Ask Lemmy

Why would I spend any effort on keeping tabs on people who made my life miserable?

I've no idea, I haven't thought about them since I left school and now I can barely remember their names.

I haven't met a single person I went to school with, since I left my home town to go to university. So, no idea.

The serious psychos are in and out of jail. The ones who were just kinda dicks sometimes (which to be honest probably includes me) are basically okay. And why shouldn't we be? Being a dick when you're still learning to be a person shouldn't carry a life sentence of any kind.

There was a kid in grade school growing up that was a bully. He made a kid cry while we were waiting for our class picture to be taken in the 6th grade, and you can see that kid crying in the picture. I still think about it often.

The bully ended up being one of the greatest running backs my county ever knew. He was a game changer.

I randomly decided to look up the crying kid from the school picture a couple years ago. He is now a very successful man. I couldn't be any happier seeing that. It almost brought me to tears.

The bully was shot and killed in the streets a couple years after graduating high school.

Definitely thought this was going to be about the other kind of baddies, in which case the answer is generally "they're married, with kids".

When we were both five years old, I knew one of my classmates would end up in prison.

Most kids can be jerks on occasion, and I can think of a few examples where that applied to me as well as it could to anyone. I haven't generally kept track of people who bullied me in school; I imagine most of them grew out of it, and a few didn't. This guy was something else, as if cruelty was the only thing that brought him joy.

At 19, he and two others beat a taxi driver to death. He was convicted of manslaughter and spent more than a decade in prison. A quick web search suggests he's out of prison and working as a car salesman now.

No idea. I don't pay any attention to them. I hope they're happy and doing fine.

They're all very successful now. This whole notion that bullies and assholes would be bagging my groceries and asking me "you want fries with that" in adulthood is BS.

tbh I can't even remember any of their names, neither of the ones that were being friendly with me.

I have no idea, I don't hang out with bullies.

I never saw them again after graduating

My bully from grade school is serving up to life in prison for attempted murder (he shot two teenagers while he was an adult, something gang related I think) and also sex with a minor.

Not that he doesn’t deserve it, he absolutely does, but part of me feels bad for him. He never stood a chance. His home life was fucked, he was always on this path and nothing was going to stop it.

One of my former bullies ended up working for a local carwash, I found out when he had to wash mine.

How would I know? I left my hometown.

I did see my high school bully occasionally in college. I was in my 5th year of undergrad and he looked like a grad student. But I was usually walking from my fwb’s dorm to class, so i was doing plenty fine myself.

I hope these people are better and happier but I don’t care to find out.

Fuck me if I know what any of them are doing with their lives. Part of me sure wishes that the shitty people from my past are getting what’s coming to them, but also what difference does it make to me what karmic justice may or may not await them.

My life is objectively better than when I had to deal with their shit. Why waste my mental energy on them?

A few years ago, my baddie killed himself. No idea what was happening in his life at the time. I hadn't seen him since high school, which was 25 years ago. I saw the obituary and thought it was surprising and interesting, but didn't feel bad, or good about it in any way.

I don't know any of them anymore, but the ones I'm aware of on Facebook all have "School of Hard Knocks" listed as their school they attended.

I was curious about a guy who bullied me in elementary school so I looked up his name on Facebook. His profile picture had a pro-life message in it. I was not at all surprised.

Many people who were assholes as kids turned out to become chill adults. I had a person who I considered a best friend suddenly turn on me in my last year of primary school. He always targeted me specifically and Istill remember coming home crying from the bullying. However, our lives diverged and we didn't really meet until late in highschool somewhere in a bar in the city. We were both already a bit tipsy (alcoholic age was 16 y/o at that point here), and when he ran into me he basically just acted as if we had never not been friends. It was like the old friend was back, rather than the guy who caused so much pain. It was like he never realized what he had done. At that moment I realized we both had changed so much since the moment that he was bullying me, and I chose to just be glad to reconnect with an old friend.

This story goes for quite a few people who bullied me. Pretty much all of them, when I met them years later, seemed blissfully unaware of the pain they caused and just greeted me as an old friend or classmate. And with all of them I also recognised that they had grown into chill people, and had changed so much that they weren't really the same person anymore. So I chose to also consider them old friends or classmates, and if I ran into them now I'd probably just have a nice chat about what our lives became.

Two of them were jailed for murder and attempted murder, in unrelated incidents.

A few of them died from drug overdoses or landing themselves in jail on domestic violence, but most of them grew up and have families and are pretty chill these days. I've buried the hatchet with anyone like that from high school.

I don't even remember the names of most of my bullies.

Became CEO, manager and the like

Not sure about all of them, as I don't want them in my life. But I found out by chance that one of them became a social worker. I saw another in an acceptance exam to an academic program, he failed, I got in.

He tried to jump from one Jeep to another while offroading at speed, missed, hit his head on a rock, and died. The driver did time because of his actions. He was a massive piece of shit, even years after high school. I feel sorry for his family.

I ended up ghosting/ditching most of my own age group, since most of them got hooked on various substances and going down the wrong path.

Yeah it kinda sucks, but I don't wanna find myself in and out of jail for the rest of my life.

I met one during college. We were both very different people by then and went out for lunch.

While there were no apologies (there were lines crossed by both of us), there was closure.

Last I heard of her, she's still a baddie, but now she's a real estate agent that is into crystals and horoscope, and cats.

I met one of the guys again who bullied me in school. He was a junkie, begging for money at the train station.

One bully of mine actually beat a young girl to death at a private party some (~10) years ago. Served just a few years prison sentence. I heard that when I was still on facebook, and I'm glad I'm not there anymore.

I don't expect the odds of karma kicking them in the junk to be much higher than average maybe +5% to 15% max.

One dead, the second one with his life just as stagnant as it was 20 years ago, and the 3rd one I honestly have no idea. 3rd one wasn't really bad, he just fell in with the wrong crowd. I ran into his sister a couple of years ago, but she didn't know his whereabouts either. But last time she heard feom him he was doing surprisingly well.