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Who else was bullied in high school?

illustrated.lady

I want to add a content warning here for bullying.

Hello!

I'm fairly newly diagnosed woman at the grand age of 32. When I was diagnosed the psychiatrist said that years ago I wouldn't have been diagnosed with our understanding of the autistic spectrum has changed over time. 

I keep thinking back to my time in school, I went to a girls school, it had a bad reputation locally and it was awful.

I have always had dreams about being back in school but they have become almost nightly since my diagnosis.

Academically, I did well in school, I thoroughly enjoyed some subjects - English, RE, Health and Social Care, Graphics. Socially, not so much although by the final two years I had settled into a friendship group with fellow nerdy kids. 

I always felt like an outcast, other girls made fun of me for every little thing, my frizzy hair, my body, my 'posh' ways of speaking, my geekiness, my online presence (these were the early days of social media), my interests.

I tried so desperately to fit in, I would listen to music I didn't like feign interest in things I didn't like and changed my ways of speaking. I couldn't recognize when people were being mean to me - that fake nice thing that girls would do that I still would not be able to recognize today!

I feel like I'm grieving for what could have been, my experience of school could have been so different in my autism was recognised and catered for. In Year 9, so at 13/14 years old I went through an awful stage of anxiety and school avoidance, I just didn't want to be there, I was just so overwhelmed and sitting in a class felt like punishment. 

It was actually only during therapy a few years ago in my late twenties that I had the sudden realization that I was bullied, that my experience wasn't typical. It wasn't normal for people to steal your belongings, to be pinched, to have your skirt pulled up, to be threatened, to have everything you do analyzed and criticized. 

My understanding now is that my experience is very common amongst autistic people. I am on the waiting list for therapy with the NHS as this is something I really need to be able to move on from.

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  • I also never really recognised I was bullied until many years later. I went to secondary school in the 1970s and some of the teachers were bullies too. Use of the cane (for boys) or a ruler on the hand (for girls) was still common then, and in one lesson a teacher threw a blackboard rubber at the head of a pupil who was misbehaving (a blackboard rubber was a piece of shaped wood with a padded side used to rub off the chalk the teachers wrote on the blackboard with). In my case the bullying was subtle, not physical - making fun of my appearance, calling me "teacher's pet" and so on. For somebody who just wanted to be left alone it was horrible though. Then one day it became physical - she pushed me up against a wall when she started the verbal bullying. Something snapped in my brain - probably due to the horror of being touched - and I finally spoke up for myself rather than freezing. Thankfully it ended then.

    I really cannot understand how anyone enjoyed school.

  • in reply to Lotus

    I can't either, I'm glad my children mostly did though, the smell of being in a school building still grips me with fear, that heavy sense of foreboding and doom around every corner, especially the gym.

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