Creating a better future
Posted: 12/13/2013
My name is Tracy and I am 38 years old.
Sometimes I wish I knew how to express in words what bullying has done to me, how it has shaped all aspects of my life. Adults often forget that children see and know more than we give them credit for. As a child, I was very pale, very very skinny and had big thick glasses. The other kids would make fun of me so badly that I started hiding in the coat closet so I didn't have to go out on the playground during recess. I had no friends in school and by the time I was in sixth grade every single one of my teachers in grade school had commented to my parents that I was lonely and had no friends. There were many incidents where the teachers or the principal not only knew what was going on, but witnessed it. Nothing was ever done and by the time I was in first grade I had stopped telling anyone what was going on including my parents.
In middle school things got worse. There were 3 times more people to deal with, there were beatings in the girls locker room, with the onset of puberty it meant that both boys and girls alike were telling me how ugly I was and how I was a loser. By the end of junior high I was suicidal and only the love of my father and the lady across the street would keep me going.
In high school I got contact lenses and people began to stop calling me names to my face. I became invisible, I wasn't good enough to be invited to anyone's house or birthday parties and I was never asked out on a date by a boy, but I wasn't beat up or called names.
Through my entire 13 years of public school I was never picked for a team. Never asked to join a group for a group project. Never given the student of the month award. Never asked to participate in school activities such as home coming. No teacher, No Assistant's, No principal's ever stepped in and stood up for me or did anything to stop what was going on.
I graduated in 1993 and by 2000 I began to experience severe depression and anger. I began taking medication and going to therapy. But there is no happy ending for me. 20 years later I can tell you in vivid detail about a lot of the events that happened to me from first grade through my senior year. I can tell you that even today my class mates do not consider me someone that is worth knowing, even on social media web pages.
There are scars inside of me that will never fade, There is anger and depression that I don't know how to get past, that will never go away. There are mornings when I wake up and I still think all of those horrible things they said about me are true. But the worst cross to bear is to look into the eyes of my five year old daughter every day and pray and hope with every fiber of my soul that she doesn't suffer the same way that I did.
I want people to stop and think about what they do, and what they say because you can never go back, take back or give back what's lost once the moment is gone. If I can raise the awareness, give any child hope or happiness, if I can make a difference in the life of our children then I have taken one more small step towards creating a better future as well as my own future and taking back what I lost.
By: Tracy
