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I Don’t Care If You Were “Just Kidding”
Jokes and comedic tones don’t give you a free pass from personal responsibility
We’ve all experienced it. Somebody cracks a “joke” at our expense. Rather than pretending to laugh it off, we react with anger or resentment. Then, they immediately turn defensive. They try to gaslight us with that classic excuse…
“Oh, but I was JUST KIDDING…”
Ah, but were they?
In my freshman year of high school, a sophomore named Ellyn used to torment me. She was a typical “mean girl,” engaging in “intragroup ageism” against me. In other words: She was only one year older than me, which would have made us both part of the “Xennial” microgeneration — but she still targeted me due to that age difference between us, however small it may have actually been.
From a K-12 student’s perspective, a difference of one or two years feels monumental. Once you reach adulthood, it essentially becomes negligible.
I suspect that Ellyn had been hazed or razzed by older girls (or even boys), one year earlier, when she’d been a freshman herself. So, now, as a newly-minted sophomore, she was relishing the opportunity to dish out what she may have been previously forced to endure.
