Stand Up & Be Better Than Them.

When most of you see me you probably think of "the girl that blinks a lot" or some other tic I had when I was younger. But none of you know why I did that, or the negative impact you made on my life from the comments you made, or the fingers you pointed at me, so thanks for that. In elementary and high school I was bullied by over half of kids I went to school with, and I didn't have a lot of friends because of it. Now that I'm in my 20's and pursuing my dream to be Nurse and help people - I want to share my story.

When I was 8 years old I was diagnosed with an anxiety disorder shortly after my Pap passed away. This wasn't a huge diagnoses, it just meant that I had more anxiety than the average child my age and I had a HUGE fear of throwing up. This fear I had of getting sick became the only thing that I thought about and it threw me into constant anxiety attacks to the point that I felt sick all the time and I started going to therapy over it. Since I was so young I had really no desire to talk to an adult about my worries or my fears, actually I felt like therapy was more of a chore than anything else and it was always a battle between me and my parents to even get me to go. As I started getting older, my anxiety was getting worse, I worried about getting sick, dying, family members dying, friends dying, animals dying, getting food poisoning and I had an absolute OBSESSION with my Mom. You could not separate me from my mom at this point. If she wasn't there, I wasn't going. My anxiety was getting to the point that it consumed my whole entire day and I couldn't even stay the night away from home because I was so afraid of getting sick and being away from my Mom. By the time I was in 5th grade I started developing nervous habits, for the people who don't know the meaning of this - a nervous habit is formed when your body starts coming up with ways to help itself "cope" or express the anxiety that it's feeling. Mine started out as constantly clearing my throat and blinking way more and faster than a normal person. After a while of blinking like this consistently, my eyes started to adapt to it and when I wouldn't blink as frequently, my eyes would dry out really fast. So even though I started to grow out of the frequent blinking stage, my eyes LITERALLY could not stop. I remember being in gym class and this boy I went to school with looked at me and said "Why do you always blink like this?' *mimicking me* "is there something wrong with you?".... Then his friends started doing it too. This was the first time I was humiliated by a group of people, and it become a normal thing for them to do after that. I remember all of their names and I have a clear visual in my head of this exact event... It's hard to forget things like that. I had never done anything to those boys for them to say those things to me, actually I was pretty quiet and I typically kept to myself. By the time I was in 7th grade, I developed more nervous tics. I still had a frequent blink, I wiggled my fingers and my toes together, I would crack my neck nonstop, and I got a really weird one where I would have to touch both ends of the table to make it "even". This was when I started to really get bullied by over half of the school and nobody wanted to be friends with me because everyone thought I was weird...

I started getting really depressed in 6th and 7th grade. I had a hard time eating, I lost a lot of weight, and I couldn't help myself snap out of it. The summer after 6th grade my Mom scheduled an appointment with a specialist at Children's Hospital because my childhood doctor said I just had bad anxiety and left it at that. After the first time seeing a specialist, he gave me a diagnosis. And an incredible one at that, because it was a childhood diagnosis, which meant that I would most likely grow out of it. This doctor diagnosed with me with an anxiety disorder, but called it a triangle affect. This is when you have 3 things. 1. Being anxiety, and given the level of anxiety I had it caused me to have 2. Nervous tics. And lastly, this caused me to have number 3. OCD. After this point, I was prescribed anxiety medication to help my mind relax and stop worrying about things that were out of my control. This would also help my tics because my anxiety would start to get under control. I was 13 when I started taking medication for it, and now I'm 22 and I'm taking half of what I started out with, and you would never even imagine that I had a diagnosis like that.

Now that you know the reasoning why I was bullied, let me tell you about the actual bullying.

I went to a very "rich" school, or at least that's what everyone called it. Let me tell you, I did not come from a wealthy family and I'm thankful for that. I got bullied because I was different than everyone else. The girls in that school would clique like a pack of wolves and they weren't nice, especially to me. I never had a partner to pair up with in class because everyone thought I was weird, or thought I wasn't smart because they thought something was wrong with me. The teacher would always have to add me into a group, and when they did the kids never included me and acted like I was invisible, so I just sat there.... quietly. The boys that were considered "popular" would sit in pairs and make faces at me or mimic a tic I did, like blink really fast or crack their neck like I did. By 7th grade I got really depressed. I was put into classes with all of the girls that thought they were popular and they all sat on the opposite side of the room as me. I had a really cool Homebase teacher that year and she always tried to get the other girls to involve me, but they never did. So eventually she stopped trying and she would sit with me and try to talk to me and be a friend. This was when it became really hard for me to eat, and I lost a lot of weight. I started running track because my school thought it would be a good idea for me to be "involved" in something. Not realizing that was actually the problem because I was either being bullied by the people they wanted me to "involved with" or treated like I was invisible because nobody wanted to be near me.

As high school rolled around I really kept to myself. I made a lot of older friends, that was easier for me because my entire grade thought of me as weird, or someone who had weird habits and they didn't want to be seen with that. High school was a little better but I think it's mostly because the friends that I did make weren't perfect either and they didn't pretend to act like they were. They accepted me for who I was and loved me just the way I was. I've come a long way since school grade school, I've never let bulling define who I am as a person, or change the view of myself. Although a lot of the things that were said to me were hurtful, and I was made to feel like there was something wrong with me, I would never want to make someone feel the way I did all through school. There were so many days that I would come home and tell my Mom and Dad about how much I hated school and didn't want to go back. I think that there are way too many times that bullying goes on without any repercussion and the people that are being bullied are too afraid to get help because a lot of the time adults are watching it happen and don't take it seriously. Don't let your past define you or change your view of yourself. Don't be afraid to stand up for yourself. I wish I would have, because I love the way I am and nothing can define me or my future.