Yeah, bullying really affected my mom. I remember sitting in the sun room almost every evening with my mom as she would sip a glass of wine. This is when she would talk about her life to me. She wouldn’t always talk about bullying/ her childhood but sometimes it would come up. She would tell stories of how she was bullied for her chubbiness. One story I remember went like this… one of her neighbors came up to her house and asked her to play. So my mom said yes and then she was led to an entire group of boys who then threw rocks at her saying “lose some weight”

Obviously this wasn’t my mom’s fault. My mom was just a little chubby, it wasn’t her fault the kids in her neighborhood were so mean. She also grew up in a very bad neighborhood, there was a lot of violence. So this probably wasn’t unusual for that area. Kids were just super mean. Maybe this, in conjunction with other kids not treating me the best either, made me feel very insecure.

In addition to telling me stories of bullying, my mom also told me stories of how she went away on vacation one summer and got super tan and lost 20 pounds. She said as soon as that happened to her, everyone wanted to be her friend and she became super popular.

Popularity is something that is kinda unavoidable when you’re a kid, but usually adults tell you its fake. But here my mom was telling me stories about it. So… maybe I felt like I was very low on the “popularity scale” because I wasn’t skinny nor tan.

I’ll think more about this and if I think of anything else then I will add on. I still don’t feel like this completely explains it. My mom’s stories may have warped my perception a little, but I feel like it was also things I observed in school. The popular kids were smart, athletic, skinny. I wasn’t ANY of those things. I honestly think something was going on in my life that caused me to completely lose the ability to concentrate. Maybe it was anxiety? All I remember is being unable to concentrate. I felt like teachers disliked me. I was struggling a lot in school. I really try to emphasize the fact that later on I ended up doing VERY WELL in school. Proof it wasn’t my actual intellectual ability that was causing me to fail all my tests. For all I know maybe it was just the fact that I was lazy and dumb. My parents would spend hours with me just trying to teach me multiplication.

I remember once my mom and dad sat me down for at least 2 hours helping me with my math homework (we were learning how to multiply double digits). I was about 9 years old. I remember being so unable to grasp it. My parents aren’t math teachers, but they were doing their best to help me through the steps. It took so long just to do one worksheet. It was extremely frustrating for me. I couldn’t do it but after 2 hours I finally got through it. I came in to class the next day and my teacher asked me to do a problem. I couldn’t do it because I still was unable to grasp it. Despite spending so long on it the night before, I couldn’t do it when my teacher asked. My brain would not grasp it. I remember my teacher yelled at me so badly and began accusing me of using a calculator. I felt so upset because it literally took me HOURS to do this yet still couldn’t understand. I was crying uncontrollably, which made my teacher believe I was just crying because I got caught. I don’t remember getting in trouble, just yelled at. I felt so frustrated and hopeless. I felt stupid. This was my life from about 3rd grade to 5th grade. Just feeling completely inferior to all the students who could learn it effortlessly. Why didn’t my brain grasp it? I don’t know. But I was such a good kid, I never did anything wrong. So getting yelled at CONSTANTLY by my teachers just made me feel like complete garbage. I was yelled at so often for simply being dumb. I felt stupid, I felt slow. I felt like something that would take a normal student 20 minutes to learn took me 2 weeks.

I know I kinda went off on a tangent but maybe that has to do with it. Doesn’t really have as much to do with my family being inferior but rather how school made me lose all self esteem.

• This reply was modified 6 years, 7 months ago by Katie.
• This reply was modified 6 years, 7 months ago by Katie.