Is A Part Of
The headline shouted out at me: “Bullying May Make Kids Psychotic“, and less than a month after most of us learned that the obviously-pychotic Columbine murderers “hadn’t been bullied — in fact, they had bragged in diaries about picking on freshmen and ‘fags.’”
I was bullied a lot in school, but I had a rather unique experience, or rather, my bullies did. One of my Junior-High School bullies, a football star (quarterback), was injured in practice before his first High School game – he broke his neck and was a wheelchair-bound quadriplegic for the rest of his life. Of course, other bullies replaced him at making my High School life miserable, and one of them, immediately after graduation, went on vacation in Hawaii, got underage drunk and fell off a hotel balcony, breaking his neck, this time fatally.
My long-term reaction to the two accidents was a classic case of Mixed Emotions: some Schadenfreude, years before I learned what the word meant, as well as some honest sympathy for people I never thought I could feel sympathy for. And there was a totally absurd feeling that I had somehow caused it through some subtle but supernatural psychic ability, which made me feel simultaneously guilty and powerful. Don’t mess with me, world, or I’ll break your neck by remote control! Now, that isn’t psychotic, is it? Bwa ha ha ha ha ha….
Note: To keep myself sane, I have kept a short list of other people who have bullied me, before or since, and as of today, no others have suffered broken necks that I know of. And at least a couple of them deserved it more than those two guys.
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