This one’s kind of a long story, I'm sorry, but if you could bear with me till the end I would be very grateful.

PRIMARY SCHOOL:

I don’t even remember how it got started. Maybe I was smaller than all the other kids or a bit of a nerd or just generally weird. Anyway, for as long as I can remember, practically everyone in the school had something against me. They called me names, said I smelled, left me out and said I carried a “disease” that they felt the need to “inject” themselves against (literally they would grab a pen or something and pretend to inject themselves with it).

And whenever I tried to fight back (this got violent sometimes so I won’t go into details), it would be me that got into trouble for it, and the bullies would be seen as the victims, despite the fact it was blindingly obvious that they were the ones bullying me. Of course, the teachers turned a blind eye whenever they witnessed anyone bullying me when I didn’t fight back, so I suppose, in a way the teachers bullied me aswell.

I had a “friend” who shall remain nameless, who played along with the bullies. Her excuse was “I’m still your friend but I don’t want to lose friends”. I just kind of went along with this for a while until she started spreading rumours about me, which I decided was more than just “playing along”. I quickly ended my “friendship” with her.

I had other friends; some of them wanted to help me beat the bullies which, at first, was fun. But then I started to get a bit distant and untrusting, thinking they may be secretly helping the bullies or picking on me behind my back. I just kind of drifted away from anyone and everyone, unwittingly making myself an easier target. I felt like I had nobody.

This was until year 6, when I got a teacher who had been bullied herself in the past; she stuck up for me. Of course, she couldn’t protect me in the playground but in class when the other kids left me out or picked on me she would launch into an hour long lecture about why bullying was wrong and a terrible thing to do and how we should be glad that everyone is different but at the same time we’re all human so we should accept everyone…and so on and so forth. We missed several boring lessons due to this, and even the slightest little thing would set her off, so we actually welcomed these lectures.

Soon, it would be time for us to leave that school and leave all that behind us. Roll on high school!

HIGH SCHOOL:

For a while, I was fine, I decided I wasn’t going to be a little weirdo anymore, I was actually going to attempt to make friends. However, the first friend I made was a girl with some kind of special needs, shall we say, and of course everyone at school bullied her.

I’ll outline a specific incident so you get the idea: this one time, we were in PE and it was at the time when any and all trousers/shorts/skirts girls wore had to be hipsters, as dictated by fashion. In the changing rooms, she pulled her shorts up to her waist and tucked her shirt in, as her kit was a bit big for her. I was in the gym at the time, hanging out with some other girls I knew. When she walked into the gym, some of the other girls (not in my group, just to be clear) started laughing at her and pulling their shorts up to their chests. My group decided among ourselves “well we could intervene, or we could wait for our teacher to come in and catch them in the act. Sure enough, the teacher walked in right when they were picking on her and said “Is that your impression of Simon Cowell?” At this point my friend ran out of the gym crying, teacher went out to ask her what was wrong, then came down on the bullies like a ton of bricks and gave them all detention.

In a way, I felt a bit jealous of my friend because she had people to defend her, and I didn’t. I once nearly told her about what happened to me at primary school but decided against it.

As the bullying got worse she began to take more extreme measures of dealing with it: skipping school, avoiding certain classes, getting into fights…and eventually self-harming. One day, she brought a knife to school in her bag. She showed it to me a break time and I nearly screamed. I didn’t know what to do—should I tell someone or keep quiet? As it happened, I didn’t need to intervene; she told one of the deputy heads about it. He was understanding, but she had still done something very serious. It was around this time that the people in charge of the school decided she wasn’t cut out for mainstream education, and transferred her to a special needs’ school. This was about halfway through year 10 (penultimate year of British high school).

After she left the school, I was alone again. I tried hanging out with different groups, but like I’ve mentioned previously, I was very untrusting and felt like an outsider whenever I tried to join a new group. I always felt like “the new kid” that everyone else secretly hates.

So these days life is better. I’m at university, have friends and have joined a great society who are basically just one big, happy family. But I’m still untrusting. I still get the feeling that some of my friends secretly hate me. I’m afraid to ask people for help with my studies because they’ll think I’m stupid. And maybe somewhere, something inside me is telling me that this isn’t me, that I don’t deserve to be happy, to have friends or to be successful. And although I’ve never told another living soul this story, there is one person who I’ve considered telling, and almost told the entire thing on numerous occasions. And the greatest irony? She’s probably reading this right now.