Thank you, I really appreciate you taking a hard stance on this because, yeah! I agree, I don't ever think bullying/abuse is something someone can cause for themselves. I couldn't figure out how to phrase it better, but I was thinking about it more from the perspective of... trying to understand wanton cruelty, and trying to understand how bullies/abusers pick their marks, y'know? There has to be a reason why so many bullying victims who people don't consider victims resemble each other, why we all are (in the most loving terms possible) so goddamn annoying. I fully understand that there are people who find me offputting every day and only a handful of them have ever escalated it to bullying, and that knowledge genuinely makes me feel better, because it once again turns the lens back towards the bullies. Someone can find me intensely annoying, and still be entirely capable of treating me with dignity and humanity.
This drama, if nothing else, demonstrates to me that bullies dehumanise their victims very efficiently in their heads. It's about their personal feelings, their feeding of the toxic cycle of obsession with someone who sucks and gives them bad vibes. Their behaviour is wrong, without ever needing to argue that maybe the victim didn't suck and have bad vibes. I can never make that argument for myself, I know I objectively sucked and had bad vibes all throughout the period of my most intense bullying and it feels very disingenious and disrespectful to the people I harmed with my toxicity, but the people who bullied me were still in the wrong.
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Date: 14/10/21 14:21 (UTC)Thank you, I really appreciate you taking a hard stance on this because, yeah! I agree, I don't ever think bullying/abuse is something someone can cause for themselves. I couldn't figure out how to phrase it better, but I was thinking about it more from the perspective of... trying to understand wanton cruelty, and trying to understand how bullies/abusers pick their marks, y'know? There has to be a reason why so many bullying victims who people don't consider victims resemble each other, why we all are (in the most loving terms possible) so goddamn annoying. I fully understand that there are people who find me offputting every day and only a handful of them have ever escalated it to bullying, and that knowledge genuinely makes me feel better, because it once again turns the lens back towards the bullies. Someone can find me intensely annoying, and still be entirely capable of treating me with dignity and humanity.
This drama, if nothing else, demonstrates to me that bullies dehumanise their victims very efficiently in their heads. It's about their personal feelings, their feeding of the toxic cycle of obsession with someone who sucks and gives them bad vibes. Their behaviour is wrong, without ever needing to argue that maybe the victim didn't suck and have bad vibes. I can never make that argument for myself, I know I objectively sucked and had bad vibes all throughout the period of my most intense bullying and it feels very disingenious and disrespectful to the people I harmed with my toxicity, but the people who bullied me were still in the wrong.