As a kid I was brutalized by my peers for being an overt nerd with an eccentric style. I was never a strong introvert, but I mostly kept to myself because nobody shared my weird interests except maybe one or two other kids. The bullying was usually so vicious that on more than one occasion, at more than one school, I was hospitalized and the kids responsible were expelled. Psychopathic children are nightmarish sometimes.
The usual treatment I received from the faculty was that I invited bullying onto myself by making myself a target. I wouldn't ever back down from the taunts and mistreatment of other kids. I was fiercely independent and always defensive because I hated being put down and I hated unfair treatment. So, I would always fight back, or tell the bullies to fuck off, and wouldn't ya' know it they didn't like being told to fuck off. Guess what would almost always happen after that.
Because of this sort of thing I was in-and-out of so many schools, in the end my grandmother (I was raised by my grandmother) decided to enroll me in home-school so I wouldn't get beaten up constantly. She was also head of the home-school program in the district we lived in (Santa Rosa, California) at the time so she was partial to it, and mostly hated the primary public school system anyway for being ass-backwards and still stuck in the dark ages (as it is in America). Besides, public school in America tends to be little more than a glorified day-care center where they make you do rinky-dink schoolwork assignments just to keep you busy and barely educated enough to get a basic job when you're a teenager, it has nothing whatsoever to do with promoting real education. For that, you'd need to go to a fancy private school, or be home-schooled by parents who are strongly invested in your future.
It never really went away as I got older. We tried public high-school and it was the same shit, only the stakes were a lot higher because kids that were in gangs might literally murder you at that age. I spent two years stuck in that hell, until I turned 16 and I could legally take my GED and bypass high-school so I could skip straight to community college. And then, everything changed. College was fantastic. No bullies, anywhere, and so many nerds everywhere I could hang out with and play magic: the gathering with in peace and tranquility, organize my dungeons & dragons campaigns and run them in the cafeteria or the student lounge without fear or anxiety. It was great. Actually, it was too great, because I started slacking off and became a big stoner for years which ended up wasting a lot of my time and money.
But, I digress. There's my brief story anyway.
