keyblade

Hunter may not be making that distinction; he may have felt at eight that seeing a girl in trouble meant taking action because his family reinforced that message. It isn’t retroactively bad if he had those feelings and they played into his honest account. The bullied school mate may have bought into and encouraged Hunter to view himself as a boy doing his duty to protect a girl or reinforced that Hunter should feel proud about having a special desire to help out females, but you don’t need to share that part of the story. Those details are unnecessary to the theme of bullying.

Maybe there is some more takeaways that can be fleshed out in Hunter’s personal internal narrative. It’s part of growing up. One’s personal belief system about gender may be a lot different than how they thought about things when they were a kid (and he is still a kid).

What I would takeaway from the thread is to stop including the message about how you felt like a white knight because it isn’t as simplistic and innocuous to the audience as the memories feel to you. It’s more complicated now than when you were a young child. I know it can be confusing, but the story it isn’t coming across the way you would like for it to come across any longer, at least not here. And a lot of people tend to take a critical eye to to what might be or come across as a story being told to make the author feel good about themselves (unless it is a person they already kind of know and care about or someone they would welcome knowing more about, spoiler- that will not be the majority of people on the planet).

@Hunter- I got bullied in elementary. If someone had pelted one of those kids, I probably would have felt like you feel about it, especially if they continued to be a bully that was good at manipulating adults.

Some kids never grow up. They go on to be confident, domineering adults. But sometimes kids who were bullied can grow up and become bullies, themselves. Kids who are an easy target for bullies sometimes become insecure and learn to sometimes bully other kids. This is a good article to read about it:

https://www.parentingscience.com/bully-victims.html

It is good that you cared when you saw someone getting hurt and laughed at on the playground all of those years ago. Your family and the people who care about you probably wanted you to be able to defend yourself and others.

Because the kid who got hurt was smaller than you, when you got angry and lashed out at your bully, people who care about you wanted you to feel proud about having a value systems that encourages you to help other people even if it puts you at risk.
But while it may have felt personally satisfying to you, it didn’t stop that girl from landing on her ass nor did getting one over on the adults help fix the playground situation. It was a moment in time where you ended up feeling you got one up on that bully and didn’t get in any trouble for it.

That was a noble instinct for you when you were eight but now when you tell the story people want to make sure that you don’t think beating someone up is the best way to prevent bullying at your current grade and age.

Sometimes parents and communities teach boys that bullying is a normal part of their gender and getting into physical fights is somehow a rite of passage to becoming a man or demonstrating that they have courage to protect others.

One issue with this is that there are a lot of people in the world who don’t conform to strict gender roles. And even if they do, girls can be mean, too. They can be just as brave and courageous. They can outwit and outfight as well as the next person. Most of the time, people who have bigger builds or more testosterone or special skills DO need to be aware that there is a power difference between themselves and someone who differs in size or physical aptitude.

Sometimes parents will teach boys that girls are to be put on pedestals. But a lot of people find that paying too much attention to someone’s gender when deciding how to treat them ends up making it harder to really get to know a person for their character.

Because you’re in high school lots of kids are in the process of figuring out what they think about gender differences, especially because a lot of teenagers are in romantic relationships or maybe going out on dates people have a lot of feelings about what it means to treat other’s fairly and respectfully, especially when there may be a lot of hormones.

So when you write the story and embellish it, you will probably get a critical reaction from people who are sensitive about being treated as equals. When you write you defended “a little girl” that is going to make people wonder if you think of girls or women as so different from yourself or boys your age that you aren’t able to see them accurately.

When you tell your story you should assume nobody knows anything about you. They don’t know if you are a bully, or a misogynist (someone who doesn’t treat women as equals), or trying to impress others with exaggeration (because that makes people behave more skeptically towards you).

I’m sorry I assumed your story was fake. I hope my link to the Christmas story wasn’t hurtful to you. I think most people tend to think of themselves as the “good guy” in their memories. It’s normal, but as you get older, you’ll realize that not everyone is going to share your point of view.

Like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6M9INFJ-PTw

Letter writer, you come across as wanting to start keyboard word-slinging over bullshit. I am also intrigued with what you get out of it.

Good luck.

WWW- West Wendy’s World, featuring aspiring writers, T.V. staff, Spam, prison inmate hackers, the ticked-off “guilty remnant” who have identified themselves from resentful posts, the designated MRA spokesman Bac and the MRA-slayer Kate