In sixth grade, I remember I was called to the Assistant Principal's office.

I don't even remember her name. I had never even spoken with any of the principals at my school. At my approximately 600-person middle school, I wondered what I could possibly have been pulled into the Assistant Principal's office for. I stayed out of trouble and didn't mess with anybody in school.

At least that's what I told myself, and that's what I thought. Soon enough, the Assistant Principal started asking me about a video that my friend and I made on YouTube. I knew what she was talking about, but in typical 11-year-old fashion, I tried to deny I'd ever seen the video, and pretended that it wasn't me when she started showing it to me. It was a video of how much we hated a boy named Zack, calling him every middle school profanity in the playbook. It made personal attacks against him and even went as far as to say that the world

The contents of the video talked about how much we hated Zack, a boy who grew up in our apartment complex. At the time, I lived in an apartment complex of doctors doing their residencies, and the complex was about a 2-minute walk from the hospital. With our parents training to be doctors, that meant that none of our families were well-off and one of our parents was always on-call or resting from a long shift, and the other was often working. A common trend for us all, then, was that none of us spent that much time around our parents. We spent most of our free time with the other kids around our age in the complex, playing sports, video games, or other games around the complex.

A couple of kids and I grew particularly close. During the summer, we'd stay and play in the complex until 11 p.m. or so, riding out bikes around. And I remember it was the summer of 2009 that a kid named Zack moved in, and I knew very soon that I did not like the kid. To me, he was arrogant and always trying to prove how good he was at everything. As a kid who liked having all the attention to myself, I hated that Zack was taking it away.

Zack and I didn't get along with the start. When the other one wasn't around, we would gossip and talk poorly about each other. It validated me at the time that other people would agree with me whenever I called Zack a bitch or complained about his attitude with other people.

One friend who I was particularly close with and I then started a YouTube channel, and devoted the whole channel to how much we disliked Zack. We made the video with Windows Movie Maker with only a blue screen and white text about how no one liked Zack, how much we hated him, and how much we hated hanging out with him.

No one is a saint in middle school, but that video was particularly vicious. I would like to say that it was no reflection of who I was, but at the time, it clearly was.

At the time, I didn't see anything wrong with it. I thought Zack was just being soft and a snitch. Zack and my other friend were the year below me, and I knew that Zack wouldn't personally tell someone at the school, but he probably addressed the situation with his parents, who later escalated it to the school district. Once the Assistant Principal got me to confess that I played a part in making the video, I even tried to rationalize my actions.

"You don't know Zack," I said to her. "And you don't know how much he gets under my skin."

Of course, I don't remember that meeting with exact detail. But I would stay after school that day to meet with my teacher briefly, and she expressed how disappointed she was in me. At parent-teacher conferences, my mother gave my math teacher a bouquet of flowers, and she told me that she looked at those flowers on her kitchen table every day, and now she couldn't look at them the same. I wasn't the good and smart kid in class anymore -- I was a bully.

Those words from my teacher crushed me, and I started crying, completely unable to control the tears. In typical middle-school, 11-year-old logic, I tried to rationalize that I was the victim and that I was the person being misunderstood.

I don't remember if my mother ever addressed it to me, but I do remember the first thing that happened when I went home. I took down the video, and went to play video games. Zack and I still didn't get along, but I distanced myself from him.

I don't know if I ever apologized.

I'm currently scrolling through social media to see if I can find Zack anywhere to apologize. I can't find him, and it's starting to come back to me that some time in the years that followed, Zack went on to block me on Facebook.

This is not a story where we all made up, reconciled, and became better people from the experience. I was the childhood bully, but at the time I would have said that Zack deserved it.

I stopped engaging with Zack as much just because my family moved. I stopped seeing him as much, although I would go back to the apartment complex to keep in touch with close friends.

A lot has changed over the past 12 years. I'm 23 now, and I shake my head in horror and disappointment that I could ever act that way towards another human being. Being 11-years-old is no excuse -- being a bully means that you're making someone else's life miserable, and I don't know if I could ever be forgiven by Zack for trying to make his life miserable for a long period of time.

In the two years or so that followed, I went through puberty. I started to go through extreme bouts of anxiety, particularly social anxiety, and went through a stage where I wondered if I deserved feeling as terrible as I did every day. It felt like a Herculean effort to start a conversation. Nothing in particular provoked my anxiety and sadness -- perhaps it was just the natural flow of my upbringing. But I started to reflect all the time about the ways I treated people when I was in elementary school, and particularly the way I treated Zack in the sixth grade.

Growing up and going through my own stage of social anxiety tried me much more than anything I went through before, but in my reflection and maturity, I became a kinder, more compassionate, and much more understanding person. Who was I to judge someone else I didn't like, when all these people were so kind and gracious to me during my darkest moments?

Hindsight bias now reveals to me that I had a lot going on in my family, and a lot I was struggling with internally. We moved almost every year until I was in high school, which catalyzed a feeling of mistrust. I pushed people away because I didn't know how long I'd be friends with them. I struggled with divisions in my family.

I didn't have a voice to express these frustrations when I was 11. I was angry. I was volatile. And so I took out that anger by being a childhood bully. I can't count how many times I thought myself into being better than someone else by thinking "at least I'm not him." My behavior then was a cry for help and a cry for attention because the situation I had at home just wasn't normal. I wonder whether it's compatible for that kid to have grown up into the person I am now, and I realize now that yes, I had to be there to get here.

But there was a human cost to my growth and introspection. As much as reflecting and repenting for being a childhood bully helped me grow, Zack and other kids I may have bullied in elementary school don't owe me any apologies.

I don't know if Zack thinks about it often, but life went on for all of us. Once in a while, I'll remember the menace I was when I was a kid. It's been 12 years, and I'm a special ed teacher now who witnesses kids take out whatever's going on at home against each other, whether it's just losing a parent or being homeless. The kids don't have a voice for it now, just like I didn't have a voice for it then. My actions spoke to my anger as a childhood bully. Only time, maturity, and reflection made me a better person for it.

But I was a childhood bully, and one day, I'm going to need to be forgiven for it.