It probably took me longer to decide what to call this than it did to write it. I was originally going to address it to friends – but the people I am talking to were far from that. Then I was going to address it to past acquaintances – but the dictionary definition of an acquaintance is “somebody that you slightly know but is not as close as a friend” and considering I tried to avoid how could I know you? Then I thought I could be blunt and address it to my childhood tormentors or bullies – but then I realised that this went against my own beliefs. I don’t believe you can truly be a bully unless you have the intent of hurting someone – and I’d like to believe that none of you did. I’d like to believe that you were all just trying to find yourselves like I was and you unawarely took the tensions this bought out on me without realising it.
I want to firstly say thank you. Without the trials of my past that you gave me I would not be where I am today. Although in my naivety of my childhood and teens I may have seen my constant paranoia, self-confidence issues, desperation to please, fear of failure and antisocial tendencies in school as personality flaws – they actually fuelled me to try and prove you wrong, and challenge myself more to achieve, I made me want to show you what I was capable of. I have grown past most of these things now, however traces of them will always remain a part of me. As I sit here now at the age of 18, ready to start a new chapter of my life and move to a big city, I want to close the book once and for all by addressing the causes of my most personal demons. Demons that stemmed from some of the decisions you made and my responses to them. I do not want to point the finger and blame you for the dark parts of my life – if I did I could have plastered your names across this post – I just want you to understand that although you never openly abused me – you never hit me or called me names – the isolation you lead me to is still bullying. It has taken me a while to realise this but social manipulation (spreading or making up rumours, ignoring people and gossiping) is bullying. I know you may not have intended it and I may have unintentionally given you reason to want to do this by not wording things in the right way or having different opinions; but those things happen in life and it is no reason to make somebody scared to go to school or paranoid about making friends
I don’t remember most of what was said to me or what happened at primary school. But what stands out is that I remember the feeling of having no friends and the feeling that I was the odd one out. Ironically it is not the names that I vaguely remember being along the lines of geek, and teachers pet and weird – but the moments that made me feel that isolation that still stick with me today. These were simple things like one of you questioning why on the playground when I got the lead part in a class play we did in our music lessons when I was 9 or 10. That simple word was the one that broke me the most as I went from feeling so proud of myself to feeling like I didn’t deserve to be where I was. I then remember getting a small prize the next week for learning all my lines and someone saying as we left that it “wasn’t really good as I only got the part in the first place because my mum worked at the school”. I never told anyone this – I just held the doubt inside that I wasn’t deserving. I was scared that if I told an adult or anyone that they would tell me that was the truth and take the part away from me. At the time I didn’t understand why you treated me like this, I thought you all hated me. But now I see that it was your own ways of coping with growing up and learning about socialising. You may not have realised how much you were hurting me, you may have thought that leaving me out or trying to turn my friends against me was fun, you may have thought lying to try and get me into trouble was a joke – but for me it was far from that. I remember repeatedly coming home from school and crying as I neared the end I even tried to hide it from my parents so they wouldn’t tell the school and I wouldn’t have to face you in person. But this letter isn’t for me to put you down for what you did. It is to gain closure for myself that I have told you how you made me feel so I can more on knowing I have finally addressed those years of my life – even if it is 7 years later.
I started secondary school hoping things would change; and to begin with they sort of did. It wasn’t until I reached the dreaded year nine that all our teachers warned us would be the making or breaking of most friendships that I began to feel dragged down and pushed away. As issues with you increased, little things like nobody wanting me in their room on year 7 camp or you telling me I wasn’t good enough to sing in our music lesson project placed doubts in my mind. I remember the tipping points being when some of you invited a load of people into our room on a residential trip abroad then leaving me to apologise to the staff when they told us off for the noise. I then remember you shouting at me and storming off during dinner when I asked you why you left me to deal with your mistake – that was the last time I remember choosing to engage in discussion with someone who I had fallen out with. I then remember one of you laughing at me for getting a C in my year 9 chemistry exam because it wasn’t one of the highest in the class. You don’t know how gutted I was about that and how much I struggled to even get that grade. I began to try and do more and more to distract myself from the people around me – junior leadership team, children’s university leader, dance projects, Arabic classes – anything to take me away from having to socialise. Yet, when I applied for prefect in year 10 my escape became my biggest demon. I understand that it may not have been to best choice to compare to other people – but you never seemed to understand that I was reassuring a friend that he deserved that tie and position as much as you, not that you didn’t. I never once said that you shouldn’t got in like you accused me of. I never said you were not good enough. Yet you took this little misunderstanding and embarrassed me in front of the whole class. I still remember your exact words to this day, the two sentences that you may not realise made me scared to come to school for well over a year. “You better watch what you say about me” you told me then when I asked what you simply said “I know that you told him I shouldn’t have got in so you better be careful about who is listening”. You probably don’t remember saying this but every time I saw you for years to come and every time at college someone asked me if I knew you and asked why I didn’t like you (which I don’t know how they knew, but to this day I want you to know was untrue as I still like you and regret what happened to our friendship) those words would ring in my head. You may not have realised but when we sat in the office after I ran out of science class in tears and my dad phoned the school because I was crying at home every night; I was terrified of you. I was scared that you had made people believe the things about me that had just been misunderstood – I know you weren’t being malicious, you just had been told something along the grapevine that had been changed and misconstrued. Yet when you told the teacher you understood the mistake and we shook hands and apologised for what had happened, that was the biggest weight lifted off of me. Yet when I left the office not long after you, you probably don’t realise that I heard you telling everyone pretty much how ridiculous I was and how stupid it was that the teacher was trying to justify me being a b***h. It felt like a 1000 tonne weight had crushed me and I couldn’t find the courage to tell someone and go through the pain of relief turning to paranoia and fear again. I instead just dealt with the isolation and nasty comments I received and I tried to carry on with the few friends I felt I could truly trust. I hid behind a smile and chatty exterior when talking to teachers or answering questions in class, whilst pilling on more optional work to hide how I truly felt – broken. I felt like I was the only person who was like me and that I was never going to be good enough to amount to everything. I once again stopped telling my parents when I had a bad day through fear of them telling the school and having to go through everything that happened before again. Through year 10 and 11 all I really remember is putting more and more pressure on myself to achieve so I could say I had amounted to something – which was pretty difficult when I felt alone and worthless most of the time I was in school. What I regret is that the few moments I do remember with clarity aren’t the happiest ones. I remember when my friend couldn’t make a concert through no fault on her’s, so I had to sing on stage on my own. As I stood there shaking you laughed and whispered about me the whole was through and gossiped about it the next day thinking I wouldn’t notice – but I did and it just put me down a little bit more. I remember you not wanting to sign my year book so some of you just put it off till we had left, I remember one of you laughing when I got a question wrong in maths and when I just missed out on my grade I wanted in history. But what I can see now looking back is that it wasn’t just me who was suffering – it was probably you all too. You probably had similar insecurities and paranoia to me but instead of internalising it you let it out. It was probably selfish of me to think it was only me who was feeling the way I did, but all I want you to realise now looking back is how hat you did made me feel. Knowing you have thought about that is enabling me to lock away the personal demons that arose from those situations and move on as a different person.
I always had a gut feeling college wouldn’t be much better with my mental outlook and personal doubts manifesting themselves in me through paranoia and body issues that I just internalised (thinking that if nobody else knew I would also forget). However, when you sent me that message accusing me of lying and saying things about something as petty as an ex-boyfriend that had been taken out of context I was hurt – but when I answered you, apologised for the misunderstanding and you still insisted constantly that without evidence you would not believe me – I couldn’t internalise it any longer so I turned to a friend for advice. Yet when you then called me and shouted at me down the phone I could not face seeing you and it broke me as I knew you didn’t intend to be mean. I knew you just wanted to stand up for your friends and have a transparent friendship – it is such as shame that petty rumours, he said-she said gossip, misunderstandings and our own insecurities came between that. However, although I lost few of you as friends through this and I will always be sorry for that, I want you to know that I know you grew as people from it and so did I. For a while I honestly just felt like complete crap but looking back I realise the drive it gave me to achieve what I have to date which allows me to close the book on my education and growing up in this town before I start afresh in a couple of weeks.
With this letter I not only intended to address you and let you know how you made me feel so I could get closure. But I also wanted to give you closure if you needed it. I wanted you to know that I am not bitter or angry and I still don’t hate you. And if you hadn’t realised how I felt, I am glad that my feelings are now transparent if they weren’t at the time. Yet through this letter I also hope that people who read this but don’t fit personally into mine and yours’s stories realise that people don’t always intend to be bullies – and realising that can not only help them, but help you to cope to. This doesn’t mean accepting it like I did – as I know now that internalising so much was far from healthy for me, but it can help you to talk to that person (or someone else) to help resolve it. I also hope it has helped people realise that social isolation IS BULLYING. Even if it seems petty and others don’t see it as so – spreading rumours, ignoring people and breaking up friendships repeatedly is bullying and you should never tolerate it. If you have been through anything similar to me, which I know is menial compared to what most people go through but still heavily affected me personally, then you are not alone. Actions do not have to be obvious and immediate severe to impact you. Like putting a frog in water and slowly heating it so it doesn’t realise what is happening till it is to late – slow and small actions can build up like a wall around you until you feel trapped in your own body and isolated from the world. I want you to know that there is a light and asking for advice and resolutions will help.
I end this letter to you by thanking you once again for shaping who I am today, and reminding those not a part of my story that bullying in any shape or form is not OK and resolving these situations will help you to overcome them a lot quicker than internalising them like I did will. I know feel that I can close the book on my past disputes and say lock the issues that this part of my life exposed.
This was inspired by a video I saw posted by Riyadh K where he called one of his school bullies (linked here) and I hope will help and inspire some of you. If you need any advice with bullying of any shape or form then you can visit stand up to bullying and Ditch the Label for professional advice or message me on my contact page.
