Bullied in public, suffering alone
‘’Take her seat since you took her house’’.
This is how it started. This is how she ‘’welcomed’’ me to her school.
I have always wondered why she targeted me. Was it because I was arriving from a different region? Or because I was indeed replacing a pupil she liked? I did not understand then and will never understand the reason for her behaviour. But I suffered in silence and alone because I did not know that what she was doing was wrong and I imagine the other kids didn’t know either. Coming from a family of teachers, I have always respected authority and trusted the adults. This is probably why it took so long to realize that something was wrong. I did not know but she did for sure.
She would always encourage the other pupils to laugh at me when I made mistakes. I remember vividly all their eyes on me and their unbearable snickers. They would laugh but she would not. Instead she would look at me in silence with that terrible look, as if she meant ‘’You are all alone.’’ Some kids would copy her behaviour and boss me around with her approval or her indifference.
‘’Punishment by example’’
‘’Punishment by example’’ would be a regular practice for her. The principle was simple: Everybody in the class deserved to be punished, but she would punish only one of us ‘’So you all know what happens when you do something stupid’’. Needless to say that it was always me. It would start with her saying my name, followed with a punishment.
One day she went to pick up a phone call in the other room. The whole class used the occasion to be loud, including me I confess. When she came back and saw that we were all chatting together, she sent me on time out for a few minutes, in front of everybody. That day I decided to stop talking. A few years ago I burned all my notebooks and report cards. There was one where she had written that I was ‘’elsewhere as usual’’ in class.
During recess she would regularly make me stay in class to copy a word a hundred times. Of course, the others made spelling mistakes too, but I was the one to be punished. This is probably when I developed an interest for words and the actual act of writing. I changed the punishment into a moment for myself, filling the space between the lines with words and ink, listening to the noise the nib makes when I shape the letters, letting my mind wander among the grammar rules but still not knowing how to use them.
I would usually be moved alone to a table for 2. One day another newbie joined us in the middle of the year. Pierre sat next to me in the empty spot. He was pale and silent like me and had a shaved head. We became best friends and I felt like I could talk again. Our friendship came with a price. She told the other kids that we were in love, and they would constantly nag us. The truth is, we felt less vulnerable when we were together.
There was also the tape technique. Pierre and I talked sometimes in class, just like the rest of the pupils in the class. She would only put tape on our mouths. Just on Pierre’s and mine.
Every couple of weeks, my friend and I also had to bear the remarks and teasing which came with these rubber handles that you put at the end of the pens to place your fingers. ‘’You write like babies, I give you baby stuff’’ she would say. Then everybody would laugh at us for the rest of the day. ‘’Babies! Babies!’’.
Pierre changed schools after a year. I missed him terribly as he was my only true friend. Then I had to put up with her harassment for another year, all alone this time. I met him about 10 years later, we briefly mentioned that teacher. But I felt he was still suffering. Life drove us apart, and it’s probably a good thing as the bond we had was not for good reasons.
A few red flags
At that time I would often wet my bed at night and wake up with fear, shame and guilt. Thank God the others and the teacher never heard of it.
I also remember having warts on my fingers. Burning them with nitrogen is a pain associated with my childhood, but it was not as painful as what I had to experience in school. Being forced to explain to others why my fingers were hidden in plasters and seeing the disgust on their faces was another humiliation I apparently deserved.
One day my parents started to send me to the child psychiatrist because I had told them that I liked the feeling of the blade on my skin. The sessions were on Tuesday afternoon during geography class. That teacher told my parents that she had made sure ‘’everything was taken care of’’ while I would be away and that Delphine would copy the lesson for me. I guess it was her strategy when my parents became suspicious about the cause of my morbid penchant.
In the shrink’s office I remember having to put in the order of my choice images of a pig to tell a story. All the stories we read in class ended well so I just did as I had learned. There was also the exercise with the stains on the cards where I saw monsters taking souls out of humans. I honestly don’t remember her reaction, all I know is that we had a few more sessions together.
The only good school memories are the field trips because I was not in her clutches. There were other adults so I knew she could not hurt me. Then I could be a normal kid.
This story too ends well. All my physical embarrassments disappeared when I changed classes. The next teacher was a kind man and did not have an ounce of nastiness in him. I liked him because he did not humiliate or punish me, and also because he had a moustache like Freddie Mercury whom I had just discovered among my father’s records.
Back to the future
About 15 years after, former pupils had organized a reunion in the school for the retirement of another teacher. I had moved several times since then but one of my classmates knew where my father lived. So she told him about the event and said that the organizer needed a picture of me in 1991 and a recent one and a short text about what I had become. I cogitated for weeks, wondering if I should go or not, when I realized that the nightmares I had had for all these years existed because I was still afraid of that teacher. I decided to go to the celebration because I needed closure. I owed it to the child in me. So I went there without the pictures and the text because I did not want to be seen again. I bumped into Delphine. She was very nice to me, and proposed to revisit the school. It’s like she had known what was going on at that time and felt empathy. We walked in the different rooms and classrooms. The place had changed but the memories were still embedded in the walls. We reached the classroom where I had suffered of constant punishment and humiliation for 2 years. I stopped at the threshold, frozen. That teacher had retired a few years before and a new one had made a few esthetic changes. My eyes saw the new classroom but my mind was back to 1991. It took huge mental effort to enter the classroom and to convince myself that 15 years had passed and that I was safe.
‘’Let’s go to the playground!’’ said Delphine, helping me to come back to reality. And so we left. I touched the chestnut tree to feel its energy. It had been here for so long, witnessing everything before and after me, being unable to intervene. At that moment a flash thought crossed my mind. ‘’I hope I am the only one, after all. I hope she hurt only me and that there is not a long list of scapegoats she picked every year.’’
My train of thought was interrupted by a voice I recognized immediately. ‘’Hello’’, said the kind and mustached man. I turned to him. His head had become white after all these years but his eyes were still as mischievous as before. White haired Freddie Mercury and I chatted for a few minutes. He knew about my Canadian dream but would not tell me who told him. Then someone called him out and he disappeared.
Then I heard her voice. I instantly felt a pain running through my whole body. I could see her from the corner of my eye but could not look at her directly. She was chatting with other people a few meters away from me. I took a deep breath and left, shivering and trying to walk straight. As I was walking away, I forgave my classmates ‘’They were kids, they did not know.’’ And I hoped that God, or Karma, or anything else would make her pay for what she had done because I obviously could not.
The aftermath and how to live with
Today I am 33. Today I can almost stand my name though I still avoid using it. When I communicate with people or when I introduce myself in person I use my diminutive. When I meet professionals, the first thing they ask is what I want to be called. I hide the truth with humour. I say that only my mother uses my full name when she is mad at me. This is not true. I am too ashamed to tell people (honestly, how would you?) that my own ‘’official’’ name triggers anxiety: The pain in my stomach, the breathing difficulty, and the lump in my throat. Just for a few seconds.
I have had nightmares for the last 25 years during which I am back in her classroom. Everything is the same, the pink rug on the walls, the drawings, the map of France, the blackboard and the big yellow plastic ruler. Then she reaches to me to hurt me. The other kids are watching, immobile and silent. I manage to escape by flying out by the window and keep going up and forward but each time I reach the wall of the school, I stop flying and I land on the ground. Then I wake up, my heart beats fast and I feel like I have been crying for hours. It takes a few minutes before I can fall back to sleep.
Anxiety is in everything related to this time of my life: The smell of pines because it was the trees in the playground, the sound of kids playing-singing-laughing, the ‘’back to school’’ ads on TV. It brings me back to 1991 and for a few seconds I am her prey again.
Resilience and love to overcome sufferings
I often think about the younger me as if I could show this little girl that one day she will be fine. One day she will become a teacher but a nice one. A teacher for adults because she is still afraid of schools. She will teach these grammar rules she learned with the kind and mustached man. Then she will discover that there are more words than those you have to copy a hundred times, it’s called ‘’literature’’. In a few years she will indeed fly away to a new country and work in a safe place where people care about each other, where they help other people so they can feel better. A place where they create tools to recognize signs of harassment and bullying so people can make it stop.
If we have a kid, my partner and I will name our daughter with the missing part of my name. And if it’s a boy, he will be named after my favourite writer.
Because in the end, love wins.
‘’Take her seat since you took her house’’.
This is how it started. This is how she ‘’welcomed’’ me to her school.
I have always wondered why she targeted me. Was it because I was arriving from a different region? Or because I was indeed replacing a pupil she liked? I did not understand then and will never understand the reason for her behaviour. But I suffered in silence and alone because I did not know that what she was doing was wrong and I imagine the other kids didn’t know either. Coming from a family of teachers, I have always respected authority and trusted the adults. This is probably why it took so long to realize that something was wrong. I did not know but she did for sure.
She would always encourage the other pupils to laugh at me when I made mistakes. I remember vividly all their eyes on me and their unbearable snickers. They would laugh but she would not. Instead she would look at me in silence with that terrible look, as if she meant ‘’You are all alone.’’ Some kids would copy her behaviour and boss me around with her approval or her indifference.
‘’Punishment by example’’
‘’Punishment by example’’ would be a regular practice for her. The principle was simple: Everybody in the class deserved to be punished, but she would punish only one of us ‘’So you all know what happens when you do something stupid’’. Needless to say that it was always me. It would start with her saying my name, followed with a punishment.
One day she went to pick up a phone call in the other room. The whole class used the occasion to be loud, including me I confess. When she came back and saw that we were all chatting together, she sent me on time out for a few minutes, in front of everybody. That day I decided to stop talking. A few years ago I burned all my notebooks and report cards. There was one where she had written that I was ‘’elsewhere as usual’’ in class.
During recess she would regularly make me stay in class to copy a word a hundred times. Of course, the others made spelling mistakes too, but I was the one to be punished. This is probably when I developed an interest for words and the actual act of writing. I changed the punishment into a moment for myself, filling the space between the lines with words and ink, listening to the noise the nib makes when I shape the letters, letting my mind wander among the grammar rules but still not knowing how to use them.
I would usually be moved alone to a table for 2. One day another newbie joined us in the middle of the year. Pierre sat next to me in the empty spot. He was pale and silent like me and had a shaved head. We became best friends and I felt like I could talk again. Our friendship came with a price. She told the other kids that we were in love, and they would constantly nag us. The truth is, we felt less vulnerable when we were together.
There was also the tape technique. Pierre and I talked sometimes in class, just like the rest of the pupils in the class. She would only put tape on our mouths. Just on Pierre’s and mine.
Every couple of weeks, my friend and I also had to bear the remarks and teasing which came with these rubber handles that you put at the end of the pens to place your fingers. ‘’You write like babies, I give you baby stuff’’ she would say. Then everybody would laugh at us for the rest of the day. ‘’Babies! Babies!’’.
Pierre changed schools after a year. I missed him terribly as he was my only true friend. Then I had to put up with her harassment for another year, all alone this time. I met him about 10 years later, we briefly mentioned that teacher. But I felt he was still suffering. Life drove us apart, and it’s probably a good thing as the bond we had was not for good reasons.
A few red flags
At that time I would often wet my bed at night and wake up with fear, shame and guilt. Thank God the others and the teacher never heard of it.
I also remember having warts on my fingers. Burning them with nitrogen is a pain associated with my childhood, but it was not as painful as what I had to experience in school. Being forced to explain to others why my fingers were hidden in plasters and seeing the disgust on their faces was another humiliation I apparently deserved.
One day my parents started to send me to the child psychiatrist because I had told them that I liked the feeling of the blade on my skin. The sessions were on Tuesday afternoon during geography class. That teacher told my parents that she had made sure ‘’everything was taken care of’’ while I would be away and that Delphine would copy the lesson for me. I guess it was her strategy when my parents became suspicious about the cause of my morbid penchant.
In the shrink’s office I remember having to put in the order of my choice images of a pig to tell a story. All the stories we read in class ended well so I just did as I had learned. There was also the exercise with the stains on the cards where I saw monsters taking souls out of humans. I honestly don’t remember her reaction, all I know is that we had a few more sessions together.
The only good school memories are the field trips because I was not in her clutches. There were other adults so I knew she could not hurt me. Then I could be a normal kid.
This story too ends well. All my physical embarrassments disappeared when I changed classes. The next teacher was a kind man and did not have an ounce of nastiness in him. I liked him because he did not humiliate or punish me, and also because he had a moustache like Freddie Mercury whom I had just discovered among my father’s records.
Back to the future
About 15 years after, former pupils had organized a reunion in the school for the retirement of another teacher. I had moved several times since then but one of my classmates knew where my father lived. So she told him about the event and said that the organizer needed a picture of me in 1991 and a recent one and a short text about what I had become. I cogitated for weeks, wondering if I should go or not, when I realized that the nightmares I had had for all these years existed because I was still afraid of that teacher. I decided to go to the celebration because I needed closure. I owed it to the child in me. So I went there without the pictures and the text because I did not want to be seen again. I bumped into Delphine. She was very nice to me, and proposed to revisit the school. It’s like she had known what was going on at that time and felt empathy. We walked in the different rooms and classrooms. The place had changed but the memories were still embedded in the walls. We reached the classroom where I had suffered of constant punishment and humiliation for 2 years. I stopped at the threshold, frozen. That teacher had retired a few years before and a new one had made a few esthetic changes. My eyes saw the new classroom but my mind was back to 1991. It took huge mental effort to enter the classroom and to convince myself that 15 years had passed and that I was safe.
‘’Let’s go to the playground!’’ said Delphine, helping me to come back to reality. And so we left. I touched the chestnut tree to feel its energy. It had been here for so long, witnessing everything before and after me, being unable to intervene. At that moment a flash thought crossed my mind. ‘’I hope I am the only one, after all. I hope she hurt only me and that there is not a long list of scapegoats she picked every year.’’
My train of thought was interrupted by a voice I recognized immediately. ‘’Hello’’, said the kind and mustached man. I turned to him. His head had become white after all these years but his eyes were still as mischievous as before. White haired Freddie Mercury and I chatted for a few minutes. He knew about my Canadian dream but would not tell me who told him. Then someone called him out and he disappeared.
Then I heard her voice. I instantly felt a pain running through my whole body. I could see her from the corner of my eye but could not look at her directly. She was chatting with other people a few meters away from me. I took a deep breath and left, shivering and trying to walk straight. As I was walking away, I forgave my classmates ‘’They were kids, they did not know.’’ And I hoped that God, or Karma, or anything else would make her pay for what she had done because I obviously could not.
The aftermath and how to live with
Today I am 33. Today I can almost stand my name though I still avoid using it. When I communicate with people or when I introduce myself in person I use my diminutive. When I meet professionals, the first thing they ask is what I want to be called. I hide the truth with humour. I say that only my mother uses my full name when she is mad at me. This is not true. I am too ashamed to tell people (honestly, how would you?) that my own ‘’official’’ name triggers anxiety: The pain in my stomach, the breathing difficulty, and the lump in my throat. Just for a few seconds.
I have had nightmares for the last 25 years during which I am back in her classroom. Everything is the same, the pink rug on the walls, the drawings, the map of France, the blackboard and the big yellow plastic ruler. Then she reaches to me to hurt me. The other kids are watching, immobile and silent. I manage to escape by flying out by the window and keep going up and forward but each time I reach the wall of the school, I stop flying and I land on the ground. Then I wake up, my heart beats fast and I feel like I have been crying for hours. It takes a few minutes before I can fall back to sleep.
Anxiety is in everything related to this time of my life: The smell of pines because it was the trees in the playground, the sound of kids playing-singing-laughing, the ‘’back to school’’ ads on TV. It brings me back to 1991 and for a few seconds I am her prey again.
Resilience and love to overcome sufferings
I often think about the younger me as if I could show this little girl that one day she will be fine. One day she will become a teacher but a nice one. A teacher for adults because she is still afraid of schools. She will teach these grammar rules she learned with the kind and mustached man. Then she will discover that there are more words than those you have to copy a hundred times, it’s called ‘’literature’’. In a few years she will indeed fly away to a new country and work in a safe place where people care about each other, where they help other people so they can feel better. A place where they create tools to recognize signs of harassment and bullying so people can make it stop.
If we have a kid, my partner and I will name our daughter with the missing part of my name. And if it’s a boy, he will be named after my favourite writer.
Because in the end, love wins.