Yeah man, it sucked. When I was in elementary school, I was in a "nerdy" clique (although none of us were really bullied by the popular kids) and within this clique, I became close to my bully's best friend. He (according to my new best friend) became jealous and decided to make me a scapegoat. He left our friend group and began to fabricate lies about me amongst my classmates because I was a little socially awkward (I'm on the spectrum for context). I ultimately developed a severe anxiety disorder from this incident and began pulling my hair out (trichotillomania) and developed a few other nervous ticks too. Having a huge bald spot on my head obviously didn't go well amongst other 11 year olds, so after the severe bullying persisted, I transferred back to a public school.
A similar situation happened again when I was in middle school, but that was sort of my own doing because I shunned one of my friends for smoking pot. He recruited another pot smoking friend and they both began harassing me in school (although they became bored after a year or so). I hypocritically started smoking pot a few years later in HS as a way to self-medicate my severe anxiety disorder (and I received a taste of my own medicine because a few of my other friends shunned me after I started smoking weed). The friend who introduced me to pot ended up becoming a bully too (I have a story somewhere in my post history about him telling lies to a girl I liked and her subtweeting about my social awkwardness, skin condition, etc.). There's a long story behind why that happened, but ultimately, he was a depraved individual who was deported back to his home country after a domestic violence incident.
Ultimately, I swore to never move back to my hometown after moving out for college, and I have upheld that promise for almost 2 decades now.
