Toughen Up

[Nathanial Essex]

Hi all, a bit of a personal one. When I was younger, I was a bully and overall dick head. This was largely before I was 10, I was super-aggressive and used to fight people all the time for no reason. I remember waiting for a girl to come back to her desk and started hitting her in the head because of something she said to me earlier (which was in response to something I did, in other words there was zero excuse for it). My parents used to care for other children and I used to ban them from using my room (with the TV) or force them to sit outside. Again, a dick head of a child on a power trip. I can pretty much write pages and pages of all the bad stuff I done.

Long story short, karma rightfully came in and for the next few years, I ended up the one being bullied. Bullied to a put I was borderline suicidal and it affected me radically during my early adult years. In college and university I would intentionally avoid people out of fear I would be bullied again. This led to me having pretty much having no friends. My phone would last a week without charging because it only rang if my mum was too lazy to call me from downstairs.

Anyway, part of being bullied is that I became ultra-passive. If anyone was rude to me, I would hardly challenge back. The sad things about this though is that I have no problem pushing back and being somewhat mean to people that I am close with. This has led to situations where at work, there have been situation where people have been rude to me and I have no fought back in the same way I would do with someone who was close to me.

My question is, do people need to toughen up or should I just accept who I am? Someone at work sends a rude email to me. My instinct and what I want to do is simply ignore it. However, my wife would say I need to toughen up and put x person in his place. Especially as if she is rude to my, I would quickly put her in her place. I agreed with that to an extent but then realised some people are just worth arguing with and others are not. The grumpy guy at work is not my boss so I just simply let his angry responses slide and got on with my day. It doesn't actually bother me. What bothers me is people being bothered that I am not responding in such a way.

I have to admit I am just typing now. Had an idea of what this topic would be about but I don't think the above is too clear and I am just writing nonsense now to let loose. Anyway, feel free to respond!

 

[Mittens2317]

Some people should toughen up (to an extent), yeah. It builds confidence and can defo help avoid confrontations.

A lad at my uni got mugged last year, he's tall as fuck, but is constantly slouched n huddled into himself. I keep telling him to just stand up straight and have more "outward" body language. That alone would help to reduce the apparently numerous times he faces that kinda situation.

There's a lotta negative connotations surrounding phrases like "toughen up" or "man up", so I'd say just brush up on your street smarts. Be less afraid of consequences (besides all the obvious exceptions), because at the end of the day it's your damn life, and you should live it the way you want without worrying about what people may say or think about you. And at the end of the day, you probably don't matter enough to them for it to be a massive deal anyway.

 

[DigitalDuck]

I was bullied for most of my childhood, to the point of being suicidal. I'm not going to go into much detail, but what would often happen is I would be beaten up, and then the bullies would go and tell the teacher that I started attacking them for no reason (I never made friends at school, so there was nobody to tell my side). It got to the point where I was temporarily expelled for "beating up another student" (that expulsion was eventually revoked when it was discovered the student in question wasn't on the same continent at the time...) Worse stuff happened too, but this was the bulk of it.

Anyway, one thing I've learned from that (and from subsequent attempts at bullying since) is that whatever you do, you do not let the bully win. That doesn't necessarily mean you need to attack back; I'm talking about fighting the reason behind the bullying. If someone is rude to you, but simply as a matter of it being their character, attacking them back probably isn't going to help - don't mistake simple rudeness for bullying. However, if they're doing it because they want to shut you up, or they want you to go away, the worst thing you can do is shut up or go away - it won't stop the bullying, it'll increase it. They'll learn that they can get you to do what they want, so they'll keep doing it.

If people attack and bully you over the things you say and do, keep saying and doing them. In fact, say them louder and do them more. If you show that what they're doing doesn't work, they'll stop doing it.