No, it didn't make me stronger. It fucked up my interpersonal interactions until well into my twenties. But I haven't figured out a way to successfully explain this to people who want to impose the "made you stronger" narrative on my life.
Fortunately, Rachel Simmons, author of Odd Girl Out: The Hidden Culture of Aggression in Girls, can explain it more articulately than I can:
These girls described feeling unfamiliar with the most basic rules of relationship, things taken for granted by any socially adjusted person. They no longer feel certain of what makes people angry or upset, not to mention how to tell when someone is feeling that way. Their emotional radar is incapacitated. This can turn a girl into a cautious ghost of her former self, stifled and silenced by fear.
This fear is felt by degrees among girls who struggle with everyday conflict. One of the chief symptoms of girls' loss of self-esteem is the sense of being crazy, of not being able to trust one's own interpretation of people's actions or events. Did she just look at her when I said that? Was she joking? Did she roll her eyes? Not save the seat on purpose? Lie about her plans? Tell me that she'd invited me when she hadn't? The girls I'd interviewed confirmed a similar unrest, the disturbing belief that what they were sure they knew or saw wasn't that at all, but was in fact something quite different. In discord between girls, gestures of conflict often contradict speech, confounding their intended targets.
I always felt like society was operating on another secret set of rules that was completely different from what I was being taught, and I had to guess what was really expected of me. This feeling didn't start to go away until I was in my mid-20s, a decade after the bullying ended, and nearly 200% longer than it lasted. This is what bullying does to people.