What's the worst way you've seen someone get rejected? I always remember an incident when I was

around 11. I was picked to go on the summer camp kind of trip for a week with a bunch of kids

the year above me. They were 12 and 13 year olds. This was because of my good behavior. I was the only

11 year old. There was a boy I'd had a crush on for a while, and on the first day he asked me to be his girlfriend.

Obviously, we were all children, so that doesn't even mean anything. But he kept going for the whole

week, sending me notes, hugging me in the hall before we were sent to our separate dorms,

and then on our last night I got a note asking me to meet him in the hall. When I went out,

the entire group was there,

like 35 to 40 kids, all crying with laughter. He announced to everyone it had been an entire

joke that the whole group had been in on, and he had never been interested in an ugly teacher's pet

like me. As an adult, I'm obviously not remotely upset about the romantic rejection, because I was

11. But the social rejection

and the public humiliation aspect was tough. Anyway, I'm 24 now and he slid into my DMs after

high school, and I told him to go F himself, which felt good. This happened in the sixth grade.

I was bullied badly throughout elementary school. For reasons

I still don't understand, I was made a social outcast by the mean girls. I was walking home

from school with one of the cool boys in class who was always nice to me one-on-one, but eagerly

joined the bullying otherwise. He told me that one of the girls in class was having a party

after school and that I should come. I was so

excited to be invited to a party with the cool kids. I went home, told my mum, and rode my bike to

the girl's house. I rang the doorbell and the whole group answered. One of them said,

Oh my God, she actually came. And they all laughed. Then the girl whose house it was said,

...