I didn’t grow up in a boarding school, but my childhood and adolescence was much like this.
One of the problems with socialization is that it teaches the wrong lessons. When you’re young, you deal with the same people over and over again. This was especially true of me, because I spent my teen years in boarding school.
With people you will see every day, you can’t let insults or threats pass. You must not let anyone push you around. It took me a long time to learn that.
Yep. You have to fight and fight hard if you are a male misfit like I was in a backwards Southern town still living in the 1920s. To survive. To not become a permanent victim.
The best response as an adult however is to walk away, definitely. And I don’t get triggered by much these days. The last time was on a bus in Vancouver. It was everything I could do to hold myself back from stabbing that guy in the throat. If I hadn’t been there with a friend, it’d’ve been a different thing. Much blood would’ve spilled. Because like Ian, I fight to destroy. As a smaller-than-average guy, it’s all you can really do. Like your eyes? Like breathing? Then don’t fight me. I don’t fight honorably and I don’t fight fair. I fight to kill and to mutilate when I have to. Simple as that.
Which is why I try to avoid fights when I can.
Thankfully those days are behind me now. I don’t want them to return and I’m getting too old for that type of thing. But still, those triggers never really go away. They are chthonian, buried deep. When someone punches in those nuclear launch codes and turns they key, the Minuteman in my brain fires its rockets and it’s very hard to spool them down again.
Life changes you. A lot of my life changed me for the worse, really. But it’s what’s there.
That’s the kind of thing which makes me think how different I’d be if I grew up in a rougher area, was a guy or had access to weapons or any kind of real physical bullying in my background.
Most short men, in my experience, go for being super aggressive to compensate (“I’m a little brick shithouse with a black belt!”) or they try to be the humorous funny guy. I have no doubt that if I were a dude I’d have gotten into fights constantly.
As it is if someone physically threatens me or tries physically to condescend to me, I go all the way off. It’s not even self preservation, it’s just rage. That person always is shocked when it happens. It’s not confined to just men. It happened more often when I was younger and weighed less, which is why I don’t think being at an ideal weight is an unqualified good for me.
I’m not aggressive at all in day-to-day life. I’m very laid back. My nickname in the army was “Chill,” for instance. But I reach a point past which you can’t push me, and I’ll die rather than relent. People who reach that with me are astounded by the change when that occurs, though I warn them in advance.
So when I fight, it’s a different tale altogether. I’m not some walking ball of aggressive rage — but when you’re almost always smaller and lighter than your opponents, you have to be very aggressive and good or be crushed. That is an artifact of being shorter than average, sure, but it’s also necessary as an advantage against those bullies who are even more certain of being able to dominate you.
Have to destroy them with even more certitude and degrading violence to make an example, unfortunately.