Do you remember that time five years ago you were really upset? Does it matter now?
At my primary school, we had this very, very open and politically correct headmistress and this was probably a good thing most of the time. We celebrated Diwali and had to fill out sheets with an anonymous compliment for each of our classmates each year. Anti-bullying policies were jammed at us constantly, and there were motivational, positive posters everywhere with things on them like pictures of a black child and a white, hand in hand, and I'm not sure if it was lovely or maybe just a little too enforced.
There was this one poster, in the girls bathroom - and when I say poster, I mean a laminated piece of A4 - and on it it said "If it won't matter in five years, it doesn't matter now". It was a quote from Cher.
I honestly think being in Year Five (that's aged nine and ten here) was one of the toughest years of my life, because in the earlier September of that year, my best friend left the school. It's really hard to explain why this upset me much more than it should have, but you could say that I was always one of those children who liked to have one, single best friend, maybe within a few others. She and I were inseparable. We'd have these slumber parties and the whole week before those Saturdays, at school we'd write out these plans of what we were going to do every half hour. At break time we strolled around the edges of the playing field and did impressions of all of the other girls in our class, who talked about their "boyfriends" and made up sexy dances and lay on the disused football pitch with their polo shirts rolled up and tied in a knot.
But because of how close we were, there was never really room for anyone else and so when she left I was at a complete loss of what to do, who to talk to, because for two years I hadn't needed to make more friends than the one I had already.
The class I was in was an absolute wreck - there were three or four misbehavioural boys who I think probably all had ADHD or something, (one of who I think moved to Australia after he was expelled) and girls who wanted to grow up much too fast. Everyone was loud and obnoxious, and by now I had pretty much no self confidence at all. Our teacher was new, and he was male, which was a first for our school, only two years old. But he was very, very nervous, and left a while after a boy shouted at him. We went through three teachers that year, and the third left at the end of it.
I was permanently upset. One time about a year ago I realised how bad it must have been when my mother told me the things they'd said to her that parents evening. I can't imagine how big an impact something that simple could have on me. Apparently I stopped raising my hand in class, nearly became mute and lost a lot of weight. At breaktimes I would sit on my own and read, or write stories in a leather-bound notebook I still have in my drawer and smile at sometimes. I was picked on and laughed at, and for why I understand completley, but the lower my self-confidence got the worst it became. The boy I had to sit next to in lessons was the worst of all - the other boys idolised him because he was cocky and wore hair gel and swore that, in the bathroom of the public swimming pool, his fourteen year old girlfriend had given him a blowjob. (I'm fairly sure I didn't believe it at the time, and I know I don't now). We'd done a spelling test (remember spelling tests?) and everyone who got ten out of ten was told to stand up, to be given a sticker or something. It was his job to write down all of the names of those of us who got that score. I think there were probably about eight. And he moved slowly around the class, calling out the name of each child, one at a time, and writing them down. He was smirking and doing it very, very slowly and I realised early on what he was doing. As it became that there were less and less of us stood up, I started to feel a lump in my chest rise (you also need to know that back then I cried ALL of the time). And then in a moment tears started trickling down my face and I could hear myself from inside my head making tiny noises. And it went quite quickly from some people in the class asking if I was okay to everyone of them laughing and taunting me, the teacher ignorant and embarassed and awkward, staring down at his desk.
They thought it was for no reason, but the boy next to me didn't. He knew exactly what he'd done and he seemed to feel nothing. He carried on the torture, leaving me until the very end.
The teacher never knew what to do about things like this so he took me to the headmistress' office, where she offered me water and gave me a big box of Kleenex and played Zen music. I was a regular visitor there, now I think back it was probably a sort of therapy they arranged for me. She asked me what was wrong but I couldn't explain what he'd done in the right way - it was a link in a chain of mini incidents like that, and they seem silly now and I can't remember what it was like but I know he was doing it on purpose.
I know how ridiculous it sounds. I feel guilty that it's easy for me to laugh at now, because of what it did to me then but that always seems like a different version of myself.
And the point is that of course it still matters now, the in five years.... Because in some ways I think maybe all of that changed me as a person for the better, because if that situation happened in school now I'd probably either not notice or just have a bit of a bitch and a moan about it in my head. But a lot of it's to do with the people I'm surrounded by - although people this age are still immature, I think ten year old boys are much more powerful than we think.
I don't know if it changed me as a person. More stuff did, more recently, but in the years after that it forced me to develop social skills and I became much less co-dependant. It was even the time I started to turn to the internet. And there's things which happen to me nowadays - even things which have happened in the last month which I know I'll remember when I'm twenty. (woah, I'm halfway to twenty from all of that. I'm getting old :/ )
I don't really know why I wrote that. It got me away from French revision. Beth asked for a post. Myeh.
Lizzie xx
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