Dancing with Tears In My Eyes

The Courage and Futilty of Mockingbirds

Courage.

As Atticus Finch described it in Harper Lee’s To Kill A Mockingbird, courage is not a man with a gun in his hand. Courage-real courage- is knowing that you’re defeated before you begin, but you begin anyway, and see it through to the end no matter what. You rarely win, but sometimes you do.

That’s a lot like my life.

I knew a long time ago that I was not a child that follows convention and that I liked to do things differently to the stereotypical majority. I think that’s why I stood out a lot when I was younger. Courage was being able to stand up to the others around you and make a decision to be different by defying convention and sticking with it. I’ve stuck with my decision since I made it. I knew I was defeated by the insiders who followed the convention to the letter: the bullies that made my life hell, just because I was different. It got me a down a few times, but I still never wavered once from being exactly who I was. That was courage- to stand up to my peers, and to stand out from the crowd.

It’s also like college.

Whilst I followed the convention by going to college, I didn’t follow the outstanding majority of my peers on to the next stage: university. I think it made me a little more of an outsider: I was the only person in my year who had no interest at all in going to university. Whilst it didn’t make me  a target for bullies, it did make me a target for the teacher’s frustrations, as many of them could not see why I had chosen to come and do A-Levels if I was not going to go on to university and do a degree afterwards. To them, it made no sense at all. To me, my life lasted a lot longer than twenty years, and I felt no need to cram everything in at the same time, just for the sake of it. It was my own life choice to make, and I stuck with it.

But it takes real courage to stand up to a teacher.

It takes even more courage to stand up for what you think is right, even when those around you are doing other things or do not necessarily share your viewpoint. Decisions made by people higher up in the hierarchy seem to be slightly more rigid than those made by lower members of staff.  As I remarked to one of the senior members of staff at the time, their decisions are not binding in the same way that decisions made by military personnel are: you can’t be court martialled (the equivalent of being sent to a Crown Court for trial) for not doing as they had said.

I stood up when I was bullied by a teacher. I was a student that struggled at college, especially the last part of the first year and the beginning of the second. My physical health was ailing, and my mental health was unstable. I knew that there was something wrong, and yet I was reluctant to accept any help for it. There were two teachers in particular that gave me support and encouragement when I needed it the most at the beginning of the second year.  They were the ones who knew first that I had been diagnosed with depression and anxiety. I thought I could trust them. I could trust the first. But not the second. Trust is another one of my ‘things’: I always seem to trust the ones who are rotten inside their own heads, and in reality aren’t worth trusting at all.

The bullying was an isolated incident, and yet the mental scars still run deep and unhealed.

I had sensed when I was diagnosed, a shift in how people regarded me. They looked at me differently now, a strange kind of pity that was sympathetic and yet seemed to hold no meaning at all. It contradicted itself in the sense that they felt sorry for me, and yet labelled me with stigma that comes with being mentally ill. Reason told me that it was not my fault: I had not changed. It was an issue with the people around me.

For one, my biology teacher was piling on the pressure for me to better than I was already doing. He was asking the impossible: I had two other subjects to study for that I had to share my time with, and now I had doctors and psychiatrist appointment to attend. It meant that my life was busy and often lacking in routine. There were some kinds of support available that I did try several times, and yet they did not work for me. I was considered to be even more of an outsider.