I don’t often speak of the trauma I endured at school. I watch my kids go to school and come home happy (most of the time) and I think how lucky they are.
Prep was good for me, I really enjoyed schoolwork and I was a bright student. I had two older sisters who were in Grade 5 and 6 at school and I was bursting to get there too. I even told Mum she didn’t need to walk me in for the first day of school. Then in Grade 1 I became the target for a school bully. It was gaslighting stuff, be my friend, now go away etc. She invited me to her birthday party then isolated me for the entire party so I ended up hanging out with her mum in the kitchen, who didn’t even question why I was not with the rest of the party. I was 6.
From then on I became the proverbial punching bag in the school yard, both verbally and physically. I would arrive at school and kids would grab my school bag and run around with it upside down as I watched all my stationery and lunch fall on the gravel and get stepped on. This was a 2-4 times a week occurrence. Mum picked me up one day from school when I was in grade 4 with bruises around my neck because one of my tormentors told her brother a lie about me and he tried to strangle me up against the chain link fence. Mum went down to the school the next day to complain but it just made things worse so I didn’t tell mum again. I was held by the arms against the fence regularly and punched and pinched. I had my private parts touched often as I had my arms forcefully held out to hold me down. If I flinched I was called “frigid” and made to endure it more. I was chased in the schoolyard by people who filled their mouths with water and then spat it at me. I can still feel that warm viscous liquid as it hit my face. Still I stayed quiet at home.
I was a bright student and teachers liked me but I quickly learnt that things got worse for me at lunchtime if I excelled at school. It was much safer to fly under the radar and just achieve good results. I began aiming for 80% instead of 100%.
Then nearly all my primary school class moved to the same high school for Year 7. We were still all together but their group just expanded even more. Now we had hormones in the mix too.
Year 7 was ok, not great but definitely not traumatic. Year 8 it started again with a vengeance. I remember being on Year 8 camp and getting ready for bed when one of my friends told me to come outside the cabin as she wanted to talk to me. What actually happened was she left me with a group of popular boys who pushed me up against a wall in the dark and god knows what they were intending but I screamed my arse off and I kicked and I clawed and they all stepped back in shock and the lead guy said “but we were told you were up for it”. I went home from camp the next day, 3 days ahead of schedule, because I said I felt sick. I had also come home early from camp in Grade 6 and Year 7.
These were the girls I thought of as friends. I never knew if I was allowed to hang out with them from one day to the next. They were all super friendly if they wanted to come and have a swim in my pool but if I was no use to them at the time they would stonewall me and talk behind their hands and laugh. In Year 8 for the second semester of school I attended 48% school days.
My mum never bought me fancy clothes and that was fine but I was always ridiculed for what I wore on free dress days so Mum was beautiful and always tried to get me a new outfit for any free dress days. I remember buying a sportsgirl t-shirt and feeling pretty safe with my choice because that is what everyone wore then. I went to school and one of the popular girls saw me and promptly burst into tears and starting telling everyone I was obsessed with her and she was scared because now I was even dressed like her. I couldn’t win.
By Year 9 I spent recess and lunch at the library. I became really good at getting my homework done during these times which worked well for me with dancing after school. I had a better relationship with the librarians than I did my school friends. A teacher reached out to me and told me to try and make some friends so that lunch I approached a group of girls and asked if I could sit with them. These girls did school classes with me and we had some rapport but I had never been a part of their friendship circle. They didn’t make eye contact with me, they kept their heads bowed and said to me “Please just go away, they will make our life hell if they see you with us”. So that is how it was. The mean girls ruled the school and there wasn’t a thing I could do about it.
So one day in June of Year 9 Mum was running an art exhibition at the school and I went to visit her while she was setting up, oblivious to the fact that my tormentors were following closely behind calling me a fat slag, fu*^ing bitch, stupid cow, even a C*#t. They would do that, just follow me with taunts waiting for me to react. I had become really good at singing songs in my head and blocking them out. Anyway I walked into where Mum was setting up the exhibition and they followed me in, taunting me, and to this day I will never forget the vision of my sister storming towards me in a rage and heading straight past me towards the group following me. I will never forget the shock on their faces at the realisation they had been caught. These were the perfect students, the high achievers and hugely popular. They were careful to only show their evil side to me. So now they had been seen. It was a great moment for me.
So as my sister went charging towards them I just stepped back and watched as she screamed at them. She was 19, and she had known I had been bullied but she didn’t know the extent. No one knew except me.
That day my sister told Mum I was not to go back to that school ever again. There was a big discussion that night and I think I stayed home the next day, but I was booked into another local school and the decision was made for me to start the following week. I went back to school the next day to get my books and pretty much say goodbye to my teachers. I told my Art teacher, who I really liked, that I was moving schools and she arranged a meeting/discussion for me and the group who had largely tormented me systematically since the age of 6. I know her heart was in the right place and she was guided by her passion to unite people but I was sent with a note to collect each girl from their classroom and follow me back to the Art room. One by one I silently collected the group, I will say of 12 girls but it could have been 13 or 14. One by one they joined the fray and huddled and whispered while trailing me around the school grounds as I kept just silently walking and collecting.
Then we went to the Art room together where we sat in a circle and I sat to the teachers right. She then went around the circle to her left where everyone got to say their piece. It was actually really enlightening to hear all the stories and bad things I had apparently done to everyone. There were many tears and hugs and baleful stares in my direction. I heard that I had not only kissed a boyfriend of one of the girls but had also done sexual acts with him. At the age of 14 I had never kissed a boy or even held his hand. I heard that I called their houses constantly telling them horrible things and calling them names while threatening them over the phone. Thank God we didn’t have texting and social media back then but also kind of hard to prove them wrong. I heard that I was obsessed with one of the girls, single white female style, and she was scared to even look at me. One said that I copied her work and passed it off as my own. Then I tuned out. I watched as they cried and comforted one another. I enjoyed the show that they put on to explain their shitty behaviour towards me. When it came to my turn the teacher said “Now what would you like to say?” and I said “I’ve got nothing to say”, because I didn’t. How can you possibly counter all of that effort put into discrediting me as a person? There was absolutely not one thing I needed to say to these girls ever again.
I left that school and moved schools a few days later. It took a while but I eventually made some really lovely friends. Unfortunately I still strived to underachieve just that little bit so I don’t feel I reached my full potential but I enjoyed the schoolwork and I enjoyed the safety and anonymity that the new school offered.
Throughout all of this time I had dancing and theatre. I would dance most afternoons, or assistant teach, at my dance school that I had grown up in. I started doing theatre shows when I was 10 and that brought me a new group of friends that felt like happiness to me when the schoolyard felt like hell. I often tell people that if it was not for dancing and theatre I do not know what would have happened to me. Would I have been another statistic? I know I was in a dark place there for many years so quite possibly.
What I do know is this. At times in my life those feelings of helplessness and having no control come back with a vengeance. I am the queen of grinning and bearing it to get through an experience I find unpleasant. In some ways what I experienced growing up has made me super human strong and in other ways I can return to being a scared 10 year old girl with just one belittling comment directed towards me. It is not easy to know the path that people have taken to get where they are and we know we have all had different experiences in life. I chose to pursue something that made me happy in a very dark time of my life and provide a space for another generation to do the same. It is so important for me to be able to provide that space, never more so than now.
Maybe by writing this it will help me to process what happened to me just a little better and I will be able to file it away so that it doesn’t hover over me constantly. A part of me also thinks it’s important to acknowledge these experiences because they help shape who I am now.
10 year old me didn’t feel she could stand up for herself. She kept her head down and just dealt with it in her own way. 45 year old me is starting to learn, finally, that just because someone says something about you, doesn’t mean it’s true.
I’m also learning how proud I am of 10 year old me for being such a strong kid when she really didn’t think she was strong at all.
