Being bullied is terrifying. I remember when I switched middle schools, I was suddenly the “new kid” and that’s all it took for a couple of my classmates to terrorize me. But just as it doesn’t take much for bullies to pick on others to begin with, it often only takes a moment to get them to stop. In the story below, the author recounts how she was able to turn the tables on her elementary school bully. Anyone who’s ever been bullied will enjoy the clever way this girl was able to get back at the person who’d treated her so terribly. And I know I could’ve used used an idea like this back in middle school! While bullying is a serious issue and there are many ideas about how to stop it, I like to think that the author of this story helped her bully see what it’s like to be on the other side. And I pray that it was enough for her to end her career as a school bully.
“In elementary school, I wasn’t the most popular kid. I was into books, had big glasses, was a bit overweight, got very good grades—a classic nerd. I had friends sure, but I did tend to be the butt of the classic ‘nerd’ and ‘fat’ jokes.
One day in class, we were doing some sort of busy work and I was seated across from one of the girls (let’s call her BullyJ) who always loved to make fun of me and give me crap. The girl, for some reason, was stamping her feet up and down on the floor like a crazy person (not just the nervous knee thing that most people get from time to time, full on lifting and dropping them).
The massive shockwaves from her dinosaur stomping ending up knocking her glasses off the desk and somewhere right beneath her feet.
Being the good girl that I was, I immediately yelled out ‘BullyJ, STOP! WATCH YOUR FEET!’
She stops her foot, a few inches from her glasses, then looks at me and just asks, ‘Why?’
Now I could have told her that she was about to ruin her glasses, but for some reason I didn’t. I happened to not be wearing my own glasses at the time, and on a lark I told her, ‘You’re about to step on my glasses.’
The bully got the biggest grin on her face, lifted her foot back up and smashed it back down onto her own glasses.
BullyJ heard them crack and bent down to pick the glasses up, still grinning at me without breaking her gaze. When she lifted the glasses up and looked at them, and realized they were her own, she started crying, loudly. Ran to the teacher.
It was wonderful.”
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