Has School Ever Damaged Your Confidence?

[Julian]

Do you ever still feel uncomfortable about something which you were bullied with in school?


Personally, I'm very hairy (black hair on light brown skin). In middle school, it didn't take long for me to find out this was considered ''yucky''. I would be made fun of, people would point at any exposed body parts of mine, and people would refuse to sit next to me. I still remember in P.E. there were benches for those who were in queue for a certain activity, and people would only sit next to me if there was at least a 2-meter distance in between me and him/her.


Now, it doesn't matter anymore. Hair is considered manly instead of yucky, and bullying is something you'll get punched in the face for. But it has still affected me. I always try to cover up as much as I can, not because of others, but because it makes me feel free. As if I can move my arms wherever I want whereas I previously couldn't.

 

[HappyKoi]

What an awful experience, Julian! Kids, and especially teenagers, can be real jerks. Personally, I don't mind guys who are "fuzzy".


Oh yes. I used to get bullied at school all the time. The religious schools were the worst, especially the Catholic high school. I was agnostic/pagan, and everyone else was Catholic and knew each other from church or the Catholic elementary school. I was also pretty nerdy, and pretty socially awkward. I had stones and balls thrown at me in gym class and when I was walking across the grounds to my classes, and on Valentines Day some of the popular kids sent me a dead, rotting flower with a fake note on it as a joke. Sometimes kids threw food at my head during lunch. I still have trouble doing things like eating in front of other people, and I still can't stand up to bullies. I try to placate them or hide. School was really nasty for some of us, wasn't it?

 

[sidney]

I never experienced being bullied in school, but there were those occasional backstabbing episodes among your "friends". That's the closest thing I experienced as far as being bullied is concerned.

 

[CeliVega]

I think so. There's this physically and academically better guy who kept throwing verbal insult and would physically assaulted me during high school years. Almost ten years has passed and I still have trouble facing my bully. What makes it worse is that he still have that condescending tone when he speaks and is very, very rude towards me. I tried standing up to him,but he kept on pestering and invading my privacy. Nowadays I blocked his phone calls. I am not sure if cutting him off my life makes me more confident, but I do feel more at "peace" knowing he won't be around.


But I do wish he can learn to be a better person and acknowledge that he has wounded a lot of people and change his ways.

 

[Aree Wongwanlee]

Oh yes, I have been bullied at school, especially during primary school. I came from a poor family. I wore clothes that were made big so that they could last more than one year. I also took my own food to school. Being different made me a target for the bullies. Luckily, I didn't have any psychological scars.


However, there was one incident which did quite a bit of damage. It was in my last year of high school. When the results of the final exams came out, I was shocked to see that I got a mere pass for a language subject which I was really good at. After some investigation, I found out that the oral examiners had a bad experience with students from my school the previous year. So, out of spite, during my year, all the students from my year was marked down. It was very mean and very unprofessional of them. As a result, I totally gave up trying to make any progress in that language. In retrospect, it was a good thing because I channeled my energy into improving my English instead. If I had pursued that other language, I doubt my English would have improved to this level today.

 

[gracer]

Hi Julian! I must say that I have also been bullied in a sense but not as bad as they did to you. It has somehow put a dent on my confidence for a time, especially in my early high school years. I just learned to finally get over it and fill the void in my confidence when someone gave me a reason to feel confident about myself. It was on the later stages of my high school years. For the first time, I felt special and adored and I didn't mind the people who bullied me anymore. When I got to college, things became the total opposite. It was as if I have totally repackaged myself into someone who became a popular image in school. I never knew whatever happened to my former bullies because I never heard about them since then.

 

[Alex]

I was bullied most of my school life as I looked different to others, and I was brainy and called teacher's pet from 5 to 16 years old. It put me off education for life because I didn't want to study and be hated by others. I ended up going to University but only to escape my parents and not to study. I regret not making the most of those years because of the bullying and wish to go back and study now. I stopped and didn't do a MA because of the bullying, and just didn't want to know and turned down doing Law because the studying was too long.


Those actions of others deterred me from studying and being the best I could be, but I did come out stronger and independent. I stand up for others and myself, but in hindsight my need for acceptance by my peers clouded the path that was open to me. It's not to late as I can go back to study although it's harder, but no one could take away my intelligence and I don't blame them, but I closed a path and career options because of how people made me feel about myself.

 

[thecorinthian]

I'm so sorry for what you had to go through kids don't know what they're doing most of the time and bullying should never be the norm. I was a kid too and I remember being always active and energetic and I began to sweat really bad when I did so one time in PE class I was drenched in sweat and no one wanted to be near me too. They said I also smelled really bad. That was the time I began to be ashamed of my body and learned to use deodorant and cologne at a young age.

 

[John Snort]

I never was bullied in school by students but some teachers did psychologically bully me. There's something about they found upsetting and they always did whatever they could to make my life in school harder than it should have been. Yeah, it did wreck my self-esteem and made me hate schools, education, teachers, authority. It's what made me anti-authoritarian and it made a lot of people hate me later. The one positive thing that came from it was it made me stronger although for years all I ever thought of was I would strike back. Since revenge would change nothing I had to let the negative thoughts go, fact though is the psychological wounds are yet to fully heal.

 

[111kg]

I too was bullied a lot, but that doesn't matter anymore, as I am planning to get my revenge once I get back home. However, my confidence was damaged a lot during highschool, but not by the bullies, nor by the teachers, but rather of my father and grandmother, who would often say horrible things to me, threaten me to kick me out of the house and stuff like that. It was horrible.

 

[Rhuby]

When I was in grade 6 I was in a classroom with all of the year level for a wet weather timetable. The girls had discovered that I had a crush on the most popular boy in the school, who was going out with the most popular girl, of course. My family was not extremely wealthy so my uniform was always a cheap imitation of the school uniform and rather than a windcheater it was a v-necked woolen jumper. That day while we were all crammed into one classroom avoiding the rain, the girls began dancing around with each other, pretending each other were my crush, they turned their jumpers inside out and laughed saying, "Look, I'm Rhuby!" With their inside out jumpers to look like my woolen one. They humiliated me, exposing my crush to the whole room while making fun of my cheap clothing at the same time. Crushes are not a huge deal ....unless everyone thinks that you are a loser and not worth his time or attention. I have grown and gotten over this now but there was a time, even into my twenties, that i could not tell that story without tearing up. And i onky told it to a couple of people.

 

[pwarbi]

For a lot of people, the school years can affect their lives in many different ways, and while I myself never had any confidence issues at school and was never bullied either or anything like that, if you are undermined at school then that can often lead to a lack of confidence when you leave as well. I know many people who haven't had the best time at school, and these days more than ever I think that the teachers, as well as other children need to realise that what happens in those early years can have a massive impact for a persons future.


Confidence isn't something that we are born with, but something that is given to us from an early age, and if that confidence is broken, at a young age it can often take years for a person to build it back up again.

 

[17emilyhalko]

I went to a VERY small middle school. There were only 100 kids in the school, so it was impossible not to know one another. The problem with this is that if you were on one person's hate list, you were on EVERYBODY'S hate list. When I was in school, I was poked fun at for being different. I would try to talk to people and make conversation with them, they would shut me out. I eventually stopped trying. I still have problems talking to people and trusting people that I don't know. I get suspicious of people when they begin to talk to me, and always immediately assume the worst. I remember in high school, I was doing a presentation in front of the class, and then didn't really have any problems at all presenting it. I was loud, lively, intelligible, and most importantly, not shy. When I sat back at my seat in the back of the room, I heard some kids in the front of the room talk about me. They were all talking about how they thought that I was just shy, but then they decided that I wasn't shy, that I was actually very cocky and thought that I was too good to talk to them, which is not me at all! I'm just too afraid to talk to people, because I constantly worry that they'll judge me or make fun of me.

 

[x0xLikeMex0x]

I was bullied for being fat and for my weird name. It got to a point where 5 of my classmates (boys) decided to fight me, so it was 5 against one. I ended with a small bruise under my thumb-nail and a mental scar.


I'm kind of thankful for my bullies for the fact it made me a stronger person. In 3rd grade I decided not to react to people who bullied me and soon they lost interest. I started to make jokes at myself and by 7th grade people would say that if you made a joke about me, I was the one to laugh the loudest at it.

 

[GrubbyRose]

Jr. High was the worst 2 years of my life. High school was a lot better as the one student who always took it too far moved to another school, and I have not seen him since. The insults as I walked pass I could just laugh off, but he took it to the point of throwing a book at my head while my back was turned. Honestly, most of my confidence has been built since I left high school, and I never had any problems in college. Everyone there seemed to be a lot nicer, and I never once saw any bullying where I attended college. School did damage my confidence, but I think I have made back a good portion of what I lost.

 

[mauricioq]

Maybe, I felt really bad through the whole secondary school. Because I couldn't really get along with a lot of people, I had like 2 "friends" and the rest of the people just looked like some bad companies, or even bad personalities, so I felt really alone that whole time. When I entered the university that changed because there was a lot of people who I felt connected too.

 

[kelden]

Is pretty common that schools end up like a crappy place, specially when you're studying at a public institution. You'll deal with teacher that would regard you as an idiot, or bully kids, or psychological abuse, etc. I rarely find someone that regarded too highly his/her school years.

 

[cyclistbabe]

School was actually where my anxiety first started. I had a teacher who was on me all the time in 7th or 8th grade, and I was forced to join choir to make up for the music class I had missed due to a weird schedule. I'm NOT a music kid and a horrible singer, and I remember feeling shy about singing. The teacher called me out in front of 70+ of my peers and every day after that I had really extreme anxiety symptoms. Most of the teachers I had after that unfortunately mistook my anxiety for blatant misconduct when I didn't want to do a presentation or speak in class, so that actually worsened my anxiety until I got older and started to understand it.

 

[VanM]

High school life was the best for me. I made life long friends during this time and I also happened to marry my high school sweetheart. Yes there were a few bullies in school and because I was a quiet boy, I sometimes become a target. But I grew up in a very tough neighborhood, and my mom wouldn't let me go home to run away from a bully. So I ended up getting into fights with my tormentors, sometimes I win other times I lose. But the important thing is to never back out and let the bullies dictate. One thing I learned is that once you prove you can stand on your own, bullies will leave you alone.

 

[djanx]

My classmates were all cool. It was the teachers who were the problem.


Well, I once had a terrible teacher who displayed my essay as an example of "what-not-to-do". And then there was another one who couldn't believe I had scored an A on her subject. Oh and then there was this last teacher who pointed at us- me and my best friend- to a junior class and said, "You see those boys out there? They'll never gain admission next year to this school because they'll never make the cut off". As far as classmates are concerned, they were all cool. It was the teachers who seemed hellbent on breaking me down.


However, it was because of these teachers that I felt the need to prove myself. I won a major national writing competition the same year that teacher displayed my essay. And me and my friend did gain admission into the school next year, and the same teacher said, "Oh, I knew you'd make it." Yeah right.


I was usually the guy who became part of the debate team because I was persistent. Everyone else seemed to either be the teacher's pet or some rich kid whose dad knew people in the school board. Most of the time I would only get one chance to prove myself because of the lack of confidence these people had in me. There lack of confidence made me less confident, but I always found a way to pick myself up.