Did anyone else LIKE being bullied?
26 May 2015, 9:56 am
I was literally exploring this idea a few days ago, myself. Digging in my past and asking myself WHY I liked it at some point too....at some point I actually asked the popular girl in school to bully me just like she did her other popular friends, b/c I just wanted to be part of their crowd.....but of course, it didn't go the way I had thought. I got bullied alright, but I did NOT become a part of their group.....ugh.
I guess I was excited by the fact that she was paying attention to me, and the possibility of being part of the popular group.
14 Jun 2015, 8:09 am
mcg wrote:
So someone recently pointed out to me that I was weird in this respect, so I was wondering if any other aspies enjoyed being bullied? I'm not sure if I just liked the attention, if having a me vs. them mentality gave some meaning to my life, or what, but I definitely preferred it to just being left alone.
In elementary school there were a few kids who would pick on me and it was honestly a welcome break from my usual solitary activities. At the time I was so much smarter than my peers (a gap that would narrow over time) that it was usually easy to avoid any physical abuse by having a quick means of escape or strategically positioning myself near an adult (though there were definitely a few miscalculations on my part, one of which resulted in a large permanent bump on my forehead) and I would often pretend to be falling for their schemes just so the situation would develop further. Like one time, a group of kids told me they were going to give me a cupcake after school and that I should meet them behind the bleachers in the gym. They were actually planning on pulling down my pants, information that somehow got back to one of my friends who alerted me to their plans beforehand. When one of them came to lead me to the spot where this was supposed to go down, I pretended to be excited to get the cupcake and went along with him. At one point I mentioned how I forgot to wear a belt that day thinking it would make it seem like everything was going according to his plan. Well he actually ended up telling me confessing and then skulked off looking guilty. I wasn't going to let this ruin my fun, though, and I proceeded to the gym where the rest of the group was waiting. One of them threw a jump-rope at me, presumably in an attempt to bind me so that my pants could be pulled down more easily. I grabbed the end of the jump-rope, ran around one of the other kids then pulled hard, knocking his feet out from under him. Then I escaped running under the bleachers which I was extremely good at navigating, since I played under there nearly every day. The whole experience was extremely fun and exhilarating.
In high school, most of the "popular" kids just pretended like I was invisible, and most of the bullies had few friends and were generally disliked. Messing with these bullies seemed to improve my social standing almost ten-fold. If someone started trying to pick on me, I would usually threaten to harm them in some outlandish and extremely brutal fashion. A couple of times I was challenged to fights which I gleefully accepted, only to have an excuse to delay the fight when I went to wherever the fight was supposed to go down. For example, one time I went to the spot where I was supposed to fight some kid, then said "Ok, I gotta stretch first, it's important to always do stretches before a fight." Then I sat on the ground doing stretches for ten minutes, and the bully eventually said "f**k this" and started walking away, at which point I called him a coward for walking away. Other times I just insulted the bullies and when they got ready to try and hurt me, I would just rely on my ability to outrun or out-climb them (always easy given my extremely light weight). Once I failed to accurately assess the rate at which a situation was progressing to violence and wound up getting punched in the face, but I ended up just telling the kid that I liked it and usually had to pay people to do that to me. After that people were coming up to me for a couple weeks telling me how much cooler I was than that other kid, a nice little ego boost.
There were a couple times I got the snot beat out of me, but you have to take the good with the bad.
So was anybody else like this as a child? Any interesting stories?
In elementary school there were a few kids who would pick on me and it was honestly a welcome break from my usual solitary activities. At the time I was so much smarter than my peers (a gap that would narrow over time) that it was usually easy to avoid any physical abuse by having a quick means of escape or strategically positioning myself near an adult (though there were definitely a few miscalculations on my part, one of which resulted in a large permanent bump on my forehead) and I would often pretend to be falling for their schemes just so the situation would develop further. Like one time, a group of kids told me they were going to give me a cupcake after school and that I should meet them behind the bleachers in the gym. They were actually planning on pulling down my pants, information that somehow got back to one of my friends who alerted me to their plans beforehand. When one of them came to lead me to the spot where this was supposed to go down, I pretended to be excited to get the cupcake and went along with him. At one point I mentioned how I forgot to wear a belt that day thinking it would make it seem like everything was going according to his plan. Well he actually ended up telling me confessing and then skulked off looking guilty. I wasn't going to let this ruin my fun, though, and I proceeded to the gym where the rest of the group was waiting. One of them threw a jump-rope at me, presumably in an attempt to bind me so that my pants could be pulled down more easily. I grabbed the end of the jump-rope, ran around one of the other kids then pulled hard, knocking his feet out from under him. Then I escaped running under the bleachers which I was extremely good at navigating, since I played under there nearly every day. The whole experience was extremely fun and exhilarating.
In high school, most of the "popular" kids just pretended like I was invisible, and most of the bullies had few friends and were generally disliked. Messing with these bullies seemed to improve my social standing almost ten-fold. If someone started trying to pick on me, I would usually threaten to harm them in some outlandish and extremely brutal fashion. A couple of times I was challenged to fights which I gleefully accepted, only to have an excuse to delay the fight when I went to wherever the fight was supposed to go down. For example, one time I went to the spot where I was supposed to fight some kid, then said "Ok, I gotta stretch first, it's important to always do stretches before a fight." Then I sat on the ground doing stretches for ten minutes, and the bully eventually said "f**k this" and started walking away, at which point I called him a coward for walking away. Other times I just insulted the bullies and when they got ready to try and hurt me, I would just rely on my ability to outrun or out-climb them (always easy given my extremely light weight). Once I failed to accurately assess the rate at which a situation was progressing to violence and wound up getting punched in the face, but I ended up just telling the kid that I liked it and usually had to pay people to do that to me. After that people were coming up to me for a couple weeks telling me how much cooler I was than that other kid, a nice little ego boost.
There were a couple times I got the snot beat out of me, but you have to take the good with the bad.
So was anybody else like this as a child? Any interesting stories?
Yes, and I do know why. In my mind, it would have been a great way to learn social skills. The popular girls who had the nerve to make fun of me must have had all of the answers, and I would have loved it if one of them took me under wing and trained me in the way of charismatic killer. I knew I could do a few weird things, though, and make friends, so I guess I should not have wanted to be like them. That didn't stop me from admiring them, though, and becoming a little excited every time they did something mean that made me blush. I didn't have enough nerve to admit that I liked it, though. I was quite naive, and it probably would have led to more bullying, the kind I didn't like, had I explained that I liked it. They already had a rumor that I was a lesbian. (Apparently that's a popular rumor to start about the odd girl out.) I feel, now, that it probably would have been twisted in that direction had I admitted that I enjoyed it. In reality, though, I was looking for a big sister figure and did like the way the others in her clique had a sense of belonging. I got a chance to get sort of close to one of the popular girls, later, though. The gym teacher put us together to work on a project. (That was her solution to me telling her I was being teased and bullied by these girls; she made me work with them!) It wasn't bad, though. My main bully wasn't there, and I got along okay with the others. We even had fun, oddly enough. I was worried about pursuing friendship, and I ended up, true to form, embarrassing myself somehow later and never got enough nerve to talk to anyone from that group again.
