Written by: KT / Edited by: Emily Harris
When people talk about name-calling they usually think of children teasing each other. My first experience was a little different: my first experience was with a grown-up. A grown-up I respected and looked up to. Ironically, this was someone who taught me about the importance of respect. This someone was my teacher. I had stumbled into a conversation between my best friend and the teacher and heard him calling me a whore. I was practically a child at the time, and I had no idea what the word even meant. I had to ask my best friend afterward – talk about an awkward conversation! Apparently, the teacher felt he had to right to call me something so vulgar because of how I dressed. But at that time, I was so young that I was still wearing a sports bra, and really would not have had any idea how to dress like a whore even if I’d wanted to. Looking back, I find it incredibly disturbing that he found the way I dressed provocative in any way. If he had, as my teacher, he should have talked to me about dressing differently instead of judging me and calling me names behind my back, especially to other kids. His gossiping and name-calling inevitably led other students taking on his perspective. The whole situation really hurt me, and, without me really understanding the impact it was having on me, it began to erode my ability to trust the adults in my life. This distrust of adults slowly turned into a general inability to trust anyone, adult or otherwise.
I became very rebellious and I had a hard time respecting authority. After transferring around between a few different high schools, I just stopped going altogether. Because I didn’t feel comfortable letting my guard down with people, I had a hard time connecting with people until I started using. It was the perfect escape from reality because reality sucked! Slowly, I got sucked into a world ruled by the drugs. I didn’t know who I was anymore, and didn’t care. Everyone was so nice when they were high. No one argued, no one gossiped … When I was high, I felt like everyone loved me – and I loved them right back. My foray into the drug world began innocently enough, with smoking weed. Once I was regularly smoking, popping pills didn’t seem like such a big deal. If my friends and I were partying and someone had some pills, we all did them together. It felt like a kind of bonding experience that I hadn’t been able to experience before because of my trust issues. After awhile, getting high and partying at night meant I needed something to get me through the workday. That’s when I started using meth. I had my party drug, my bedtime drug and my work drug – I was never sober! I couldn’t get to sleep without smoking anymore. The incessant drug use was starting to show itself physically. I didn’t look healthy, and didn’t look like me anymore. One day, I passed out in the middle of the day while standing in a friend’s kitchen. When I came to, I knew I had to quit before it was too late. I didn’t want to quit, but I didn’t want to end up killing myself more.
My road to sobriety was not fun at all! I was thrown back into the harsh, evil reality of life. I had forgotten how mean people could be. Since I could no longer numb myself with little pills or my trusty little pipes, I found a new way to deal with sober life: I started mimicking my attackers. I’d told myself that I would never be like them, but there was something in me that genuinely wanted to understand them. Maybe if I put myself in their shoes, I’d finally be able to. The transformation into a gossip or a bully was slow, but by the time I realized what was happening to me, I had become the kind of person that I hated. I was picking on people just to pick on them, just to keep my distance from connecting with them. I was disgusted with myself. The change in me was not lost on my friends and family, but I wasn’t interested in listening to them when they tried to pull me out of the road I was going down. I was playing a character – the mean girl – and they were interfering with that. They were messing with my experiment, and the experiment was my new drug. I was sober now, but I still needed something to numb me to reality, something to pour my energy into so I didn’t have to focus on myself. I didn’t ever want to feel small and insignificant again, and the best way I knew to prevent those feeling was by keeping everyone at arm’s length. Anyone that got too close got the full-on “bitch” side of me. That’s how I pushed people away.
Today, I’m approaching the things that I want to work on within me in a healthier way. I stopped playing that experimental character, and I was lucky to be able to rebuild some of the relationships that were damaged during that time. After everything I have been through, the one thing I regret most is how I let my trials and tribulations change me … I became the kind of person that I despised! While I can own up to all of my actions, I can’t help but wonder if things throughout my life would have gone differently, better, if my ability to trust and form genuine connections with people hadn’t been taken away from me at such a young age.
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