I’ve written before about some of the things I do to try and get a grip on my mental health. Ever since I was around 14, having been bullied for a large portion of my childhood, I’ve struggled with the voices of doubt & negativity.
My childhood wasn’t particularly special. An average middle-class home in Essex with average middle-class home issues and challenges. As a child, I wasn’t gay, or rather I certainly didn’t know it at the time. Therefore I wasn’t bullied for who I was, I was bullied for what I looked like.
As a child, I pretty much looked like Harry Potter, long before Harry Potter was ‘trendy’. I look back now and think I was ahead of the curve but unfortunately that is not how the playground kids saw it. I was different, untrendy and borderline nerdy. The daily routine would consist of some jibe about my hair, or some comment that I can’t afford a haircut, those sorts of things. Nothing too major, but over a period of years it starts to chip away at the armour.
Another factor was my brother. At the time schools and teachers were just starting to learn and work out how to handle children with ADHD or other learning challenges. My brother wasn’t, and still isn’t, an angel, but when you see how his mind works he is definitely a sufferer of ADHD. And as someone that got bored quickly, the temptation to torment his older brother was just too strong. So I got it at home and I got it school.
By the time I reached secondary school, it was established that I was the kid with the dodgy haircut. Even my best friend at the time was starting to distance himself from me. Nothing overt, just small little things that increase the distance between the 2 of you over time.
Like most examples of bullying, once it gets to Secondary School it gets far worse. If they say kids can be cruel, then teenagers can be just pure evil. And, incredibly stupid. As my hair cut was the target of their attention it needed a name. One of them (the one with the horrific braces) decided that my haircut was a ‘mullet’. Now, for those of you with access to Google, you will notice that a mullet is a particular type of haircut. Mine was not that. But the name stuck regardless. So, as far as they were concerned, I became known by nothing else other than “Mullet”.
As these things do, it spread like wildfire and even random kids from other years were all doing it. I had no ceased to exist as a person as I was now a haircut. A haircut I didn’t even have.
This went on for a number of years reaching a bit of a head when I was around 14/15 where one guy (the one with the braces) pushed me into a clothes peg in the boys changing rooms. Remember the metal pegs on the wall for hanging your clothes upon? One of them. Took a chunk out of the back of my head but didn’t penetrate the skull. I believe, from what I remember, I had a complete meltdown. The thought (and the pain) of having a part of your head exposed due to some idiot with awful braces (and to have 5 stitches) was just too much.
One evening of that week, my parents were out somewhere and my brother was continuing to torment me and break through my bedroom door (that door went through the wars bless it). With all that going on and feeling particularly low, I just sat in my bedroom under siege both at my door and in my head and just stared at the meat knife I had snuck out of the kitchen.
At that moment in time, all I could see was the knife and the sense of clarity it brought with it, albeit momentarily. To me, the knife, or rather the sense of escape that the knife represented, was all that mattered at that moment. I remember it resting on my leg as I sat on the side of my bed. Totally still, a picture of calm in a sea of chaos. But that sense of clarity didn’t last long. The masters that are negativity and self-doubt don’t let your mind get away that easily. My self-confidence was so low, I didn’t even have enough self-esteem to kill myself.
It was at this very low point in my life that I, from somewhere, mustered up the energy to take control. I would not let my life be dictated to and I would not let my mind control me, I would control it!
So I started on a journey of complete self-change and emotional transformation (or rather, a rebrand but the same shitty feelings are still there, just now with better hair and a bigger smile). I changed my hair, I changed my look, I changed my outlook on life. I removed the one thing the bullies had over me, the haircut. Changed it and got a ‘trendy’ one for the time (although when I look back, dear god it was awful).
Now my problems were not solved overnight but low and behold the bullying did start to happen less and less. I had friend circles (not loads but more than I had) and found that I was invited to things. Things, in terms of bullying at least, seemed to have changed.
Now some people say that I was lucky or indeed that I sold out. I succumbed to pressure and changed who I was in order to fit in. There are many people out there that don’t have that option and this in now way devalues their experiences or their life choices. But for me, that was the price I wanted to pay at the time because it was either that or my life.
That choice is still with me today. I didn’t deal with my demons back then, I simply buried them so they were harder to be provoked and less likely to dictate my mind. While I’ve started on my journey of dealing with them now, they have been locked away in the dark for a very long time. Fixing them, and indeed fixing the depressive cycle they enforce on me, will take time.
Now, why am I telling you all this? This isn’t your usual sort of thing to write about and is extremely personal. But there are some lessons here that I wanted to share with you.
One of the things I learnt when studying for my certificate in NLP was that all people are doing the best they can with the resources they have. Everyone wants a positive outcome but everyone differs on what that outcome might be. This is one of the fundamentals of NLP and its something, on occasion, that I struggle with. When I look back at my childhood, the main ring leader with the awful braces wanted a positive outcome. He didn’t want the attention of the bullies on him, therefore he deflected it to me. Rightly or wrongly, I understand his decision and why he felt the need to attack. I’ve made my peace with that and now, as an adult, I don’t bare him any anger or resentment for what he did.
In many ways, I use that as a reminder that everyone is trying to do what they can with the resources they have. On the days where it seems like the world is out to get you, or that one person is just put on this earth to torment you, is it possible or even feasible that they are just as frightened, scared, damaged or anxious as you are? Is it possible that a way to end the cycle is to approach them in a different way? If you do what you’ve always done, you’ll get what you’ve always got.
So my message to you, not as someone with all the answers but just as someone just like you, is to be a little kinder. Accept that everyone has their demons (their voices) and that maybe, just maybe, we are all just trying to defend ourselves and survive in this, something, unforgiving world.
Thank you for sharing this. Very brave of you.