For those of you asking, “how did he treat you badly?”, I have another example I would like to bring up to try to illustrate some of my struggle and what it looks like for me.

In that same dorm, I lived in a suite with 5 girls (each with our own room, shared a bathroom). Me and 2 other girls had lived there since fall quarter, and then partway through winter a new girl  moved in who was in the room directly next to me. She would chat and say hello to the other girls in my suite, but refused any social interaction with me whatsoever. A few times, I said hello and smiled, or tried to communicate about small things that needed to be addressed, like “do you know if maintenance has come yet today?” and she would just stare blankly as if I did not exist at all! If we were walking into the building at the same time, she would speed walk  to unlock the door first and then close it in front of me so I would have to unlock it again just to buy herself time to get away from me (this happened multiple times). This one time I was walking towards the library, and she noticed that we were going to cross paths, and she began talking loudly at her friend and turned around and walked away very quickly. There was another time I found myself standing next to her at the free-store on campus, and I said “oh hey” and she just stared blankly in front of her again. Around the same time, I noticed another girl on campus who just seemed rude to me out of the blue, which disappointed me because she was the head of a club I tried to join. Then I found out later they were best friends, and I thought “maybe that explains it”… It all happened too many times and too consistently that I don’t believe it was just coincidence.

But the point is, it seemed obvious to me that she was treating me differently than others. It was isolating. Now, this is an extreme example, but really similar in a lot of ways to how this other person ended up treating me as well. These things left me feeling undeserving and ashamed of myself.  I didn’t want much other than to just have people be okay with me. Not best friends or study buddies, I just wanted to be treated like a person.  It’s hard enough when you share a space, have class together, and it’s generally a small campus. There’s so much to figure out as it is.