Every year in Anti-Bullying Week, I share a post I wrote five years ago where I wrote about the hell of my secondary school years and the very long shadow bullying cast on my life. It may be lazy to share the same post year on year, but even 30 years on, I don’t want to put myself through writing it again.
During the first three years of high school, I was primarily known by two names, neither of which had been given to me by my parents. In English one day in first year, we were taking it in turns to read out a scene from a play. I couldn’t for the life of me tell you what it was but as fate would have it, the line I had to read was “I want a yak.” Quick as a flash, the boy in front of me yelled out “I always thought you were one……” Cue the entire class, including the teacher, to collapse in laughter. That spread like wildfire, and before long it became my name to the entire pupil body.
If we’d had Google images then, I might have discovered pretty quickly that yaks are really kind of cute, but I never really saw it that way at the time and I really don’t think that the name was an affectionate one.
The other name came from the fact that, yes, I do have weird eyes. For that reason, people would hiss like a cat when they saw me coming, and spit out “Cat’s Eyes” as I passed.
I’m sure that doesn’t sound like much, but when you hear one or other of those things round every corner every day, you do feel less than human.
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