When I walked back into the room where they’d all just left moments before, to find them all sitting there again without me … nobody said they were sorry. Nobody acknowledged the pain that was written on my face. Nobody came after me as I left. Nobody felt the slightest bit of guilt for lying and deceiving someone who was just trying to connect.
The hurt was indescribable, and I didn’t know what to say. Or do, once I’d returned to my room. I wanted to scream and yell, or curl up in a ball and stare into space. But there was no-one to offer a hug or comfort. I was back in the room where my ex-roomie had angrily almost kicked the door in just weeks before, and no-one else wanted to move in with me. Not one.
But they wanted to hang out with everyone else.
The above describes some of my experiences being at “efterskole“, a one-year boarding school you can choose to attend in Denmark between finishing Year 9 and starting high school (“gymnasium“). I had been bullied relentlessly in “folkeskolen” – from when I started in Year 5, to the end of Year 9 – and these experiences I have mostly covered in my book, “Voices Off: Talking About Schizophrenia”.
So, I hoped that attending a different school, far away from all my classmates, would be a sigh of relief.
It wasn’t … it was worse.
My roomie from hell lasted a week. There was a window in our room where she invited all the guys in – of course, to leave muddy footprints and leaves all over MY bed, not hers. Then having the audacity to tell her father I was “being mean to her” at an activity day at the school, after having called me a foul bitch and telling me she was going to beat me up just days prior.
Another girl in our corridor who loudly criticised my taste in music at every given opportunity, on one occasion coming into my room to switch it off. I was listening to Taylor Swift and doing no harm. What was her problem?
In fact, I could ask this question many times. What’s your problem? With me? Why are you targeting me? Why am I the ONLY ONE without a roomie, without a partner for the school gala? I had walk down the red carpet alone. Why did you push me away repeatedly? What had I done wrong? You didn’t do it to anyone else. I never saw others get pushed down the stairs, or have photos taken of their private notebooks that you suddenly burst into my room and flipped through with cameras aimed at the pages.
What was I supposed to do?
Eventually, I had an emotional breakdown and left the school early. My ex-roomie stayed for the remainder of the year.
“Why does nobody want to talk to me?”
I asked my psychiatrist again and again and again. I couldn’t understand why, even after five months at the psychiatric ward, nobody was approaching me despite all being perfectly capable of approaching each other. Sometimes she’d say, “Are you approaching them?”, other times she’d just listen to me rant, but I never felt satisfied with the answer or outcome. I was walking around, trying to make eye contact, smiling, doing my best in my severely mentally ill way – and, after learning that people are so capable of being systematically nasty to each other, then surely, people must be able to be systematically good, too?
Even after being discharged from the ward and attending OPUS, I didn’t make any lasting friendships. Despite, again, everyone else from the group seeming to hang out with each other.
It was torture.
Later in life, I heard through the grapevine that someone I knew from folkeskolen AND someone I knew from efterskole had spent their first days at gymnasium talking about “how weird” I was. You may think that this was rotten information for me, but I’m glad I found out. PROOF! Proof that my intuition was never wrong – that these idiots were doing exactly what I had thought they were doing; spreading the word about me so that no-one else would want to hang out with me.
If I had been depressed, that would have pushed me over the edge. I’m not, and I’m still here – but does that make it any less hurtful? Does that make it any less unfair? What is the point in saying these things about me?
The majority of peers I met during my first years living in Denmark were not kind. I couldn’t figure out what I was doing wrong.
I didn’t feel protected. Not by teachers, headmasters, fellow peers, or anyone. There was no sense of responsibility or care. I wasn’t crying and making a fuss, but I had pulled out all my eyelashes.
Did nobody think that something was wrong?
Or even, perhaps, think to ask me if I was okay?
No.