Thin.
3
Thin But Definitely Not ‘In’
I wasn’t an idiot. I knew we had to move at some stage in our lives. That was just a by-product of having a dad who worked in the military. I just didn’t know it would be so sudden.
We were moving to Belgium, and my parents once again assured me I’d be happy. I wasn’t too sure about that. How could I beat the friendship group I had in Germany? And what was the effin’ point of settling in anywhere if we had to move every couple of years?
My last day of school was filled with tears. I sobbed in the classroom as we took our final lessons, despite having hated them before. I sobbed as Emma’s mum took the final photos of us as the Angelz. I sobbed as I made my final walk past the counsellor’s office. I sobbed on the bus home until my eyes became swollen and red. I was completely and utterly heartbroken.
In fact, I sobbed for weeks. How was I ever going to get over this feeling? I’d never felt this low before.
I may have only been twelve, but I knew I was going to hate Belgium.
I’m pretty grateful social media didn’t really exist when I was twelve, so I didn’t see what Emma, Anja, Olivia and Hannah were doing back in Germany, or what party I hadn’t been invited to. If I had, I don’t know how I would’ve coped. It’s bad enough for my anxiety now.
Belgium was as rubbish as I’d expected it to be. When you’ve left somewhere as bright and flamboyant as Hamburg to move to a small town in the middle of nowhere, where the local tongue is Flemish, you’d probably be understandably p*ssed off yourself. Everything was either grey, beige or brown, and, no, that is not an exaggeration. They did excel at one thing, and that’s Belgian frites, but that’s about it.
Our house was a small brown bungalow, and no one on our street spoke a word of English. There was an old lady across the road who, over the next few weeks, seemed to develop a bit of a crush on my dad, but while she was friendly enough she wasn’t exactly someone I could have a sleepover with.
In order to have a sleepover I needed friends, and in order to make friends I needed to go to school. My anxiety began to ramp up again, and I began desperately praying I’d be able to fit in, like I had easily done in Hamburg. My parents assured me I’d make friends in no time.
Spoiler alert: I didn’t.
There was only one English-speaking school for miles around, and due to the large amount of American military personnel based there it happened to be an American high school. I was one of just three British people in a school of over a thousand pupils, making me an oddity. Not only that, but because of the way the education system differed to ours I’d now be a year ahead of myself. In teenage land, this was a big deal – a one-year age gap between twelve- and thirteen-year-olds may as well be ten. What a way to start secondary school, eh?
This school was rough. Girls would tattoo and pierce each other in the toilets, an offer I turned down many a time. There was a fight practically every day, where girls would often rip each other’s hair out on the lawn. One day, I even found a used condom on the floor, which as you can imagine was a truly delightful sight.
I spent a lot of time daydreaming about the good ol’ days with the Angelz, and wondering what they were now up to. Did they miss me? Were they still my friends? I’d tried calling them a few times on the landline, but I’d often be greeted with ‘They’re out playing volleyball/at a party/at a sleepover’ or ‘I’ll get her to call you when she’s back’, which they rarely did. I couldn’t understand how, after promising to stay the bestest of friends forever and ever, it was as though I no longer existed.
‘You need to try and move on and make new friends,’ my mum would say, and she was right. But I just couldn’t.
I was sitting in gym class early in the term when a skinny Spanish girl came and sat in front of me. I’d never seen anyone so thin before – she was skinnier than Anja, and that’s saying something. Like Anja, she had oodles of boys fawning over her like she was some sort of exotic goddess. I watched as she happily bathed in the attention, desperately wishing I was as popular as her – before remembering I was the plankton at the bottom of the food chain, and the chances of me ever getting a boyfriend were slim to none. Aside from the time she taught me key swear words in Spanish, we didn’t have much communication over the next year, though that didn’t mean I couldn’t ogle her when she wasn’t looking.
She had dimples above her lower back because of how thin she was, and, like a psycho, I weirdly began hoping her gym trousers would fall lower that day so I could study them more closely. She looked so frail and delicate. From the front, her hip bones jutted above her tracksuit bottoms. Her wrists looked like they could snap at any moment.
Thin, thin, thin. I couldn’t prise my eyes away from her body, no matter how hard I tried.
Maybe I was looking too much into things, but I soon spotted a common theme between Anja and the Spanish Girl. They were both pretty. They were both popular. They were both sexual goddesses (apparently). And it could’ve been mere coincidence, but they both happened to be T-H-I-N. Was this the magic ingredient for fitting in?
Being thin was not only a beauty ideal in my eyes, but also a way of being. This was the early noughties, and I was on the brink of becoming a teenage girl. Everything I read or saw surrounded the notion of women being thin, and not much else. Women tried to get rid of their curves, as though they were somehow grotesque. Magazines and the media encouraged you to lose weight, repeatedly picturing the same white, skinny models and celebrities across their pages – and, in turn, making you feel as though you had to look that way, too. This is precisely what I’d do – mentally link popularity with thinness.
‘Are you a lesbian?’ some guy yelled at me one day in front of his friends, waking me up from my intense ogling of Spanish Girl. Although being a lesbian is far from an insult, I glanced down at my lap, mortified. This boy was called David. He was allegedly the most popular boy in the year and dated the most popular girl, despite the fact that he resembled an unwell, anaemic rat and barely came up to my shoulder. From the moment I’d arrived at the school he’d taken a great dislike to me, and I still have no idea why, other than I was different.
Some people say that if a boy is mean to you, it means he fancies you. I can categorically tell you that if a boy is mean to you, it’s because he’s a dick. Don’t let anyone treat you badly under the illusion it’s a crush. You deserve so much better than that.
David would spit at me. He’d push me into lockers, despite the fact I was quite little. He’d tell me girls were going to beat me up, despite the fact I’d never had any issues with anyone before. He’d call me ugly, make fun of my flat chest, or make weird, sneery voices at me, which were kind of creepy. I began to hide whenever I saw him, terrified of what he and his friends might do to me that day.
In an effort to impress him, the popular girls would then start being horrible to me, too – throwing food at me across the dining room, or calling me ugly or whatever other original insult they could think of. Someone made up rumours about how I fancied certain boys in my year and scribbled them all over the walls of the girls’ toilets. And I’d just sit there and take it, too frightened of what would happen if I argued back.
We’d been living in Belgium for a few months and I still hadn’t settled in. It was miserable, feeling like I didn’t have a single friend. Lunchtimes were spent huddled away in a corner of the library, hiding from the librarian, who also seemed to hate me, or sometimes not eating at all. If it meant having to eat in the canteen, where I was guaranteed a sh*tshow, I refused to go in.
Over time the desire to skip school altogether grew stronger. I’d do that sometimes – deciding to walk round the local shops instead, or spend long periods of time in the toilets away from everyone. I was just so sad.
This wasn’t the type of sadness you experience if you miss a loved one, or when you accidentally burn a pizza in the oven. This was a sadness that crept up on me, a feeling I simply couldn
’t shake. Nothing made me happy. It was a sadness that made me feel too tired to get up in the mornings, and which would send me to bed early every night. When it was dark I would cry and cry until I physically couldn’t any more, the insides of my body feeling like weights that were pulling me down into the mattress.
Eventually, my overwhelming sense of sadness turned to not caring about a single thing. My body was too exhausted to feel anxious any more, too exhausted to feed my nervousness.
My mum put it down to hormones in the beginning, I think. When I found it hard to get up in the mornings I guess she thought I was being difficult. I couldn’t bring myself to tell her I’d considered dying. I didn’t want to lumber her with my problems. I’d often made comments about how I didn’t want to go to school, but I’d been saying that my entire life. What was new there?
Bedtime became my sanctuary and safety net. I felt calm in the dark where no one could hurt me or make fun of me. I felt at peace. No worries, no bullies. I was left alone and that’s how I liked it.
And that is how my depression started, although I didn’t know what it was at the time.
Some people call depression ‘the black dog’, which has never really resonated with me. I love dogs, and comparing something as awful as depression to them doesn’t seem that fair, does it?
This is how I describe it. Imagine that on a regular, happy day you are surrounded by an almost-clear cloud. Over time, as your thoughts become more negative by the day and the depression worsens, the cloud becomes greyer in colour. Every negative thought turns the cloud greyer and greyer, darker and darker, heavier and heavier, like a fog. This fog makes your mind fuzzy: you can’t think clearly, let alone see clearly.
At your lowest point the fog is so thick and dark and heavy that you can no longer see anything. No matter how hard you fight, you feel lost in this smog and unable to shake it off. I was stuck in an abyss with no way out.
The final straw for me came towards the end of the academic year. I was sitting on the floor in gym class when David threw a basketball at me as hard as he could. I don’t need to tell you that it f***ing hurt. My eyes began to well up – not only through embarrassment, but also in pain.
‘F***ing idiot,’ he said, and strolled off with his friends like that was a normal thing to have done.
I left the gym and punched my locker as hard as I could repeatedly. I cried and cried and cried. ‘I can’t stay here another year,’ I kept saying to myself through my sobs. I honestly didn’t know how I could’ve survived it.
The class had yet to finish, but I went into a toilet cubicle to hide and didn’t come out for the rest of it. Someone came in and asked if I was OK, but I lied and said I was fine.
But I was sick of pretending I was fine. I just wished someone knew how un-fine I truly was.
Sometimes when you’re so caught up in your own worries and struggles, you don’t feel like anyone cares. But someone always does.
Unbeknown to me, my parents had been searching for alternative schools almost the entire year I was there. However, in order to do that, it would mean changing our family’s whole dynamic. If there’d been a better school to send me to in Belgium, I would’ve gone there instead. But there wasn’t.
There was one other option: a very expensive all-girls boarding school near to my grandparents in England. Going to boarding school was never supposed to be part of my story, but it would give me a chance to be less miserable.
‘I didn’t give birth to you only to send you away,’ my mum told me recently and, although I didn’t see it at the time, boarding school was her only way of saving me.
It would stretch my parents financially, but if it meant me getting a better education and being happy, it was better than nothing.
My parents showed me a brochure of the school, which looked like a fairy tale compared to the school I was in. Then again, North Korea would have looked appealing by that point. I still wasn’t a hundred-per-cent sold on the idea, but anything was better than what I was currently dealing with.
It was worth a try – and, hey, if I didn’t like it, I was certain I’d only have to endure it for a couple of years at most, just like I had all the other schools.
4
The Makings of a Misfit
If you’ve ever questioned whether boarding school is like Harry Potter, then you’re right – it’s not. I’d had high hopes for my new Hogwarts-esque future, but it couldn’t have been further from that if I’d tried. There were no owls, although you could keep a pet hamster in the Pet Hut (i.e. an insulated shed opposite the IT block). There was no potion-making, although I did get into trouble for deliberately melting a series of plastic rulers with a Bunsen burner. In fact, I think the closest we ever got to magic was putting lacrosse sticks between our legs and humming the Harry Potter theme tune, while running across the sports field to the sound of our PE teacher yelling.
In fact, boarding school wasn’t what I expected it to be at all. The brochure made it seem like something out of an Enid Blyton novel, when in reality it was just a school you lived and studied at. For someone who hated school with a passion like I did, you might as well have chucked me in Guantanamo Bay.
Going to a new school is tough enough as it is. But now, with the added bonus of having reached puberty before the majority of the other girls in my class, I was sure to be a certified misfit. And, for someone who wanted to blend in and be accepted, all I seemed to do was stand out.
Periods, to me, were THE SINGLE MOST EMBARRASSING THING EVER. Needless to say, I didn’t want to talk about them. I didn’t want to even hear the word. I couldn’t believe that being female came with all this gross and unnecessary baggage.
As though having to start a new school wasn’t terrifying enough, I’d recently started my period, so I now had the added pleasure of having to deal with bleeding and cramps on my own … as well as showering, clothing and feeding myself. It was an awful lot to handle.
‘Don’t worry,’ my mum said, ‘there’ll be lots of girls in your year who have started theirs.’
On the day I arrived to unpack my things and settle into my new school, dressed head-to-toe in denim (thanks, Mum), the atmosphere in my family could only be described as depressing AF. Honestly, it was like my family were going into mourning, acting as though I was never going to return. My mum was telling me to fold my clothes and hang my uniform up properly at night. I began Blu-Tacking a few magazine clippings on to the wall in an attempt to make my dorm, which I was now sharing with a stranger, a bit cosier. From the outside I may have been holding it together, but I was absolutely petrified of being on my own – and most of all, about potentially being bullied again.
I thrust the slightly unnecessary amount of sanitary-towel packets my mum had bought me to the back of my wardrobe in shame, before my dad saw. I was terrified at the thought of having to deal with something so grown-up on my own. What if I leaked in my knickers or on the bed sheets like I had before? How would I be able to hide the stains or wash the blood out without anyone noticing? My mum had always been there to help me with that, and now here I was stuck in a school in the middle of the Welsh countryside with a lot of responsibility for myself. I mean, I still read the Beano and played my Game Boy, for God’s sake.
‘Now, if anyone gives you any grief, you punch them in the face,’ my dad said, which, in hindsight, probably wasn’t the greatest advice. As I watched my mum and dad drive away that Sunday afternoon I burst into tears. I just wished I’d pretended life was hunky-dory at my old school and got on with the bullying back in Belgium. The only upside was that my nan and grandad lived fifteen minutes down the road, meaning I could go and stay with them at weekends if I wanted to.
‘You dress weird,’ one girl said to me that night at dinner. I looked down at my outfit, then back at what the other girls were wearing. Perhaps they had a point. The girls around me were all dressed in fashionable clothes from Topshop – not this denim get-up that made me look like a deranged cowboy from 19
74.
Over the first few days I soon discovered I was one of only three girls in Year 8 who had started their periods. Three. Great. Thanks, Mum, you were wrong. And bleeding out of my bits wasn’t the only thing that made me stand out.
The first problem was my accent. My voice wasn’t posh like theirs. I still had a lingering south London accent, for Gawd’s sayke. I didn’t have ponies roaming around in my back garden. My shoes weren’t cool enough. In fact, everything that I thought of as normal was apparently wrong.
Compared to the other girls in my year, I was also a huge, furry monster. I’d peek enviously at the other girls getting changed and see their smooth skin and flat chests that had yet to be blessed by puberty. I had hair on my legs, on my bikini line and underneath my arms – not to mention the two caterpillars some may call ‘eyebrows’ plastered across my face, which made me look like the female equivalent of Liam Gallagher. No matter how often I shaved my underarms, the hair would grow back within a couple of days, and I wished I looked as lithe and as young as the rest of the girls still did.
My body looked completely different to theirs. As they stretched, I saw ribcages. You couldn’t see a hint of bone underneath my skin – I had rolls on either side of my body and looked so squishy in comparison, a bit like a slug with arms. I hated my body for having developed so early.
Because I went home every weekend without fail, my nan and I became the best of friends. I adored spending time with her. There was no one who quite understood me the way she did. We laughed at the same things. We both loved animals. We both fancied Simon Cowell. She never told me off – if anything, she repeatedly told me how wonderful I was, which made a pleasant change from being told I was naughty. I loved her hugs, her cooking, even the way she tucked me into bed. I never took going home for granted.
Misfit Page 4