Trigger warnings: bullying, suicide
At the schools I attended, there was no school uniform. We wore whatever we liked except jeans and offensive slogans. What a nightmare for anybody autistic, nerdy, poor, or all three.
Anyway, the in-crowd always had the latest Fila shellsuit, Nike trainers, Campri ski jacket, Head bag etc. Their hair was always trendy, even if the trend looked awful (back-combed quiffs, come on). They hunted in packs, around a dozen of them.
Their targets for mostly verbal abuse in school, physical outside school, were mostly kids who were not trendy.
You couldn’t win with them either, when I finally got a shellsuit it was unbranded, and their verbal taunts changed. “Oh look at you, trying to be trendy, with your shellsuit off the market. What a loser”.
Outside school, they got physical. The ring leader pushed me around and tore my jewellery from my neck in the town centre. She’d left school by then, I was in sixth form. I waited with the police while my dad came to pick me up.
And no, they were not jealous of me. I was a bit of an ugly duckling, and not their only target. One of their other targets took his own life, aged 16. Gordon lay down on the train tracks to get away from them.
You can find them on Facebook now, and find that some of them appear to have evolved into human beings with compassion. Others, often the ring-leaders, are still mocking people for their differences to this day.
I survived their taunts, but fell off the rails badly, partly due to trying to prove them wrong, that I wasn’t ‘square’. They badly affected my self-esteem for many years, and messed up my life more than a little.
#AntiBullying #SuicidePrevention #DifferentIsOK
Stock photo of a blonde teenage girl in a purple Adidas shellsuit, with an overly hair-sprayed top-knot hairstyle and large hoop earrings.
Ausome Charlie 