Usually when I tell my friends I was bullied in grade school they just laugh with me for a few seconds, and then it’s over. We joke about it, and it is funny sometimes, but when I look back on it, I realize the effect it had on me as a little girl and how it’s still affecting me today.
Now, I’m not going to lie to you and say that I was a loner, got physically hurt, and would be scared to go to school every morning. That’s not the case at all. The picture at the top of this screen is, in fact, a horribly embarrassing picture of me when I was eight years old. I was a normal kid. I played sports, had a lot of friends, went to sleepovers, and did everything a normal eight-year-old girl does. But I was also getting made fun of by the same group of boys all the time at my school.
Around this age, I had a small speech impediment. I had a really deep, hoarse voice for a young girl, so I was going to speech therapy some days after school. There was a group of mostly older boys who constantly made fun of my voice and the way I talked. I would usually just laugh and shake it off, but it really bothered me. Eventually my raspy voice went away, and so did the name-calling, and I quickly got over that. But with the end of that came a whole new joke that I was the butt of.
Most of the boys in my class and some of the girls told me I was fat all of the time. Now, keep in mind that I wasn’t the skinniest kid in the world, but I was in no way a really fat kid. Still, I was made fun of on more than a few occasions about the way my body was shaped, something that I had absolutely no control over and something that was changing and growing every single day.
After a lot of torment, when I was 11, I begged my parents to let me transfer schools, and after my parents talked to my teachers and found out that I really was in a bad place, I left. I went to a different middle school where nobody made fun of me and I had friends who actually liked me.
Looking back on it, I realize that those small instances still affect me today. I am probably the most self-conscious, least confident girl you will ever meet. I struggled so much in high school to feel accepted and beautiful but no matter what I did, I always hated the person who I was looking at. While I don’t hate myself anymore, I still have days when I struggle to be confident. For the longest time I could never believe that a boy would ever find me attractive. I have never felt like the beautiful young woman that I know I am. I used to always wonder why I felt like that, but I’ve always known why.
Making fun of a little girl who is sensitive and vulnerable is the worst thing you could do. That group of boys who thought they were being funny tainted my entire perspective of myself. I was just a little girl who had huge dreams but would go to school every day and live the rest of her teenage years truly believing that she was ugly and not good enough, all because of some bad jokes.
I think the moral of my story is that you never know how someone will interpret your words. Some people are more sensitive than others. Don’t get me wrong, my friends and I joke around and make fun of each other all of the time, but it’s because we’re mature enough to understand when a joke is really just a joke. Saying the wrong thing to a kid can change their whole life, and I can only hope and pray that group of mean little boys have grown up and started to understand that hurting someone’s feelings shouldn’t be used for your own personal enjoyment.
I hope all the kids in the world who have been corrupted into thinking badly of themselves have also grown up to realize that those situations are just things that some kids made up for fun. Your worth and your value is so much more than what a few kids have to say about you.
