u/EternalOptimist2026

I'd love to hear your stories about your experiences with bullies. I'll start with my story:

I got diagnosed at 39 because my therapist suspected that my "best friend" was actually a bully. He told me, "Autistic children have a hard time deciphering between a friend or a bully. This is happening here, you are basically on the playground and a bully is taking advantage of you. You can't pick up on the cues."

She said all the right things. She texted me all the time to check in. We would go on a weekly lunch, every Wednesday. She told me I was one of her best friends.

She also asked me for money. For car repairs, for vacations, for rent. And I paid it every time, because I thought that's what best friends do. Best friends are there for each other. I didn't have a sibling growing up, so she was like my sister.

I didn't believe my therapist. "She would never!" I thought. He challenged me by asking me to set one boundary with her, and that would reveal her true colors.

I said no once.

Then my world started crumbling around me. She contacted everyone I knew, all our mutual friends including people I introduced her to, and started spreading rumors about me. Just from the one no, after 5 years of being "best friends".

That was 2 years ago. Two years of grieving, of figuring out how to move forward and learn how to trust people again.

What are your stories? What are your experiences with bullies? Were you younger when you had one or a little older when you had one? How did you set boundaries or move on from them?

Watching Ted Lasso is brutal for me.

Ted is generous and warm and a little too much, and the people around him respond with warmth and appreciation. They soften. They come around. His kindness lands. With him, they assume the best. With me, they assume the worst.

Ted brings his boss biscuits every morning. She goes from wanting him gone to treasuring him.

I went to the UK with my wife. I bought my friend's favorite chocolate, Maltesers, at the airport and gave it to him when I returned. He called me gay and blocked me on every platform. "Being thoughtful = I want to sleep with him" is the equation he was using, whereas I was using the "Being thoughtful = I am a great friend" equation.

Ted shows genuine interest in everyone he meets and it disarms them. They open up. With me, they ask "What's wrong with that guy?"

I got invited to a party by my super networker friend. I met one of her friends there, a professional standup comic. He seemed really cool. I told him I'd love to see one of his shows. I thought I was being supportive by saying that. She told me the next day that I had overstepped by following him on Instagram. A guy with 50K+ followers was so offended by 1 guy following him that he had to complain to our mutual friend about it. The crime of telling a standup comic, "I'd love to attend one of your shows!" By the way, that friend...she blocked me on every platform. Networking is okay for her, but not okay for me.

Same instincts. Same warmth. Same too muchness. On the show, it makes a whole locker room love a man. In my life, it makes people quietly decide there's something wrong with me.

I have to remind myself that Ted Lasso is fiction, just Marvel or Star Wars or something. It's a fictional world where people respond to kindness with appreciation and curiosity, not judgement.

God, I wish I lived in that world.

It's been exactly one year since I was formally diagnosed with autism.

Before that, I was in the darkest place of my life. I had spent my whole adult life losing friends and never knowing why. People would just stop calling or block me, and nobody would tell me what I did. After enough years of that, you stop asking what's wrong and start believing it's you.

After one of my best friends blocked me without saying anything or giving any indication they were unhappy with our friendship, my therapist recommended I get assessed for autism spectrum disorder. Then I got my diagnosis, and for the first time in 39 years my life made sense. There's a study (Sasson, UT-Dallas 2017/2019) where strangers watched a few seconds of autistic adults and judged them harshly, almost instantly. Then researchers ran it again and told the strangers the person on screen was autistic. Same clips. Same people. The ratings went up. Nothing changed except the word "autism". If only my ex-friends had the word "autism" too. 

I'm not going to pretend a diagnosis fixes everything. But I finally understand myself, and I'm building a life that fits the brain I actually have. This past year was the first time in my life I was truly grateful to be alive. Here's to the second year after my diagnosis.

I read a thread here recently where someone raised defamation, and many people in the comment section told them it wasn't defamation, it was just a bad review. The model was allowed to their opinion.

Sure. Opinion is protected. But opinion isn't a magic word you say to make anything legal. "I didn't like working with this photographer" is opinion. Telling people, as fact, that a photographer did something he didn't do is a different thing. One is a review. The other is a thing people sue over. So where's the actual line?

Here's why I'm asking.

A model approached me once about doing a TFP shoot. The deal was simple: I shoot her engagement photos for free, she models one shoot for me, also free. Even trade. I delivered. She loved them. She used them everywhere, including her wedding invitations.

Then I went to schedule my half. She told me she'd changed her mind. I asked her to either honor the trade or pay standard rate for the engagement shoot. She said no. Then she blocked me.

We had a signed contract. An attorney friend looked at it and said I had a valid case: if she didn't do her half, she owed me $600 for the engagement shoot. But then he said, "Even if you won, I have no idea what her financial situation is, so I don't know if you'd ever see this $600. And say she comes back and offers to drop it and just do the shoot to settle. Do you really want a TFP shoot with someone who's being forced into it by a court? She's not a good person. The juice isn't worth the squeeze." So I let it go.

What came after wasn't a bad review. People I'd worked with for years started going quiet. New models stopped responding. Old ones left me on read. Then a model I'm friends with told me she'd been out with a group of friends, and when my name came up, one of them said, "You're friends with that guy? Stay away from him, he's one of the bad ones." This was someone I had never worked with, never met. That's just what she'd heard. Someone had spread it far enough that it reached people with no connection to me at all.

I'm 99.9% sure it was the TFP model. After all this, I talked to another photographer about her, and he said, "Yeah, she's not a good person. She runs around ruining photographers' reputations. She's gotten free TFP shoots out of half the photographers in town." I wish I'd known that before I ever agreed to her engagement shoot.

So, two real questions:

When does a private "warning" to other people, model to model, stop being protected opinion and become defamation? Does it matter that it's said quietly instead of posted in a review?

And practically: when the damage is a quiet whisper campaign instead of one signed bad review, is there anything you can actually do, or is "move on" the only real answer? In my life, everyone seems to keep telling me to move on.