Why did they hurt me? Childhood pain still haunts me

Post Reply New Topic

I was bullied as a child for being different in the Bible Belt but there are two incidents that still stand out to me even to this day.

My mother used to take me for swimming lessons at a public pool. I remember the place being dark and green as well as smelling of chlorine. I was getting out of the pool by climbing up one of the ladders and one of the instructors was standing next to it. She said my name in a harsh tone and hit me on my forehead with a plastic ring. Not surprisingly, it hurt me but for some reason I didn't tell my mother or anyone else what she did.

I was at a water park and in one of the children's pools, I started talking to another boy about my age. I remember talking about the Godzilla movies with him and trying to describe how the kaiju (Didn't know the term back then) looked like. I got stumped on describing one and he suddenly punched me in the eyes. My eyes swelled up with pain and I cried. No one had ever done that to me before and I still wonder what drove him to do that.

I suppose this doesn't fit your expectation,
i found as child that being smart and being from a family that employed people was very not done,
(everything's coming back with the turning of times' wheels)
and got physically attacked for that, and first day of attending school there was a row, i was just standing, and all the 'bigger' girls pointed at me as the culprit, from hindsight, that's logic, long story short, fear of groups, whispering, laughing, always getting insulted, worse was PE, it was pure bullying, but mom thought i needed more of that what i hated so much, all girls and PE, great mix, i was slightly more at ease in boy- or alltogether-games
- to this day other people presence make me shutdown, or they (re-)shut me down
(a crazy analogy that can't be mentioned, but once maybe you must, the dumber will always shut up the less dumb, rule of numbers too, and i suppose the less dumb have a lower drive to shut up or break down the dumber // and that's like the spinning of the earth itself, not very likely to change any time soon)

We're getting back there again, back when you had segregated shopping, oh the dictatorship of small shop-owners, specially as a child you would be verbally bullied and left waiting on purpose a lot,
i now always object when a salesperson skips a child in order to serve some mean old b****, (seems the ghost of that just hang around, now im over fifty you still see that same type behaving the same way)
But all that is on the rise again in these times, the retail not wanting to retail if you're not of their 'church', but giving you the 'judgemental looks'
that was a reason for the rise of supermarkets imo, the ingroup mentality and intolerance of small retail being a big one, the endless waiting and the display of abusiveness another

The truth of course is that their action say more about them than it does about you.