Bruce Springsteen is one of the biggest rock stars in the world, and he said that the people he knew growing up likely wouldn’t have predicted this. According to Springsteen, very little of his cool factor was present when he was a child. He said he was the target of bullies and was, in his own eyes, a “loser.”

Bruce Springsteen said he dealt with bullies growing up

When Springsteen was growing up, his family moved in with his grandparents. He believed this style of upbringing set him apart from his classmates.

“No matter how much I want to, no matter how hard I try, ‘the way things are’ eludes me,” he wrote in the book Born to Run, adding, “I desperately want to fit in, but the world I have created with the unwarranted freedom from my grandparents has turned me into an unintentional rebel, an outcast weirdo misfit sissy boy. I am alienating, alienated, and socially homeless … I am seven years old.”

“Amongst my male classmates, there are mainly good souls. Some, however, are rude, predatory, and unkind,” he wrote. “It is here I receive the bullying all aspiring rock stars must undergo and suffer in seething, raw, humiliating silence, the great ‘leaning up against the chain-link fence as the world spins around you, without you, in rejection of you’ playground loneliness that is essential fuel for the coming fire.”