was largely about warehousing kids out of "the way" and rewarded compliance and conformity toward mundane mediocrity over all else.

One of my favorite recess toys was the hand size red rubber ball, and I remember signing up for it almost 2 weeks in advance for one recess period. The day finally came, and quickly some bully kid took it from me and punted it across the playground. I ran after it, and the kids who had caught it and were looking around with Whose ball? expressions, saw it was "Mentie's" and kicked it as hard as they could away from me. I ended up running back and forth across the playground literally driven to tears, which only reinforced the asshole kids, while the teachers tasked with monitoring the playground watched and did ABSOLUTE FUCK ALL about it, giving off a vibe it was my problem and even somehow my fault. The correct thing to have done in retrospect, was to PUNCH the second kid who thought it was funny and OK to kick it away from me deliberately, but no, that would make ME the sole bad guy in the school's eyes.

My Dad tried to take me to Aikido classes, but not only was I more interested in spazzily running around the padded gym they were held in, I angered the teacher with a disrespectful remark so they just stopped taking me. (I later took up Aikido in my late 40s and got very adept at it. The Sensei KNEW that instructor I angered all those decades before, too.) So, I never learned any fighting skills, nor got "permission" to use such if I did. On top of this, my metabolism made me tall but stick-thin. My arms and legs were unthreateningly bony, and well into my 40s I could eat limitless calories and not gain an ounce.

The bullies who were allowed to flourish without school intervention; some went on to die in motorcycle crashes while high school age, one notoriously got a life sentence after murdering his GF around age 22. Lots of the rest, made their way into the business world where their aggression and lack of ethics and empathy got rewarded by better pay and faster promotions, because that's what our Capitalist system tends to incentivize.

I ended up going into the trades despite my "intellectual prowess." Took decades before TRP to slowly grasp and fumble my way out of Blue Pill programming. I eventually started my own business and was able to live and work my principles, finding success if not ruthlessly gained FU money. Most of my peers in the industry seem cut from the same cloth as the school bullies of my youth, and they almost all jumped right on board the Bush 1, Bush 2, and now Trump trains, and like the bullies of my youth, single me out as an "other" to ruthlessly attack and bully as an avatar of their imagined "Liberal enemies." Someone brought up during a recent convo (I'm still involved in the community despite Covid lockdowns bankrupting my business) "How many other businesses do you see the customers writing glowing reviews and missing them years after they shut down?"