Your teachers are only just beginning to understand and refuse to acknowledge bullying still. Year eleven can be pushing the first years and for months it is ignored, smoothed over, but as soon as you fight back they are onto you like a shot. As soon as you get into that circle you are bugged. Completely and utterly. So as the parents evenings, open days and any other promotional crap ensues, some nobody in the library tries for a pay-rise and knocks up a couple of leaflets that tell the parents bullying is bad. That homework must be done, that no-one must be allowed to rest, not to be lazy. A couple of forms, petitions and lots of signatures, but once the party’s over you look round and you’re still standing in the crap. Pointless assemblies, meaningless classes, where the teachers are as bored out of their minds as the students are and in this tiny dysfunctional community, everything goes round and round- institutionalizing us until we feel lost without it. Teachers rarely give us a glimpse of humanity, just talk. Talk and talk. Wide-eyed and indifferent expressions. The bad get worse and the good get bored.
So, the best days of your life spent painfully and ruefully. Not as great as it seems is it?
And that’s at school. Most people escape from this burden at 3:15, but for some this is where the problem starts. When everyone’s on a bit of a low at home, school actually seems to be an escape. It’s about this time in someone’s life when the parents think it’s safe to actually become people as opposed to the motherly or fatherly persona that has oppressed them for 15, 16 years. But they just wish things would go back to before- when they felt safe with their mother, when they didn’t pick up on the badly masked bad moods and rows and depression. When their only worry was if they saw their dad a couple of hours late, instead of weeks. When stepbrothers, stepsisters, half-brothers and half sister’s were a mere nightmare. When jealousy sets in and endless bitter glances ensue between families and the only tie that binds them is yourself. And you know it. As people become experienced in life a smoked glass screen clouds it until you become so knowledgeable you wish you hadn’t bothered. Christmas for example. By fourteen, the magic has gone, faded into the background with all fantasies and aspirations of the past. Until its just another day, 24 hours like any other, come and gone.
But when it comes down to it, teenage life is all about image, all girls and most boys care about how they look to other people, teenagers diet until they are ill- but they never are content with themselves. The truth of it is though, no-one notices what you look like unless you look bad, in which they relish in, they rush past and through you as if your not there with thoughts of themselves, whether positive or negative. But even the smartly, expensively dressed neat hair, perfect teethed guy cannot buy affection or popularity, there will always be something people can dig at you about, normally something most close to your heart. Teenagers make mental lists about the reasons the opposite sex would not be attracted to them and they are not attractive and dwell on them forevermore. Everyone’s so wrapped up in themselves they barely notice other peoples insecurities and are left feeling they are alone. And they might as well be.
