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?

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.

One was in a car accident, ended up a quadriplegic.

Another one, last I saw, he was pumping my gas.

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.

There was pretty much only one guy I knew as a kid who was actually a bad person, rather than just another kid with all of the emotional instability and executive dysfunction that entails.

He wound up raping his girlfriend, shooting her, and then when the cops responded to a report of the gun shot he pulled a gun on them and got himself shot by the police.

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.

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.