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Growing up I had a cognitive impairment which I got made fun of for a lot.
When I talked, I had difficulty formulating language and during middle school pretty much everyone I knew picked on me for this. During middle school I nearly committed suicide and this difficult experience in middle school lead to a lot of trouble in the following years.
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I had difficulty formulating language and during middle school pretty much everyone I knew picked on me for this. During middle school I nearly committed suicide and this difficult experience in middle school lead to a lot of trouble in the following years.
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After middle school I made it to a point where I had friends and a vibrant social life but I was still made fun of a lot for supposedly being less intelligent than everyone. I had difficulty carrying on conversations but I was still very smart receiving a 3.66 GPA with little to no studying in high school and getting accepted to a good university.
When I was at UNH I was still being made fun of for my social ineptitude and some of my social quirks. It was painful and this pain I felt lead to a lot of my mental rigidity which developed into schizoaffective disorder. Leading into my first episode and during it I was trying to improve my intelligence as much as possible so that people wouldn’t make fun of me.
My secret fear was that getting made fun of almost lead to my death, therefore I had a strong inclination against doing anything where I could be ostracized or targeted. But I eventually dug out this fear and overcame the complex.
One of the biggest issues I had from this complex was thinking that everything my parents had taught me was the reason for my middle school trauma and bullying. Because of this, I distanced myself from them and denounced everything they had ever taught me. I realized later on that emulating my parents during my middle school years didn’t lead to my depression and being bullied in middle school. It also didn’t lead to my first episode of schizoaffective disorder. The fact that I was trying to be different from them in all ways got me away from all the healthier habits and social concepts I had learned from them and doing so contributed to the deterioration of my mental health. When I got rid of this delusion I felt a great burden alleviated in my heart and in my mind. My mental clarity improved. This was because I was no longer hateful of my parents for a middle school experience that they did nothing to cause.
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One of the toughest things for me was questioning all the negative things everyone had said about me.
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Looking back, I realize they did everything they could to help me out of my depression and help prevent it. It took time, but seeing things clearly brought me closer to my family.
The impact from the bullying made me question myself. My peers called me gay and used a lot of gay slurs to make fun of me. These slurs stayed with me and made me question my sexuality for many years, even though I had never been attracted to any man or wanted to be with one at all. Being heterosexual or homosexual is fine, but for me the only reason I ever questioned my sexuality was because I was bullied.
One of the toughest things for me was questioning all the negative things everyone had said about me.
The first key was to tell myself and realize that I didn’t deserve the treatment that they had given me. The bullying made me feel that they were right, because that’s what they wanted me to think when they were picking on me all those years. Sometimes I would attribute my entire middle school experience to having stolen a small item at a local store. The irrationality of this was me receiving two and a half years of torment for stealing a small item which cost about two dollars. This shows that I was so afraid of my past bullies that I would rather go to any lengths to prove them right than to realize I didn’t deserve to be treated the way I was. All of them were wrong. The fear they had instilled in me from picking on me to the point of nearly committing suicide distorted my thinking to a completely irrational stance of thinking I had deserved everything they had said and done to me, which wasn’t true.
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Most people stick to the group, so if one lead bully says something, everyone else tends to say the same thing…
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When I learned that I did not deserve this trauma, I felt relief. Over time, my confusion lifted. It felt calming to know my sexuality and to have understanding as to why I had some confusion for so many years. It was also very difficult initially to challenge everyone else’s thoughts in conjunction to my own.
Most people stick to the group, so if one lead bully says something, everyone else tends to say the same thing. A lot of times the followers don’t even agree with each other and/or the main bully. They are also afraid of being bullied, so they join him/her and chime in just to be a part of the group and maintain self preservation.
Photo by Anika Huizinga on Unsplash
The post This is My Story of How I Was Bullied. And How I Overcame It. appeared first on The Good Men Project.