This last few days has, unfortunately, been the cat vomit frosting upon the giant shit cake that 2026 has been so far. There has been a bit of turmoil in my personal life. Unfortunately, I got fired.
I won’t go too far into the details, but the tl;dr is that there was a girl who was being a consistent bully. Every single day, she was consistently, deliberately cruel to other students, mainly a group of other girls, and – worse than that – an autistic first grader who had to be moved into another group because of her actions. The bullying took the form of insults, mockery, physical harassment, and, on two separate occasions, spitting on other students. Last week, I finally lost my temper at her and said some things that, perhaps, I shouldn’t have said. She told her mother, who is a teacher at the school where I worked. And because of that, I got let go.
I accept full culpability on my part. I said things that were wrong, and I acknowledge it. But I cannot stand bullies, and especially those who enable them: which, I realize now, my after-school program was doing. Furthermore, they provided me with inadequate support to deal with the situation from either a disciplinary or emotional perspective, and then punished me for their lack of competency. I generally give people the benefit of the doubt. But by condoning this child’s harmful, antisocial behavior, I realize now that this job wasn’t worth my time.
When I was growing up, I was conditioned by teachers and, especially, my in-classroom aide of ten years to expect bullying as my birthright. If I fought back, I was punished for acting out. If I reported other kids’ behavior, I was told off for tattling. The other kids, seeing that I was being punished for their actions, were emboldened. Eventually I bore it in silence, keeping my anger simmering on the inside like a pressure cooker with a faulty release valve, until it exploded outward.
I don’t blame the other kids for their actions. Kids don’t have fully developed empathy, and honestly, they don’t entirely finish growing that part of their psyches until they’re in their early twenties. But I blame the authority figures around me, who should have seen that I was vulnerable, and instead of protecting me, just made me a target. Furthermore, whenever another student was nice or kind to me in any way, I was expected to treat it as an act of generosity on par with Mother Teresa. For my teachers and aide, bullying and cruelty were the default state of affairs, and even being deliberately ignored was considered a kindness.
Ever since I left high school, I’ve arranged my life so as to avoid bullies. Now that I finally have a choice as to who I spend time with, I’ve cut off contact with any of the teachers who enabled my bullies, as well as other toxic influences in my life – arrogant bosses, narcissistic roommates, manipulative and judgmental former friends. I survived school. I’m done with it.
I believe I’m done working in education for a while. I don’t want to be a part of a system that punishes those who stand up to bullies while, at the same time, rewarding the arrogance and cruelty of those same bullies. As the death stick merchant in Attack of the Clones said, I need to go home and rethink my life. As that nice Mr. Vonnegut said, so it goes.
~ Ian (currently listening to The Silver Cord by King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard)
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