My childhood took place before The Enlightenment. and in an overwhelmingly working/middle class neighborhood. I was a small child, and though I was quite shy, I didn't want for friends or attention from girls. I just didn't know what to do with it. In retrospect, I also suffered from anxiety and low-grade but near-constant depression. Sports was my outlet. And then alcohol.
I was bullied twice at around the same time, maybe twelve or thirteen years old. One was at school from a noted bully. He was "different" from most other kids in the Catholic school I attended. He smoked and had older friends, and dressed like what we then referred to as a "greaser." He started taunting me when I refused to do the stupid things he would have me do. He'd make fun of my name, adding the word "pisss" to it. The bullying only escalated over time, and my attempts to avoid him only seemed to make things worse.
He cornered me one day in the playground, after lunch. A couple of his henchmen also surrounded me, just like in the movies. As he got closer to me, he raised his fists, and I punched him in the mouth. He went reeling backwards as blood streamed from his face. I, of course, got in trouble, but a couple of the nuns confided in me that they were glad I did what I did. There was little pressure to work such things out in a nonviolent way back then.
Another guy, also a smoker and drinker in Eight Grade, and in public school, was pissed that I had a girlfriend in his school. (It's always about a girl, isn't it?) He lived a block from my paper route, and would tip over my bike every day, papers flying everywhere, when I was delivering my papers. I'd just avoid him, pick up my papers, and go about my business. But then the bullying escalated, he became more threatening, and also enlisted his henchmen to taunt me. The older boys in the neighborhood were pushing me to take him up and fight him but, even with my prior knockout, it's not at all what I wanted to do. They even gave me boxing lessons. Anyway, he came after me hard one time. I needed more than one punch to put him away but, again, he never bothered me after that. I was not at all physically imposing as a child, and I wasn't schooled in the pugilistic arts. Both of them were bigger than I, and I'd seen them fight other boys before, so I was more than a little scared. And fighting was not what I wanted to do.
In both cases, I felt great at the moment of "victory," and then later relieved that they stopped screwing with me. But in the long-run, it bothered me that I needed to defend myself in that way. It made me feel crazy.
I grew up learning how to settle or avoid such conflicts in ways that were more in line with my temperament. I later went on to train in martial arts for over twenty years, and currently do so, in which, when things go well, you learn that if you're not fighting for your life -- or someone else's life, when necessary -- then you shouldn't be fighting.