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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.

Parents

  • I was bullied at Junior school, usually by toughs who liked to punch faces for the sake of it. I found a way around it - doing all my homework in my head on the walk home [it was easy], not filling in the answers, then getting detention at breaktimes to complete the work, which kept me inside... away from the bullies.   

    I was also bullied at High school, but in a much more insidious way. The former bullies from previous times had grown to basically being in charge of every part of school life. The whole social status of every male was based upon who could 'have' (i.e. beat up) whom, and I was at the bottom. I had one friend who had looked up to me from the old school and I had protected him  in many ways, and so he introduced me to his mates. Those mates were in the very top stratum, major major bullies to everyone, so they were skeptical at first but eventually included me in their group. One of this group decided in his head that I 'owed' him for his being so nice to me and that unfortunately became the basis of our 'friendship.' Any idiot could see that it was patently false and that, y'know, his status wouldn't last forever, but at the time he milked it for all that it was worth. I see him sometimes, even now, with a stupid smug look on his face when he looks back - founded on total fantasy. his (horriifyingly limited) goals in life utterly transparent to me.

    Yet at one point this *** was on top of me for my every thought and action, and I had thought I was only enduring it for his protection from being bullied by any of the other general wankers waiting in the wings with their burgeoning testosterone-fuelled aggression running through every steroid-enhanced bicep ready to slaughter me for absolutely nothing other than for being 'weaker' in the concrete jungle. And he called himself my mate!

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  • I was bullied at Junior school, usually by toughs who liked to punch faces for the sake of it. I found a way around it - doing all my homework in my head on the walk home [it was easy], not filling in the answers, then getting detention at breaktimes to complete the work, which kept me inside... away from the bullies.   

    I was also bullied at High school, but in a much more insidious way. The former bullies from previous times had grown to basically being in charge of every part of school life. The whole social status of every male was based upon who could 'have' (i.e. beat up) whom, and I was at the bottom. I had one friend who had looked up to me from the old school and I had protected him  in many ways, and so he introduced me to his mates. Those mates were in the very top stratum, major major bullies to everyone, so they were skeptical at first but eventually included me in their group. One of this group decided in his head that I 'owed' him for his being so nice to me and that unfortunately became the basis of our 'friendship.' Any idiot could see that it was patently false and that, y'know, his status wouldn't last forever, but at the time he milked it for all that it was worth. I see him sometimes, even now, with a stupid smug look on his face when he looks back - founded on total fantasy. his (horriifyingly limited) goals in life utterly transparent to me.

    Yet at one point this *** was on top of me for my every thought and action, and I had thought I was only enduring it for his protection from being bullied by any of the other general wankers waiting in the wings with their burgeoning testosterone-fuelled aggression running through every steroid-enhanced bicep ready to slaughter me for absolutely nothing other than for being 'weaker' in the concrete jungle. And he called himself my mate!

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