Disclaimer: I am not a doctor and am sharing my personal experiences with you. If you need medical advice, please consult your neurologist.
Kids can be incredibly mean and strangely specific at the same time.
I still remember the intense nerves of returning to school after being gone for a quarter of the year recovering from brain surgery. When I first walked back through the doors, I thought I was received well. But it didn’t take long to realize there were a few people who just wanted to get laughs at my expense.
I was walking through the halls on my way to class when a boy named Jeff called out my name. In front of everyone, he made a disgusting, vulgar reference about how my condition made me look like a machine built to pleasure a huge animal. Never in a million years had I thought someone would make fun of me for my disability—but here it was happening, on my very first day back. I expected some kids might not fully understand my epilepsy, but I never anticipated being publicly mocked for it.
The bullying became a massive problem instantly because Jeff saw how much the crowd laughed. In a heartbeat, the heat rushed to my face, and I felt like a total social outcast among peers I had considered my friends for years. The feeling of being broken down into nothing was horrible; I was already carrying the massive physical weight of recovering from brain surgery, and now I had to carry the public pain of being ridiculed.
That single moment completely ruined my high school experience. I had always been taught that friends had your back, but I found out the hard way that people mock what they don’t understand. I just happened to be the thing they didn’t understand.
Writing this today feels good—it’s a weight off my chest. But it is even more important to let anyone reading this know that you are not alone. If you are dealing with this, I found that trying to calmly educate the people around you can help curb the ignorance, though it won’t stop it completely. Kids are going to be mean if they think they can get a reaction out of you. Back then, the most effective armor I found was to never let them see it get to me, and sometimes even beating them to the punch with a joke so they had nothing left to say.
It took time, but I realized Jeff’s words said everything about his own cruelty, and absolutely nothing about my worth. Stay healthy. Derek
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