Who would I be?

If you could be someone else for a day, who would you be, and why?

I’m not really a celebrity follower… And I don’t really follow sport, except curling in the winter Olympics. I like music but don’t really have one musician I’m an avid fan of. Really I don’t hold anyone in a place where I wish I could be them. The thought is a bit foreign and sits oddly in my autistic brain. Why would I want to be anyone else?

I guess the closest I could get is to be myself, but at a different time. Maybe the moment I fought back from being bullied. Maybe that moment I kicked a someone who was always yelling at me about my weight. He used to make boom noises as I walked.

I was slightly bigger than the others in my class but at the time I was by no means fat. If anything I had matured early so I had a female figure at the age of thirteen. I mean, hips that flared and a waist that was small with a pretty good set of boobs on me. At the time though I was wearing jumpers that were too large and trying to hide. Firstly because I hated attention but also because of Mr Davies. He was the art and photography teacher and he found it ‘oh so cute’ that I couldn’t meet his eyes and would try to make me. Me actively trying to evade him had resulted in the grown man singling me out and talking to me. As if what I was doing was a coy thing in order to encourage his affection. The reality was I was intensely uncomfortable and simply looking at someone in the eye was painful. It caused physical hurt. I guess that the teacher thought I was flirting, but I found it awful. On top of everything there was no way for me to get help with the bullying as the man I would have to go to was Mr Davies.

If I went with my bullying problem then I would have to spend time with him. That I did not want to do. Mr Davies was the first person who actively made my skin crawl. I had to stop the bullying.

I looked at the rules. They stated that a boy couldn’t hit a girl and that what he was doing was worse than awful. He was hurting me, despite the fact that he shouldn’t and I couldn’t work out why he would do it. I mean I was aware that he was in love (infatuated/crushing on) one of my main female bullies but I couldn’t see how hurting me would help him. Now, of course I can see that he was trying to get her to see him, but being an acne infested fat kid there was no way the popular Alice would see him. Then I thought that if I did what my parents told me and stood up for myself then I would win, and everything would be fine and people would simply leave me alone.

So, that day in school as he started the whole bullying I didn’t walk past trying to be as small as possible. Instead I stopped in front of him. I looked at him, and I don’t mean I glanced, I mean I gave him a full autistic look. I visually studied him. It made him uncomfortable and then I kicked him hard in one shin.

He kicked me back.

I was in shock.

“You shouldn’t hurt a girl,” I said.

“You kicked me first,” he countered with.

I couldn’t process this. It went against the rules. I looked away and went to the back of the queue for class. Why had it not worked?

If I could be anyone. In that moment I would want to be me, but as I am now. I want to tell that kid that she ought to walk out of school. That she ought to remove herself from the school and get help. That she didn’t have to cope with Mr Davies, or Luke, or Alice. That it was all avoidable.

Except I can’t go back. Instead, I find myself thinking about it at times. Thinking how I should have handled it and being way too hard on the me that was thirteen years old. I’ve been receiving therapy to try to stop this and it is starting to work. So, maybe I am getting further away from the girl who was bullied and alone. Maybe I’m about ready to accept what happed to her though and let her go.