This topic just came up because I was getting ready for bed and my roomie asked me why I still wear a retainer to bed. Well, this prompted a long winded explanation, but the point was, I am still way to self-conscious about having had buck teeth nine years ago, sO I still wear my red, yellow, and blue sparkly retainer to bed. Every night.
So I was wondering…are any of you still self-conscious about things you were teased about in your youth?
Some more of mine:
I wore coke-bottle, bifocal glasses when I was nine. I got contacts when I was 12 and I have not even owned glasses since, until last january. I have a really nice pair now (no bifocals) but I sitll won’t wear them unless it’s an emergency. I hear “Guys don’t make passes at girls who wear glasses” over and over in my head.
When I was 12, I moved from inner-city Baltimore to the burbs, from poverty into relative wealth (Mom remarried well). I am still a lunatic about clothes, because transferring to the eight grade in a primarily white, rich, upper class neighborhood with a closet full of salvation army throwaways was pretty traumatic.
I had the worst afro-eyebrows ever, and I finally got plucked when I was 14. I am still a stickler about plucking every three days, because those “unibrow” taunts still haunt me.
So does anyone else have any childhood traumas they still aren’t over? Or any advice for recovering? I’m only 19, so I guess there is still hope! =)
I think I’m pretty much over my childhood trauma in specifics, but not yet completely. What I mean is, it’s not the things I was teased about that still haunt me, it’s what happened to my self-esteem and the lagging process of rebuilding, that does.
I’ve gone through a lot of changes in the last few years and have found a peace with who I am. Because of this I am able to somewhat dismiss what people said to and about me on the basis that they were kids and kids can most certainly be cruel.
On the occasion that I can’t forget how gross and disgusting they made me feel, I become shy. Horribly horribly shy.
A lot of people who knew me then don’t even recognize me now. The ones that do say how much I’ve changed. I haven’t changed. It’s just that now they can see me.
All that wasn’t too long ago actually. The teasing basically ended once I moved into High School but there it was more not teasing just getting left out. I did have friends in HS though which is good. But I still feel self conscious about my weight. (I’m not overweight but my thighs and my stomach bug me and when I have a bad day I still hear their taunting in my head)
As I’ve gone through HS though I’ve become more comfortable with who I am and am starting to like myself more.
For me, middle school was the worst of it. High school was big enough that I made close friends and found a group of people I was fairly comfortable with.
College, however, was what changed everything for me. I went to a women’s college in Texas where the average age of the student population was 33. Suddenly, I was surrounded by women significantly older than me (I was 17 when I started) who were so much more concerned with getting their degrees, feeding their families and attaining their goals than what I was wearing, how well I fit in, or my own peculiar brand of stream-of-conciousness humor.
I got the chance to redefine who I was without the imposing judgements of everyone else. I became something of a class clown. I became much, much more comfortable with who I am. That was reinforced during summers home when I ran into two or three of the kids who used to torment me. Some of them had grown up and become nice people. Others had stayed the same and were beginning to reap the consequences of what they’d sown.
While I wouldn’t ever put anyone through that, I survived, and I am stronger and more compassionate because of it.
I went to a back-woods elementary school. While I had always been labeled as “different,” and alientated, the outright taunting didn’t start until 6th grade or so. At that point, it became clear that I had totally different agendas then the other kids. While I wanted to write, act, sing and learn, they wanted to tease their hair and get pregant ASAP. On top of that, my mom opted to teach at a pre-school that my little sister could attend with her, so money was always tight. I didn’t have the LA Gears. I would be surrounded daily on the bus by a group of 3-4 boys, who would proceed to tease me until I burst into tears. This is a daily process. When I told my parents, my father insisted on calling the school, which made the whole situation SOOO much better.
The end result is that I stopped trying so hard in school, barely made it through high school, and am now going part time in college. My concept of what a man is was formed in that hell-hole, and as a result, I have a hard time trusting men. I’m lucky that I have always been cool with my body size, I inherited my father’s metabolism. God only knows what the hell they would have done to me if they could have made fun of my body, as well.
I feel college did me a world of good, as I grew up in a sheltered town in Wisconsin. Our school mascot was a truck (our team was the Truckers) and that pretty much sums up the mentality of the town. Most people who graduated (or attended) school end up within a 20 mile radius, and never see anything outside of their norm.
College allowed me a fresh start, where no one knew me, and I was able to escape any preconceived notions that were holding me back. I think I still carry some of the pain from the younger years, and that is not a bad thing. I am just glad it’s not like it used to be, and that I made it out.
I was a plump kid all the way into my freshman year of high school.
Seeing that I had no motivation, and my greaatest ambition was to work as a delivery boy, I took an auto repair class.
Well, there was this older kid, a junior, who picked on me daily. Right before I quit school that year, I believe the last thing he said was something along the lines of, “Your mother must have been on the rag when you were born.” This was of course very impossible, but it was my birthday, and it bugged the hell out of me.
Anyway, immediately after I quit school, I got me some counseling for low self-esteem. Over the course of the 9 months or so that I was out of school I grew 6 inches, placing me at 6’4". I also lost about 60 pounds, and started to develop some pretty serious muscles from digging basements for money.
I went back to school the next year, and ran into my big bully, who was no longer quite so big, in the hallway.
I pushed him up against the lockers, and asked him if he remembered me. The look of terror in his eyes should have been good enough, but I ended up trying to stuff him into his locker all the same. That’s how I got my second long vacation from school.
Moral of the story:
Although revenge is sweet, the consequences of it can be bitter.
