Bullying Hurts at Any Age

Haylee Fentress and Paige Moravetz: two young lives cut short because of unnecessary vicious and stupid behavior

There was a post on Fierce Fatties about two high school girls who committed suicide because of Internet bullying. This was what I had to say:

I was bullied very badly as a child and teenager, particularly in my early teens. I was ungainly, had braces and Martian headgear (would still like to get my hands on the sadist that invented that object!) was very shy, and, as it turned out, was mentally ill. When I look back on it, my bipolar disorder probably onset with the hormones of puberty. Those were not happy times. I’ve almost no doubt that if bullying via the Internet had been added, I would have completed one of my somewhat half-assed suicide attempts.
Regarding the bullies: don’t these little shits’ parents pay any kind of attention to what their monstrous spawn are doing online? I suppose you can’t pay attention every minute, but…I don’t really know where I’m going with this. I only know that whenever I see another case of suicide due to bullying, usually including bullying via the Internet, it makes me both sad and angry.

One commenter also mentioned that she had been bullied in college. To which I replied:

There is a lot of bullying that goes on at the college level, at least in the early years. The hellspawn that I mentioned in my previous comment are let out on their own with very little supervision. When I was in college I wasn't bullied awfully but there was a group of people who started the rumor that I was a "Satan worshiper" for my love of heavy metal music--huh, this happened when I was in high school too! Which just goes to show that it's kind of bizarre for there to be an expectation that the immature shitheads who just graduated high school will in three months develop the maturity to be an adult in college...yeah, right. 
I ended up dropping out after the first semester of my freshman year and going to a technical school where I learned about telecommunications and administrative assistant skills. To put this in perspective, this was 1984, the computers all had green screens and no graphics capabilities plus a whole massive megabyte of memory, the floppy disks really were floppy, and everything I learned about computers was obsolete in six months! Also I really didn't like secretarial work so it was kind of a waste of a year. But even the small amount of bullying that happened in my first semester drove me to not return to college until many years later in my late 30's when I got my emergency medical technician license.
Truth is, bullying can happen at every age in any atmosphere where cliques are allowed to thrive. But I think it does affect us worse when we're young and unsure of ourselves.
Wow...rant ended, I guess? Anyway I am sorry you endured that crap. No-one should have to.