Talk about yourself
I've been Bipolar since I was little, but it wasn't fully developed and so it went unknown. When I was about 13, I began getting what the doctors thought was depression and anxiety, but when I was 15, I was diagnosed as Bipolar.
I was always a "natural" victim - I wasn't like the other people in my classes, I was very different and quiet because when I went to secondary school, all of the people from my old school "ditched" me. So I didn't have many friends to begin with, and I found it hard to make them, so I just didn't talk.
How Did Other Children Mistreat You?
For the most, people were just teasing me, laughing at me and talking about me. As I said before, I was very quiet and without friends which didn't give me very good self-confidence in the first place. That was the main thing. Because I was quiet and a little shy, people targeted that which just made it worse.
In England, we don't wear our own clothes - the majority of schools wear a uniform. We sometimes have non-uniform days where we wear our own clothes to raise money for charity. I didn't wear the same clothes as the rest of the school, who pretty much all wore the same thing, so I was targeted because of that.
I was threatened a few times by the classic school-yard bullies, not always verbally. Sometimes they would sit and laugh at me with their friends and then stare at me angrily to try and scare me, but other times they did come up to me and threaten to beat me up or have a fight with me.
In school, people threw some things at me, but they weren't very damaging objects (mainly just paper balls, erasers, pencils). Our school allowed us to leave the school for an hour at lunch to have our lunch elsewhere in the area. Nearly everyday, I had food thrown at me, bricks and stones and even full cans of soda. They would always target me in particular; they always threw the objects at me and not my friends.
Later on, my friends started bullying me, which I'll explain later on.
Lessons Learned
- I've never got over bullying. It has definitely affected me in a bad way.
- It didn't help my self-confidence at all. I've never been that confident, but it has definitely got worse over the years.
- It gave me social anxiety. I spent my dinner and breaktimes in the toilets because I couldn't handle being in social situations, and later on I didn't have any friends to have lunch with so that was also a contributing factor.
Do you think bipolar disorder helped make you a victim?
I'm not sure. As I said before, my friends started bullying me when they found out I was Bipolar. They just totally cut me off when I explained to them why I was the way I was.
Did being bullied damage your self-esteem?
Yes, greatly. They were always very nasty comments about my personality or my image.
Do you still have "victim" characteristics as an adult?
Yes, the effects are still very present.
