Never try to be friends with your bullies. Don’t hope for their approval. You’ll never impress them, and you shouldn’t try.

Being a kid was fun. Then puberty and secondary school hit, leaving me with a pimply face, an awkward body and a voice I didn’t feel was mine at all. I hung out with a group of boys in my single-sex school because they lived close to my house and making other friends was hard.

One of these boys tormented me. He encouraged the other boys to run away from me. He hit me a few digs. He winded me badly on several occasions. He told me nobody liked me and pushed me to go away. The memory that still makes me cringe and feel ashamed is from when he threw my new bike around enough to bend the frame. I was too embarrassed to tell my parents, so I saved money from my paper round to get it fixed.

Some of the other boys in the group defended me just enough for me to stick around. Besides, outside of school, they hung out with a few girls who were nice to me, even if they didn’t want to kiss me. There were no better options.

I deeply regret how much I wasted my teenage years. I even used to pray – I was barely religious then and am not religious now – that they’d like me and see I wasn’t just a nerdy loser. I was terrified of the shame of having no friends, so I hung on to the rubbish friends I had.

Eventually, I went to college and I thrived, making genuine friends from all sorts of backgrounds, while some of my bullies wandered around, lost, confused and afraid to venture beyond their familiar little world.

But I can’t help looking back now and again. I wish I had, as the bully suggested, gone away. I didn’t know that, despite all that pain, it does get better.

I wish I had gone away to the library, taken out all the books and expanded my mind. That time fretting over popularity would have been better spent exploring the world’s music, writing stories, volunteering, or watching classic films. Or studying even harder, expanding beyond the narrow second-level curriculum and learning about life beyond your test.

My advice is to truly educate yourself. Develop as a person, so that when you enter college – an environment that doesn’t function like the weird world of school – you will be a better, rounded, more developed person with a wide range of interests and ideas, able to choose friends based on empathy and common interests.

So forget about popularity. Focus on yourself. Learn who you are. When idiots like my bike-breaking bully wallow in petty sludge, work to be smarter than them.

Oh, and by the way, a few years ago I confronted him from a position of success. He was mortified and apologetic, but I'd long passed the point where I needed his contrition. It gets better.

This column gives a voice to people within the education system. Email education@irishtimes.com