Lessons Learned

Every once in a while something crosses your social media feed that makes you stop and think a bit.

Like most quiet kids, I had my share of bullies in school. They didn’t tend to stick around, though, since I wasn’t much of a target. I didn’t particularly care what they thought of me so they never really got the reaction they were looking for by telling me their opinions. I was big enough and athletic enough that they thought twice before trying anything physical. My general strategy for dealing with them was simply to ignore them until they got bored and moved on, which rarely took long.

There weren’t that many of them – I had my friends, and most of the rest of the kids didn’t pay me much attention one way or another – and I quickly forgot their names. I can still remember the name of every girl I ever had a crush on in school – which is almost certainly more than they can say about me – but the bullies didn’t seem worth the effort.

So when one of my friends on social media forwarded around an obituary the other day it took me a while to place why the name seemed familiar.

This guy was the persistent one, out of all of them. The only one who thought I was enough of a target to keep it up for more than a week or two. He was a genuine little shit of a kid, and I didn't miss him after he moved away to plague some other school.

He looked older in the obituary photo, as do we all these days. People said all the usual things in the comment section, and perhaps by this point in his life they were true. Maybe he stopped being such a shit somewhere along the way and grew up into a decent human being. I certainly hope so, though I wouldn’t know.

But to be honest I just couldn’t bring myself to care. He wasn’t even worth disliking back then, and I had no reason to think differently now. And that in itself has stuck with me these last few days.

There’s a lesson there, I suppose. If you treat people poorly, don’t be surprised if they write you off. Don’t be surprised if you don’t get a second chance, because you’re not owed one. Don’t be surprised if the only reaction they have to your death is the vague memory of how nice it felt when you disappeared the first time.

I try to treat people well, and for those who make that too difficult I just try not to deal with them at all. It makes life better for everyone that way. I hope that when it is my turn for my photo to get passed around social media nobody has the blank feeling about me that I did with this guy. Perhaps he contributed to this, as a negative example if nothing else, and I suppose I would owe him that much if so.

There are lessons to be learned in even the emptiest places, after all.