During high school, from freshman to senior year, I was always getting bullied. Not physically, but verbally. This one kid would always call me a frog because I had duck feet and, I guess, walked weirdly.
The thing is, the kid who was always making fun of me was 5'6" and weighed 110 pounds. I wasn't a big kid either. I was tall and skinny, standing at 5'11" and weighing 132 pounds.
The reason I didn't beat him up until my senior year was that I was afraid of what would happen afterward. Even if I beat him up, then what? I would most likely get expelled because my high school was extremely strict. Plus, I didn't want him to get to me. I thought that one day he would stop, but he never did.
My classmates started calling me "frog" too, supposedly as a joke, and this went on for three straight years. I was angry and frustrated, and I honestly didn't know what to do.
During my senior year, he made fun of me again, and for some reason, I got extremely mad. So, I waited until the last day of school, waiting for him to make fun of me again. And he did.
I snapped. I went after him and elbowed him in the temple. He fell to the ground with blood on his face. For some reason, I wanted to humiliate him, so I pulled his pants down. It turned out that he had actually shit himself.
Now, imagine this: the professors walk into a classroom full of teenagers with their phones out, recording everything, and there's a kid with blood on his face and shit all over his sweater and pants.
The professors were extremely mad at me, but they didn't do anything. His parents called the police on me, but since I was only 17, I got away with it.
Fast-forward to the present. I'm 28, and I go back to my hometown to visit an old high school friend of mine. We start sharing stories, and he brings up the kid I beat up.
It turns out that, because of that incident and the humiliation he went through, he couldn't finish college and ended up dropping out. His mother had also died, so he had to take care of his father, who had developed epilepsy. Unfortunately, his father died two years after that he moved out of town.
After hearing all of this, I've been feeling extremely guilty about what happened.
Back then, I never told the teachers what he was saying to me because I thought I would look like a wuss in front of my classmates. I was dumb and arrogant, thinking I had to get justice with my fists instead of handling things another way.
Now, for the past two weeks, I've been feeling extremely guilty about that kid. I keep thinking about what happened and wondering if my actions had a bigger impact on his life than I ever realized.