I'm back, but I've been thinking a lot about stuff lately, so I'm doing something a tad different. Food for thought, maybe.
-the story of my life-
Forgive me if I seem like an attention-seeking whiny teenager, but I've been thinking about this a lot lately, and want to share it with those of you who don't necessarily know much about me.
On the twentieth of August, nineteen-ninety, I was brought into the world and named Samuel Paul Down.
I was (and still am) living in a christian household, and spent two happy years at a local day nursery. Then, I went to school, and all hell broke loose. From three weeks in, my lisp, strange teeth, and physical inferiority (last to be picked.. ever) made me an instant target for a particularly troubled group of children (my mother knew their mothers, I found out later on)
One boy just didn't stop. For seven years, I was taunted, isolated, hurt and stolen from. And there was always the followers, the guys who jumped on the bandwagon. I was completely hindered from developing any real friendships, or indeed social skills. The school were supposedly blind of this obvious fact. My social life, at the age of ten, was non-existent. I would sit against a wall, out of the way of everybody else, and blindly hope that no-one would find a reason to bother me.
Then, I found myself on the floor with a paramedic staring over me. Wow, turns out I have epilepsy. Oh joy. At the same hospital visit, I was diagnosed with dyspraxia, a disorder that extremely hinders co-ordination and
organisation. I was relieved, in a way, to finally find out why I was always picked last, why I was looked down at by my classmates. But this brought a fresh wave of reasons to taunt me, too. I had a writing slope for the
last year at primary school. Naturally, an object of fun to all those less favoured towards me. Which, at this point, was just about everybody.
By the end of year six /start of year seven, I was a paranoid emotional wreck with huge abandonment issues, and would break out in tears if I was held back after school (without prior notice), or the person I was supposed to meet wasn't there.
Enter the secondary school. Same problems, just bigger and worse. The laptop I recieved in year eight didn't help. Now I was the unathletic, geeky mong with the laptop. Well, that broke within a year , what with schoolkids kicking my bag, as they do. The student support service at the school were useless, instead of punishing those who had caused me the pain and greif, told me to stay out of their way.
Year nine. What with my laptop broke, some bright spark decided to get me a writing slope again. But this was worse. I had a slanted booster seat to reconfigure my posture. I was fourteen years old, and I had a writing slope and a booster seat. I was forced to carry it round, thus reducing my social life to zero, what with everyone taking the piss, and me still crying at the drop of a hat.
That summer, between year nine and year ten, I went to a Christian holiday camp, which I previously hated because I never made any friends there (no social skills, remember). But this year was different. I met some great people, made some awesome friends, restored my faith in humanity and boosted my social confidence through the roof.
Equipped with this new found confidence, I entered my GCSE course. Same school, same people, same problems. The only difference is, I didn't care anymore. The short holiday had permanetly altered my psyche. I stuck through it, I ignored everything that wasn't a kind word, and I got right back up when I hit the floor. However, I still had a huge stigma associated with me. This limited my friends to the three people who could actually see past the rumours and lies (and some shameful truths) and see who I really was.
I passed my GCSE's with an ALICE score of 5.0 (C). Since entering college, the stigma dissapeared. I made some great friends, and my social circle went from three to thirty in two days, and to a hundred in a month. Even the people who bullied me constantly in secondary school weren't being assholes. It's like the whole school grew up in six weeks. And remember the first guy, back at the start of the post? Five years apart changed his perspectives a lot. He's an awesome guy.
So, despite some trouble with my courses (namely: they suck) I'm perfectly happy. I have awesome friends, very little enemies, and I've been invited out more in the past month than in the whole of my life before college.
I'm writing this, however, becuase the one person outside my family who has seen all I've just described has asked me the million-pound question:
How am I still smiling?