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" To: My second-grade classmates at Jefferson Elementary school in Wisconsin I was mean-spirited and confused when I was 6. If I close my eyes, I can still picture one of my cruelest days perfectly: It was a snowy winter afternoon in Wisconsin, and my second-grade classmates and I were running around the playground during recess when I spotted a piece of frozen dog poop on the ground. I went right for it and threw it at someone I had cornered, picked it back up, and flung it at the next poor target. I thought it was hilarious, but it was a disgusting thing to do \u2014 and I got away with it. I always did.  Like the time I persuaded my two best friends to fill a book of Mad Libs with swear words and let them take the fall when the teacher confiscated it. I can still feel the hole I&amp;#039;d get in my stomach as I watched others get in trouble for my stunts; I was too much of a coward to &amp;#039;fess up.  I didn&amp;#039;t realize it then, but my bullying was a way for me to take control when everything else in my life seemed unpredictable. I went to six different schools before I was 11 because my parents moved around a lot for new jobs. To feel comfortable with my ever-changing surroundings, I manipulated others. I didn&amp;#039;t stop until middle school, when it got harder to find anyone to do my dirty work. As I raise my three children, Sophia, 7, Etienne, 5, and Charlotte, 2, I cringe at the thought of any of them acting like I did or being treated with that kind of cruelty. Sophia recently came home from school with a hole in her shirt. A classmate had poked a pencil through it because she was mad that Sophia had something new to wear. While my heart broke to see her in tears, I could relate to the mean girl who had done this to her. As we chatted, I learned that the bully didn&amp;#039;t have many friends, so I suggested that Sophia invite the girl to join in the next time she&amp;#039;s playing with classmates. And I told her that bullies aren&amp;#039;t bad kids: They&amp;#039;re acting out for other reasons. \u2014 JAMIE GUMIENY-FINK, 32  To: The junior high teacher I picked on... and so many others I&amp;#039;m sorry for always being so unruly in your class, despite the principal&amp;#039;s repeated attempts to discipline me. I&amp;#039;m sorry for the nasty notes I wrote about you and for preying on how powerless and weak you seemed when you couldn&amp;#039;t control our class. When you resigned, I knew it was partly because of my menacing behavior. But even that didn&amp;#039;t stop me. My bullying was relentless: I threw a chunk of asphalt at a girl. I punched a boy in the stomach. I pulled hair and hit people. Once, in high school, I pushed a classmate into the mud during a flag football game, simply because she was too perfect and I couldn&amp;#039;t stand it. There&amp;#039;s no excuse for what I did, but there is an explanation: I bullied because I was bullied. I was born with a birth defect in my left eye called Duane syndrome; it made me look cross-eyed unless I turned my head slightly to the left. Even now, eight years after having surgery to correct it, I still feel deep pain when I relive the moments when people called me a cross-eyed freak. I can still taste the slush puddle another bully pushed me into.  I&amp;#039;d probably still be a terror today \u2014 a domineering wife, a vindictive boss \u2014 if I hadn&amp;#039;t gotten on a path to truly forgiving others and myself when I became a born-again Christian in college. Now I understand that my behavior was a cry for help, and I only wish adults had paid as much attention to my feelings as they did to my victims&amp;#039;. All I wanted was for people to stop tormenting me. I just didn&amp;#039;t know how to ask for that. \u2014 TERRI KRUSCHKE, 39 To: My junior high school victims I felt lost and confused in the social hierarchy of seventh grade as the bewildering concept of popularity took root. To cope with feeling out of place, I made my classmates feel worse than I did. I stopped bullying by the time I got to high school, because I realized that I had torched so many potential friendships. But my guilt hit new heights as an adult, when I had my son, Leo, now 10, who has intense autism.  I never bullied kids like Leo (I somehow knew better than that), but I did bully a girl who had a sister with special needs. So to her: I&amp;#039;m sorry I made your life harder than it already was by mocking your upturned nose and &amp;quot;oinking&amp;quot; at you in class, and for prank-calling your house only to laugh at you before hanging up. And I&amp;#039;m sorry to everyone else I teased \u2014 the girl with the mole on her face, the classmate who wore bolo ties, and the boy with the funny-sounding name. At the time, my victims asked why I couldn&amp;#039;t be nicer. I just didn&amp;#039;t know how to explain that I preyed on them so I could have even the slightest bit of power in a new school where I felt so small and overlooked.  Now, as a writer and a cofounder of a special-ed PTA chapter in Redwood City, CA, I go to extremes to stand up for people who can&amp;#039;t advocate for themselves. Recently, we were at Leo&amp;#039;s favorite playground and he was desperate to play on the merry-go-round. I resisted, worried the other kids would be jerks just like I once was. In the end, I gave in, and luckily everyone had a blast. But it kills me to imagine someone treating Leo the way I had treated other kids, when I&amp;#039;m not around to protect him. No child should feel forced to sit on the sidelines. I didn&amp;#039;t appreciate that as a mean, lost adolescent, but I do now. \u2014 SHANNON DES ROCHES ROSA, 41 To: My childhood best friend  I&amp;#039;ve said this to you before, but I&amp;#039;m saying it again: I&amp;#039;m sorry I started that fistfight with you in the sixth grade. You were my closest friend, and I turned on you to get in good with the popular girls. They were obviously jealous of how beautiful and sweet you were, but they convinced me you needed to be &amp;quot;taught a lesson.&amp;quot; I&amp;#039;m sorry I threw the first punch and, with the popular girls egging me on, proceeded to hit and slap you. I wanted to stop, but in that moment, being accepted by that clique seemed more important than anything else. In the end, you won the fight, the cool girls wanted nothing to do with me, and our friendship was shattered.  We were 12 years old, and I had such low self-esteem that I couldn&amp;#039;t tolerate the possibility of someone not liking me. I bullied other girls who picked on my friends, too, convincing myself that they&amp;#039;d like me more if I stood up for them.  My family didn&amp;#039;t know about my bullying. But if they had, they probably would&amp;#039;ve seen that I was grieving over the death of my beloved grandmother, who passed away not long before I started acting out. She was the one person I could talk to about anything. Without her, I longed for new ways to feel accepted. It&amp;#039;s ironic that I thought I could win new friends by using my fists.  When my daughter was 16, I told her about my bullying past to make sure she didn&amp;#039;t make the same mistakes I did, and to show her how profoundly it had affected me. My regret has stuck with me all these years and influenced my career path to help others as an author, therapist, and motivational speaker. As a mom, I talk to my children about everything, from what they&amp;#039;re feeling to what their fears are. Kids won&amp;#039;t articulate what&amp;#039;s really going on unless they&amp;#039;re asked \u2014 I certainly didn&amp;#039;t. \u2014 MARY GILDER, 47 "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.redbookmag.com/life/a11544/i-was-a-bully/>