The Real M.E Part 3, Sticks and Stones.....

I am about to share something with you that I find very difficult to talk about. I am going to tell you from the heart what it felt like to live my life in constant fear of verbal abuse. I have considered if those who bullied me will ever read this as with the excess of social networking it is a high probability. However, some of the bullies most likely wouldn't even realise this is about them because quite frankly they probably didn't even consider themselves to be bullies and for them the past is long forgotten. I have found that not only do people change as their lives evolve but people also create their own memories of events and therefore have different versions of them. If I am honest I really don't think their opinion is of any interest to me, I just hope that because they have grown up and had children of their own they have developed more awareness of how their actions affect others.

I will take you back to when I was thirteen. When I left High School I went to a school slightly out of my catchment area. It took me a long time to get accepted into this school and I was so happy when they finally said yes because they were the only community college in my area to do drama as a GCSE. I had always had dreams of being an actress or a singer and seeing my name in lights and my photo on the front of all the glossy magazines. I remember walking into school on my first day and feeling so overwhelmed by the size of the place and immensely confused by the maze of corridors contained within it. I didn't know many people and the ones I did know, the ones who had been in my year at the last school I didn't really get on with great so it was quite intimidating being surrounded by hundreds of strangers. On my induction day just before the Summer holidays I had been asked out by a boy in my class and I had felt the pressure to say yes even though I wasn't sure I wanted to. Over the Summer we met up a couple of times but I was pretty uncomfortable around him as boys were still scary to me and I had a pretty limited experience of dating. Sure, I had been on a couple of cinema dates and had a few awkward snogs at the Youth Club Disco but when it came to anything more or people saying they had feelings for me I would run a mile (as I personally think it should be at that age..God I sound like a pensioner). Anyway, there was a real divide at this school between the regular kids and those who conversed with a more well spoken tone. These girls tended to be the ones with all the power and friends in our year and because I had started to 'date' one of their 'gang' they didn't like me from day one. This escalated when I dumped the guy as even though he was pretty good looking I just didn't want a boyfriend at such a young age. He didn't like it either and the dent on his ego caused a bit of a bitter streak in his attitude towards me. I had done some child modelling for Next and George at Asda and he decided to tell everyone I had modelled gloves because I was 'too ugly' for anything else. It was obviously a cruel joke but the girls in his circle of friends latched onto it. I say girls but there was one main ring leader, (Girl Z) and the other two just sat back and laughed without speaking. These girls were in two of my classes. In one subject Girl Z barely got through a lesson without shouting something mean at me. It was usually something like 'did you really do modelling?. What for, balaclavas?' Or 'Ugly Slag'. It was shouted at a volume the rest of the class could hear and on many occasions even the teacher heard. He would sometimes say 'that's enough' but she would never get into trouble for it and there was no effort made to stop it. The friends she sat with, including about three or four lads would usually laugh really loud and a few times one of them would shout something as well. I remember feeling really really self conscious and wishing that the floor would open up and swallow me whole. At my previous school I had been bullied about my looks (I would rather not go into great detail hence why I didn't mention it previously) and now it was happening again I felt very paranoid and almost ashamed of my appearance. I began to feel frightened of the words and I felt a cloud of butterflies flitting around in my stomach at the very thought of them. I answered back a few times but my mouth just didn't know what to speak, especially to her favourite question 'Why are you so ugly?'. What possible response could I give when the whole classes' eyes were upon me?. I started dropping out of the lesson, it got to the point where I only attended it once every two weeks. Nobody ever questioned it, my teacher never complained or seemed to care about it. I don't know how I managed to pass my exam in this subject but luckily I did as well as all my other subjects. I had gone from a student predicted mainly A's in my exams to someone who skipped lessons and was expecting to fail every exam.

Meanwhile I had been suffering in another subject, my beloved Drama. It started about three months into the year with three girls calling me a 'slag' or a 'bitch'. I reported them to my teacher and two of the girls appeared to stop their horrible words yet for a while they continued to show their distaste for me with threatening looks. However, the other girl (Girl W) refused to be pacified. She was relentless in her pursuit of me and nothing was going to stop her. We had a game in Drama where you had to close your eyes and put your thumbs in the air and three people had to go around the group and lightly pull someone's thumb, then the 'victims' had to guess who it was (yeah I know what you are thinking, the lamest game ever). Well Girl W chose me and instead of lightly pulling my thumb she yanked it so hard it felt like she had broken it. Luckily that was the only time I experienced physical bullying at that school but it shook me up. I felt physically sick before a Drama lesson, it felt like someone had put my insides through a mincer. The second I entered the room I could immediately sense her eyes on me. We had to sit in a huge circle for a lot of lessons and she would sit there staring at me for the whole hour. It was constant, she rarely moved her attention away from me and her gaze burned like a fire. I could feel it spreading up my neck and through my entire face until my cheeks were throbbing with a red hot angry blush. I tried to pretend I wasn't bothered, I desperately avoided meeting her eyes with my own but I think my faked ignorance infuriated her and trying to get some reaction from me became a bit of a game to her. Because she could be disruptive she was often sat right next to the teacher in our circle of twenty five students yet when her vicious tongue spat out the word 'bitch' or 'slag' at me he would totally ignore it. My so called friend never stuck up for me but part of me didn't blame her for keeping quiet because she probably didn't want abuse to come her way. There was never a lesson that went by without her verbally attacking me and in the end it broke me and I decided to drop out of Drama. It was a heartbreaking decision but I had put up with this for a year and I could no longer do so. She still pursued me on the bus journey home or if she saw me around school but it took the edge off knowing that I wouldn't have to sit through an hour of it daily. It then became a more like a game of cat and mouse, I lived with the fear of knowing that she could strike at any time and battled to avoid bumping into her every day.

At this point it felt like the whole school was against me. I was ostracised, often being ignored and left out of conversations and group discussions. People would talk about me as if I wasn't there when they were sitting right next to me. I was treated like I had some infectious disease nobody wanted to catch. Negative opinion of me seemed to spread through the school like a Mexican wave. Other groups of girls would make comments and threaten me and it felt like everywhere I turned someone would be waiting to say something nasty. I tried to appear unfazed to everyone because I thought if I looked like I wasn't bothered people would get bored. I worried about the way I looked at people in case it gave them reason to attack me. I thought there was something wrong with me. I became very self conscious, very aware of my outer appearance and very skilled at adjusting my own body language and reading other peoples. This is something that has followed me into adulthood and has affected my relationships with partners (in both good and bad ways). I have however learnt that my first gut instinct on certain things particularly negative behaviour of partners whether it be through words or actions is usually right and that that I should trust it.

One positive to come out of the situation was that I made some different friends, friends that appeared quiet on the outside but that were lovely, kind and fun. Luckily these friends hung out in places around the school I knew Girl W wouldn't go. These friends were what got me through the hard times yet I rarely discussed my situation in detail with them. We spent a lot of times hiding in the library, somewhere Girl W had probably never heard of but our loud voices were frowned upon and eventually the librarians twigged that we weren't there to do any actual work and we were advised to leave and only return when we had actual work to do. We also found a great way to escape the bullies at lunch was to go into the approved rainy days classrooms which were monitored by teachers or teaching assistants. I learnt to avoid many places such as the school canteen, the 'smoking corner' and the village where we were allowed to go at lunch time. I worked out a safer way to get to lessons and this involved being at least five minutes late to every lesson so the corridors were quiet and free of crowds that may contain a bully. Still, despite this I scuttled down them like a mouse being pursued by a angry cat and with my heart racing and my stomach fluttering. One task I couldn't avoid during school hours was using the toilet but I found a way to make this 'safer' too. My friend and I discovered a disabled toilet near the staff room and if I needed to go I would always use this toilet, even if it meant rushing from right the other end of the school. Mum worried about me because even if it was dark I would wait until everyone else in the school had left before I got my bus home but she didn't know that I would deliberately miss the first bus to school so there was no risk of bumping into her on the journey. I would stand out in the rain and return home soaked through. I became desperate in my want to become invisible. I changed my appearance and started wearing track suits and trainers (believe it or not these were quite popular back then following Sporty Spice's fame). I even had my hair cut much shorter and dyed dark brown but none of this stopped the harassment, in fact one day she snapped 'nice new trainers, I wanted them but you got them you bitch'. I reported the bullying over and over again, Mum sent letters to the school almost weekly yet nothing changed. They tried really thoughtless things such as sitting Girl W and I in a room with a teacher to 'discuss our problems' but she just laughed while I sat there with my insides churning like a washing machine. The most idiotic idea they ever had was to send us on an anti bullying workshop together in the town centre. I had to spend the entire day with her and she just found the whole thing incredibly amusing. She had a face that liked smiling but it was a smile forged with sinister intent, one used to create fear. A smile that for two years ruined my life. My attendance at school for those years was so poor as due to the stress I picked up every virus going, my Mum even got a warning letter about it. I did make it through my GCSE's though and was amazed to pass them all...except for the D I got in maths...yuk!

When I decided to stay on for my A Levels I desperately wanted to study Performing Arts and this meant I had to ask the teacher of the subject if they would accept me onto the course. As you probably can guess it was the same teacher. His reply was yes you can do the subject but 'you need to get over your problems interacting with people'. I was lost for words and lucky that he left the school two months later, taking early retirement. People say 'sticks and stones may break my bones but names will never hurt me' yet verbal abuse can leave permanent emotional scars including deep-seated feelings of low self worth and insignificance. It can affect people in some way or another for the rest of their lives giving them difficulty trusting or a constant fear of certain social situations. Ostracism is very much a silent but in some cases deadly type of bullying. It is an invisible, persistent form of abuse often used to diminish the value and presence of a person which is why it has a prevalence over other types of bullying in the adult workplace environment. Because it is bullies have the security of knowing that their victim has little proof to document in order to highlight the treatment they are receiving. Giving someone the silent treatment is just that, silent. This type of bullying is so powerful in the way it eats away at a persons self worth that it can cause both immediate and long term psychological scars. I have no statistics to quote and I am certainly not a qualified psychologist but I do wonder how many unexplained suicides in adults as well as children that have been provoked by this and the cause has never been discovered. A conservative estimate by BeatBullying.org suggest that at least 20 young people a year commit suicide due to bullying and a 2006 survey revealed that 31 million school days are lost each year because of it. I am not sure if this is just the UK but it is shocking nevertheless.

In my own personal opinion I believe that verbal abuse combined with ostracism is the most destructive of all bullying types. It certainly has affected me throughout my adult life. As I have previously mentioned the stress definitely added to if not caused my health conditions. I have suffered with periods of low self esteem and self doubt and a feeling that I unloveable. Whereas in the past I was a chatterbox because I loved to talk my loquaciousness is now often used as a defence mechanism to cover my true feelings when I am nervous or to fill in silences which overwhelm me. This isn't always a bad thing but it can lead people to make assumptions that I am well when I am feeling pretty poorly. As the tiredness rises so does the pain and therefore the more stressed I get which leads me to talk lots more. Even friends have been known to say 'you seem happy and well today' when it's the exact opposite but it's not their fault for not being mind readers. I am affected in many ways but one major positive is that it has made me embrace my unique style and treasure my quirky personality. It has made me absolutely determined not to conform to 'normality' and to be proud of that fact. I love clothes, I love bright colours and jewellery and I love expressing myself through my creativity. Nobody can take my artistic side away from me and I refuse to blend into the background.  Another positive is that I have made a few amazing friends that love me for who I am and that I trust and will treasure for life. I have also been in several tumultuous relationships all of which have taught me a lot about myself, made me less tolerant of negative behaviour and hyper aware of emotional manipulation. My confidence in who I am is growing but my social confidence has been up and down and is known to change like the tide. I have grown up massively the past five years and I have fought back against my fears and continue to do so. I have to don't I, otherwise the bullies have truly won.