I've found this entire discussions very interesting, especially Kelida's comments. I guess what she has to say really speaks to me. (heck, it could *be* me!) I also had a really hard time as a kid....I was different: I was a bookworm, spoke like an adult (after all, that's who I talked to!) and pretty much socially incompetant. Some pretty harsh things were said and done.
Anyway, to come to some sort of point, my teachers, who I think often felt very helpless in the face of the scapegoating and isolation I was experiencing, would often tell me something that sounded a lot like Beanster's post. I was told that the bullies were that way because they were insecure, that often bullies had a hard home life, that maybe they were very unhappy people. My teachers were trying to comfort me, but to me it sounded a bit like wowbuggers interpretation. As I filled myself with these excuses, I became selfsatisfied and superior- which, obviously, provoked the bullies. My teachers had done me less of a favor than they had hoped.
It took me a while to break out of my isolation. I went on rejecting my classmates long after they started accepting me. It wasn't until I hit gr. 10 and started gathering a group of friends as odd in their ways as I considered myself that I finally freed myself enough to see that my former bullies were just people...people that I could have a civil conversation with even. No worse or better than I. And I owe them in a way, because my isolation made me treasure my friends, and try to be the kind of friend i'd always dreamed of having. And it gave me the thick skin to realise that there are times when integrity of self is far more important than acceptance.
whew.

my 2 cents...spend it however you like,
Ceit