Subtle Bullying: Why There Should Be More Awareness About It

Hi, everyone. Before I get into things with this blog post, I’d like to say that this will be another personal entry of mine, regarding bullying and mental health. If anything I’ve written in this post resonates with you, I hope it helps.

I’ve always been quite a shy and sensitive person, especially when I was in school. I was never one to misbehave or be distracted from the work we were meant to be doing, I would just get on with my work and try my best with everything we were assigned. In my experience, being that kind of person makes you a bit of a target when it comes to people taking advantage of you, as they think that, because of your nature, you wouldn’t find it easy to stand up for yourself.

I experienced a lot of that from my classmates, but what I went through with my friend group was worse.

To protect anyone’s identity, each name I mention in this section has been changed.

It started in early 2017, my best friend Ella introduced me to some girls in our year that she became close with during the Christmas holidays and she asked me if I would consider joining a group with them. I said yes because I felt I would like to have a bigger circle of friends to socialise with. The three other girls seemed quite nice as I joined a group chat with them prior to school starting up again.

I really enjoyed it at first, it was nice to have more friends to hang out with during the breaks at school, it made me feel like I belonged and I wasn’t invisible like I felt with most of my classmates. Around spring/summer time, I got closer to a couple of the girls, Emily and Hayley, who were twins. We spent quite a bit of time together out of school, when the holidays started, and when we were in school, we would facetime when we all got home.

Things turned sour after a while. They would make me feel left out. One specific situation I remember was that I was unwell at home and the rest of the girls wanted to go to a shopping centre together, I told them I couldn’t go because of how I was feeling. They went together, and sent photos of themselves enjoying themselves afterwards and bragging about how much fun they had, on the group chat I was on. I felt that they were actively trying to make me jealous for not being able to go with them.

One girl in the group, Caitlin, would take my lunch from me often and embarrass me until she eventually gave it back. It would annoy me a lot, the other girls just laughed. Caitlin would also frequently make jokes at my expense, which again, the other girls would just laugh at. When I stood up for myself and told them I didn’t find it funny, they would tell me it was just a joke. It wasn’t funny to me.

Every Friday, we had a routine to get lunch from the chip van just outside of the grounds. If I was still packing up or cleaning up from class, I would get left behind while they got lunch, even if I was just busy for 2 minutes after the bell went.

One day, when we were on holiday from school, we all went to a shopping centre together (the same one as mentioned before). My mum was anxious due to what I told her about how the girls treated me, so she asked my older sister to go with me, in case they decided to leave me again. They didn’t leave me, but my sister learned more about how they treated me and each other from her point of view. 

After a while, I felt like I was being harassed by the girls. I began to get anxious whenever they would message me after school, which would be constant. I blocked and muted them multiple times, so I would get some sort of a break.

They made school horrible for me. I tried to keep them at arm’s length during classes but it was very difficult. They would reel me in with their niceness, to make me forget the misery of how they treated me in private. I told my pastoral teacher about everything that was going on, the girls were talked to, but nothing changed at all.

At the end of 2017, I made the decision to leave the group. I asked Ella if she would leave the group with me, as we were very close before everything happened, and she didn’t. Now, when I reflect about what happened back then, I feel Ella was as bad as the other girls as she would never stick up for me, she would just awkwardly laugh with the rest of them.

I cut ties with the girls in the ways I could. I was never able to fully escape them though as I had classes with them. I felt miserable when I left, as I had no friends. Everyone was in their own little clique and I was left behind, until a couple of months later, I made friends with a girl in my English class, Charlotte, and I no longer felt isolated.

I decided to write about this as I feel bullying is almost always considered to be obvious to people that aren’t involved in what’s happening. For a while, I thought what I went through wasn’t really bullying at all, that it was just how I was, that I took everything to heart too much.

It should be talked about more, it should be stopped. If you’ve been through or are going through what I experienced or something similar, please know that you’re not alone and it’s not your fault.