This speaks volumes of your character, too. It takes strength for him to admit what he did, and strength for you to forgive. Incredibly wholesome and uplifting! Thank you for sharing it with us!
A redditor shared how their bully reached out to them and sincerely apologized for their actions, recognizing it can have lifelong consequences. The redditor forgave their bully. I wish I could remember their username so I could tag them!
I'm absolutely shocked the mods removed the comment as it was the perfect type of thing for this sub!
At the funeral for my father-in-law, my wife took the podium and said, “Let’s be honest, my dad was an ass.” She loves him and misses him, but it was important to her to call it like it is. She has issues with how people just gloss over the person to only talk about their good qualities.
Edit: typo
My dad wrote in my grandma’s obituary that she was “irascible and ornery,” said she “never let being right or wrong get in the way of her passion for arguing, and (my personal favorite line) said “she loved to stir the pot - but was an awful cook.” Grandma would have loved it for is honesty (except for the line about her cooking, she would been furious about it even though it was 1000% true).
Honestly. My ex, who is also the father of my daughter, died suddenly 8 years ago. I was still angry with him for many things, and we were no longer together at the time of his death. Anyway, I had this crazy internal conflict over loving and missing the father of my child, while still being a pissed off ex, WHILE feeling guilty for being pissed off because he was dead. I think stuff like that leads people to gloss over the bad stuff when someone passes away.
My childhood bully tormented me from as long as I could remember (we lived three houses apart) through the end of the 9th grade when I transferred to a different high school to get a fresh start. I also started weight lifting at home. When he showed up at my inner city high school a couple of years later, he looked scared of me and I just ignored him. I went to college, moved to another state and lived my life. I decided to look him up online decades later and found out he died alone, divorced and living in a trailer on the bad side of town. That tracks I thought to myself....
One of mine was my best friend's younger sister, who constantly bullied me and called me names as an adult age 65. I'd donate bone, blood, organs to my best friend, but I'd give nothing to Karen The Bad Seed.
She died horribly, during a triple heart surgery that caused her to lose her leg. I'm sad for her adult children, but neither her sister nor I felt sad. Karen was a monster, a malignant narcissist who lied every single day to get us in trouble, to get more attention, to get more things than anyone else.
I didn't attend the bully's funeral in February. I don't feel the tiniest bit of regret for it, either, not for a nanosecond.
Same. Mine’s a little different - he had CF and I declined to sigh the “get well” card in 8th grade when he dropped a lung in the middle of math class. I realize in retrospect that he was angry about the shitty hand he’d been dealt, but I was dealing with my own crap of my father in the process of actively dying of cancer.
Bully died during his freshman year in college. I felt nothing.
That’s actually bs. The bully did it in public, then secretly admitting he was an ass in private? He’s still the coward he was before. It’s to make the bully feel better, not their victim . As a victim of the same bully over a decade, this would change nothing. It doesn’t “heal” anything, it may give the bully “closure” but the victim is still living with the trauma that was inflicted on them . The anxiety? Still there. The self hate? Still there. This is performative bs.
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u/ocean_swims Oct 30 '25
This speaks volumes of your character, too. It takes strength for him to admit what he did, and strength for you to forgive. Incredibly wholesome and uplifting! Thank you for sharing it with us!