BULLIED

Submission 684

I know I haven't suffered as much as a lot of people, but it still feels bad to be bullied.

Hello, I'm a 13-year-old Filipino (1/4 English) girl, and I go to an all-girls private Catholic school here in the Philippines. My school keeps giving these anti-bullying talks, but of course, it's still going to go on, isn't it? Please don't judge me for anything I write below. It's painful, but it'll be nice to get off my chest.

It probably started in first grade. I've been a quite smart girl all my life, and my grades have only been going down recently. Back then, I didn't have to worry about much. I was shallow, and back then as a seven-year-old, friends were only people you eat recess with. My best friend in the whole of Kinder (who I will call Friend 1 or F1 for short) had been sorted off into a different section, but being a very social girl back then, I had made "friends" easily. The only problem came when a girl in my class started having family problems, and she took it all out on the rest of us. Let's call her Bully 1, or B1. She started stealing people's things and throwing them into trashcans. I started getting suspicious when I noticed that every morning she'd ask to see my pencil case, because I didn't know she was stealing things back then. Every morning, she'd take my pencil case. Every morning, I'd notice something was missing and I'd point it out to her. Every morning, she'd gasp and say, "oh, no, I think I saw your [thing from pencil case] outside, in the trashcan." I realized that she was a thief, and every morning from then she'd come and ask to see my pencil case and it satisfy me so to answer with a big fat NO. And that was the end of my bullying in Grade 1.

Second grade came, and I realized I had no real friends. Everywhere I turned, there was nobody. I had only books as my company. First trimester came and went, and when my mom got my report card, she was smiling for two reasons. One, I had gotten good grades. Two, the person sitting behind me was actually my cousin three-times-removed, and my mom had met her grandparents. This was Friend 2. I became friends with F2, and she introduced me to F3, a shy, innocent girl that didn't want to say hi at first. I liked them immediately. But then the new girl (B2) came in and made friends with F2, and F3 being someone to stick by F2's side, I was left alone. I had no friends to eat lunch with. I let my feelings out on a seatwork that asked us to rate events in our life from 1-10, 10 being the lowest, and I put "B2 becoming friends with F2 so I have no friends". Long story short, I went to the guidance counselor's office, F3 convinced F2 to come back to me after I sort of became a bully myself (and got called a "f*cker" by a Grade 1 student in the process), and by the end of the school year, I was okay, even though I was pushed around a lot.

Grade 3 passed by without many problems. I made a new friend (F4) and regained my friendship with F1. Grade 4 never happened because of the K-12 program, where all the levels were renamed and our curriculum was changed. I think I joined Wattpad in the midst of all this, because I've always loved imagining my own worlds, and I've always been chosen for the story-writing programs of the grade school (I'm still proud of it to this day).

Grade 5. I became a bit quieter. I quit my piano lessons (which had gone on for about 5 years) to have guitar lessons. I knew I was (and am) chubby and not very good-looking, but I realized what people thought about me when we were studying for our third-trimester exams. I don't think it was a good idea to join a four-person Filipino review session with a mean girl being an interrogator. She started saying adjectives, and later, "sino ang pinakamapangit dito?" which means, 'who here is the ugliest?' Being someone with hardly any self confidence, I raised my hand. And because I raised my hand, the other three people pointed at me. I smiled shakily, ran off, and cried in the bathroom. And then I felt ugly, inside and out.

F4 invited me to go to the CISV [blank] City chapter minicamp for five days after Grade 5. When we were set to go on the bus, her dad started crying. I really didn't understand. After five days of being at camp (I hardly made any friends because F4 was always there for me), we returned home, and discovered heart-shattering news.