Hey guys!

TLDR: I tripped a guy in my grade that I strongly dislike after he pushed someone else and thought no one would do anything. 


First off, this all happened about three months ago. There’s this kid in my grade who can really frustrate me. He’s not always annoying, but he is more than he isn’t. He has a very high ego, and he makes his feelings very clear by complaining to teachers about ‘boring/easy material’ or will call people ‘dumb/idiotic’ when they don’t agree with him. He refuses to acknowledge that someone else might have a more informed perspective than his on any topic. He acts quite entitled and will argue over things that are really straightforward if he thinks he can. He seems to believe that he can do whatever he wants, and his sophomore classmates are holding him back from achieving his true potential. 


On the other hand, there are times where he can be tolerable. We both do an extracurricular together in a small group and he tends to act normally then. We actually dated two years ago (middle school was a weird time) and at the time he still generally acted like a decent person. Because of this, I know that he can be a really genuine and caring person, but he does a lot to cover this up, and he is also very picky about who he is genuine to. He still had moments where he was not great, but these didn’t happen often. The following school year (we had broken up) he started to struggle socially and lost a lot, if not all, of his close friends. 


I do feel bad because it must suck to not have someone you are close to in school. But at the same time, he lost his friends because he began to act worse and worse to people around him. 



Quick examples that bothered me: 



- Telling our gym softball team that we should have a ‘good-bad rotation’ for who bats, then labeling all the guys as good and girls as bad. there were some girls who were clearly capable of performing to the standards of ‘good’.  this really frustrated me. 
- Using a ‘kahoot hacker’ to spam our class kahoot with bots and make it unplayable.
- Seriously saying I was  ‘just an idiot’ for asking about the rules of handball (in front of our whole gym class)
- Arguing with our math teacher about getting a better grade until she cried
- Helping the other team score points while playing a basketball warmup, by throwing them the ball and yelling “OOPS!!!!”. the coach asked him to stop and he told her “sorry I just have terrible aim”. he plays basketball on a competitive team. 
- Making it very clear that he is better than the rest of us at basketball by saying we are shit or babies ect. 



I’ll call him PT. 



Those were a few! Anyways. As I said above, he plays basketball competitively so he is quite good at it. We were playing a 3v3 game one day, and I was playing with two tall guys on my team. We were against PT’s team. I was shorter than my teammates, so I was defending the shortest  player on the other team, which was not PT. 


PT was bothering me the entire game, making small comments and being a douche. Of the six people that were playing, only two of them play basketball on a team. The rest of us know the rules but it’s just a general understanding. PT liked to accentuate this fact by yelling out “FOUL!” every other second. I would have let this be; however he only addressed it at our team. Anytime their team did something obviously wrong he would shrug and say “ref didn’t see it”....... There was no ref. 


As one of my teammates is dribbling the ball up the side of the court, PT saunters over and pushes him with both hands. It wasn’t strong enough to make the guy fall over, but he dropped the ball as he caught himself. PT now had the ball. Having seen the whole thing and being very frustrated with everything he does, I yelled “FOUL!” to see if he would do anything. He stopped, asked me “what are you gonna do about it?” And then continued moving. 


What did I do? I did something about it! Being a 5’5 unskilled at basketball girl, and him being a 6 foot something basketball playing male, I didn’t have many options. So as he dribbled past me, I simply stuck out my foot and tripped him. He fell, and completely sprawled onto the floor. The perfect, ideal trip. The one you see in movies. I was completely satisfied with what I had done. It created a loud noise and people stopped to look. Some laughed. He just stayed there for a solid ten seconds. He got up and stopped talking after that. 


A week or so later, I found out his grandma had died some days I had tripped him. I didn’t realize that this had happened and I started to feel really bad. Maybe he had been acting out because he was mourning? It also wasn’t exactly my place to do anything to him at the time. He hadn’t pushed me, so I’m not sure I had the right to trip him. Him pushing this guy was only a two second thing but tripping him may have been to extreme. 



Tell me:



Am I a petty asshole for acting out like that? 



Thanks :)