I grieve for the child I used to be.

I wasn't a perfect child. I had my rough spots where I wasn't the nicest, to myself and to others. It was never in malice, or out of an urge to be nasty just for the hell of it. It was always in response to a situation where I felt I had been wronged. Someone was rude to me first, or picked on a friend, maybe. It all had a reason.

My childhood & Elementary school years were wonderful. I can only really think of one incident where my mental health interfered, but largely, I was happy. As soon as I entered middle school and started 5th grade, shit hit the fan. A lot of people say that high school was the worst time of their life, but for me it was middle school, by far. For reference, I went to middle school from 2014 to 2018.

I was in the advanced classes as a kid. My school called it PERC, standing for "Program for Enrichment, Reasoning & Creativity." In elementary school, we would be pulled out of our regular class a few times per week to go learn the advanced stuff in another room, but still spend the majority of our class time with the "normal" kids. But in middle school, where the schedule was much more like a high school's structure, every class we took was advanced — meaning I was stuck with the same kids all day, every day, nearly every year. This made it difficult for me, a very shy kid, whose friends were not in the advanced classes, to enjoy the middle school experience in any capacity.

I was never bullied like you see in the movies. It was all subtle. Social ostracization. Nobody spoke to me unless they had to. When teachers said to "get into groups" I was often the last person to find one. Before I found my main group of friends (who I'm still extremely close with to this day), I wouldn't get invited to a lot of things. Recesses and lunches would be spent quietly on the sidelines, being largely ignored by those around me.

We had wildly different interests. I was into the weird fandom things— Undertale, FNAF, MLP — and internet culture in general. They were into mainstream things, like One Direction, 5SOS, sports, makeup, fashion, and dating.

One day, I remember returning to my locker after lunch to hear a pair of boys at their lockers nearby discussing My Little Pony. They were talking very loudly about how all fans of the show are creepy overweight adult men, and how it's a show for babies and anybody who liked it was lame and weird. I'm certain they were deliberately doing it so I would overhear it. At that point, everyone knew how much I liked MLP, and they teased me behind my back about it, so much so that I forced myself to move on from it prematurely in order to fit in.

Word for word, I got a message on that anonymous confessions app everyone used to use around that time that said, "Do you have the mind of a 5 year old? You still watch and play with My Little Pony," which was an extremely damaging blow to my self worth.

Keep in mind, I was around 12-13 years old at the time. In other words, the target audience for MLP.

People didn't like me because I didn't talk. After I made one of the biggest mistakes in my middle school career, they had a lot more reasons to hate me, and they definitely made that clear. Many people outright said it to my face.

One day in early 2017, I posted something to instagram, complaining about the noise level of my classmates and how they needed to "get it through their thick heads" that they needed to listen to the teacher and quiet down in class because people (me) couldn't focus. Admittedly, I did call them names, and was pretty rude with my wording, but I never named names or directly tagged people and I was also like... thirteen years old and fed up. And undiagnosed.

Kids responded like any group of reasonable thirteen-year-olds who were just called names online would respond. They called me names back, but worse. And they made it their mission to further isolate me throughout the rest of middle school. Evidently, someone reported the post to the school, because later that week I was pulled not-so-subtly out of class and sent to the principal's office. She was a nasty old lady who should not have been working at a middle school, and she yelled and screamed at me about how unacceptable and how stupid of a choice it was to post something like that. Kids are supposed to be loud and talk and you can't expect them to cater to you and be silent in class, that's just not fair!

I remember struggling to hold back my tears on the bus ride home that day.

I'm still extremely bitter about the way the school handled it. Nobody thought that maybe there was some deeper reason as to why this was causing me so much distress. They just immediately reacted with punishment, and didn't do anything to try to control the other students. They dismissed me just because I didn't show clear and obvious signs of needing extra assistance.

Entering an environment where I would be consistently brought to the edge of sensory overwhelm every single day was exhausting. I would have panic attacks every morning before going into school and my parents thought it was just social anxiety because I couldn't properly verbalize how I felt. I thought it was just anxiety, too, because I didn't even realize what I felt. It got to the point where I was passively suicidal because I was just so tired of it all.

I remember being confused why I was the only one who was bothered by what was happening. How could anybody else possibly focus with all the noise and chatter happening constantly? It didn't make sense to me. I felt like nobody understood that this wasn't a normal level of rowdiness for a sixth grade classroom, it was unbearable. It was physically painful.

They would scream across the room at each other, talk constantly even during lectures, throw things, and generally be rowdy. The teachers couldn't even continue their lessons half the time because they would be talked over constantly. I would get lost because of the noise level and I couldn't focus. My friends weren't in my classes so I had nobody to talk to or ask for help when I did get lost, and I was too embarrased to raise my hand and ask for help since it seemed like everybody else understood it. In class, I would often detach myself and retreat into my mind to try to get away from the noise (people saw this as "zoning out," and that's how I would describe it because I didn't know how else to). I would spend hours at home tearing my hair out while trying to do my homework in tears because I couldn't remember what the teacher had taught us that day.

I'd spend even more long, tearful hours at night wondering why I couldn't just focus and block out the noise like everyone else seemed to, wondering why I couldn't absorb the information as easily as the rest of my classmates, wondering why I was so miserable.

I wasn't a hard-core rule follower. I didn't want to be in school, and I didn't particularly care about what we were learning, either. I just didn't want to look stupid. I didn't want to get bad grades and taint my streak of all-A's from elementary school. I was supposed to be a smart kid, and smart kids get all A's, right?

I didn't even want them to be silent. I didn't care that they talked in class. I didn't mind some chatter. I just wanted them to tone it all down a couple notches, because the level they were currently at was way too high.

But I was misunderstood.

Looking back as an adult, I realize that this was one of the earliest, and possibly biggest, examples of my sensory difficulties. It was a startling realization that I wasn't a bad kid, I was just struggling and nobody could tell. Nobody helped me. I finally had an explanation as to why I felt the way I did. After getting diagnosed with ADHD in high school and recently coming to terms with the fact that I'm likely autistic as well, my behavior back then finally made sense to me.

I had a whole breakdown about it recently after searching through my Instagram post archive for kitten pictures but instead finding all the awful shit people said about me as a result of that incident, which is what prompted me to write this little reflection in the first place. Just re-reading what they said re-opened all those old wounds, and it was actually scary how intensely I felt those old fears and emotions again.

Then after an hour or so of crying about it I snapped myself out of it by reminding myself that this all happened nine years ago when I was 13, nobody (probably) remembers it, and that the ringleader of my torment was a massive bitch anyways so I don't give a shit what she or the others think anymore. (A few of the nicer people involved and I kind of silently made up in high school, but I never spoke to them to begin with so I don't consider any relationships lost).

I don't blame my classmates, not entirely. (Except maybe that one girl. /hj. but I did recently hear that one of the nicest guys I knew also hated her with a passion so I feel a bit more vindicated about that). We were thirteen. We were in a very turbulent part of our lives, both socially and physiologically. I was a quiet kid. I kept to myself all throughout my school career, so people understood that's kind of how I liked it. And maybe I'm giving them too much grace, but perhaps they didn't realize that socially isolating me in the way they did made me feel awful. Who knows for sure?

I'm also not saying I was right about what I did. I wasn't, and I regret it. But the aftermath of it deeply affected me as a person, and fundamentally changed how I interact with the world. I'm only just coming to terms with that fact now, and it's very jarring.

Reminiscing can be a bitch sometimes.