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I have been thinking recently about my childhood and how that is impacting me now. I have started remembering things that I worked really hard to forget and move past. Mainly these are about how i was bullied as a child/teenager by someone i thought was my best friend.
At primary school i remember that i was not allowed to play with anyone else. She was controlling and manipulative. I had to play with her, exactly how she wanted to play. If I wanted to play with other people, she would tell me that if i wasn't friends with her I wouldn't have any friends. It was at the point where I hoped every day that she would be sick so I didn't have to see her. For some reason, I didn't see this as a problematic friendship until many years later......
Once we got to secondary school, things got worse. I remember seeing it as my opportunity to make new friends and branch out a bit but that made her more controlling than ever. I don't have clear memories of everything she did, but I know that I cried almost every day, often during class. My anxiety was increasing by the day so when teachers asked what was wrong I would freeze and not say a word. She would kick and pinch me constantly. I would occasionally try to tell a teacher what was going on but the only outcome of that was to be told to ignore her or be sat down with her in an office together and told to apologise to each other. I spent many years trying to work out what I had done to hurt her.
She tried to turn other children against me, spreading rumours and actually trying to pay people to not be friends with me.
She would sit in the classroom holding sharp objects to her wrists telling me she would cut herself and it was all because of me. I received texts from her and people claiming to be family members saying she was going to kill herself by jumping in front of a train and it was all because of me. Often I would also be given instructions on how to prevent this from happening.
I have ignored all of this for a long time but the memories are coming back to me strongly. I am starting to understand how it has affected my life. I was always anxious but the bullying made it so much worse. Teachers repeatedly made no effort to help me or find out the problem because i was doing well in class. They did not understand that learning was my coping mechanism. I learnt not to trust people in authority and those people who made promises to help anyone who needed it were not trustworthy either. If anything they would make things worse. I learnt that my value was in my academic achievement and that was more important than my mental health. I learnt that I was responsible for other peoples feelings and behaviours.
I am working really hard to undo some of these lessons. I don't feel angry at the girl who hurt me, looking back she was clearly a child with her own issues who did not get the help she needed. But I am angry at the teachers who ignored me, even when i cried in their classes and begged them to understand that the reason i wasn't contributing to class discussions was because i really couldn't. I wish someone had taken the time to sit with me, listen to me, help me understand what was happening or even given me the language to describe it to myself. I didn't use the word bullying or anxiety to describe any of this until I was 18.
I don't know what I hoped to gain from writing this all down, but the thoughts were going round and round in my head so i thought maybe they would slow down a bit if i put it in writing.
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