School was never a place I felt at home. I have dyslexia, which was undiagnosed at the time, and back in the 70s nobody really understood what it meant. There were no support systems, no adjustments, and no real awareness of signs to look out for. I just knew I couldn’t read or write very well, and my maths skills were even worse. It made me feel stupid in every lesson – and I wasn’t. I just didn’t learn in the way they were teaching.
But dyslexia wasn’t what made me dread going in every morning. It was the bullying. What started off as fairly mild became more intense over the years. In my experience, bullying didn’t always come through words, sometimes it was far quieter than that. One girl had this way of staring straight at me, slowly and deliberately, then turning away as if I wasn’t worth a second of her time. That look used to stay with me for the rest of the day. And then there was the isolation and the feeling of being deliberately left out or invisible.
Break times were the worst. There was no work to get done and nothing to do but feel the full weight of being left out. I used to pretend I was sick so I could stay at home. Eventually, it became so unbearable I had to leave and move to another school. My self-esteem was practically zero at this point.
