When I was a little girl, I was taken in by my grandparents. It wasn’t that my biological parents didn’t necessarily want me, but they didn’t have the resources to raise a child. They were on a lot of drugs, they weren’t ready for parenthood. So, yeah… I was a drug baby. And I was adopted.

Because of this, the state of California tried to tell my family that I was going to be slow, that I was going to be mentally retarded. However, this was not the case. My grandma worked hard with me to make sure I hit each and every developmental mark on time.

I was terribly attached to my grandmother, because of this intensive time she spent with me. We didn’t live where I got a lot of social interaction with other children.

When I started school I was terribly shy. Kindergarten was an intense thing for me; teachers treated me different, and kids noticed this. I didn’t draw stick-figures like the other kids did. Principal called my parents because I drew “eight cats” by drawing a ‘mama cat’ with seven kittens still inside her belly. This was apparently unacceptable.

 

So, teachers treated me differently.

Kids noticed this.

I asked questions in class.

Teacher was thrilled.

Kids were not.

 

However, until the second grade, this worked out. I had “friends”, sort of. I played with the other kids. The teachers taught me advanced reading. By the time I was in second grade I had finished the fifth grade English curriculum.

It was then that I was first bullied. It wasn’t the other kids, believe it or not. (I know, right?) It was the sixth grade teacher. She did not want me to do the sixth grade English curriculum. She felt that it would ‘damage’ her students, and make them feel ‘badly’ because a little girl was in the class. This happened right before summer. I had to return to my grade level, and was exceptionally bored by the reading my classmates were doing.

So, third grade rolled around and my teacher did her best to give me something “better” to do. She started me reading books that were more at my level during recess. So I sat inside and read, by myself.

All because one teacher didn’t want me to be a … ‘distraction’… to her class.

I felt ostracized. How could I not..? I was being punished for being smart. I couldn’t go out to recess because my English work had to be done then, since the teacher wouldn’t let me in her class to be taught, and my teacher couldn’t give two lessons at once when she did English for the rest of the class.

This was the very first instance that I faced some sort of bullying. This was pretty shocking for me–and my parents, too. It was upsetting. After that year, I would not be in an advanced English course until High School.

In retrospect, I can understand the sixth grade teacher’s reasoning. A little kid is reading circles around half the school; that doesn’t really reflect well on the other students, whether it’s fair or not. (It wasn’t fair.) I could understand how a sixth grader may feel as if they weren’t very smart if they were struggling with their English, and here’s this little kid who’s got it down.

Yeah, that probably would have sucked.

But the sixth grade teacher could have handled things a little better. She could have passed on part of her curriculum on to my teacher to assist in my education, instead of flat-out denying me.

Only a few months later, I would leave that school which I, in fact, deeply loved. It was sad.

I never truly enjoyed school after that again.

 

You may be wondering why I’m writing all of this. I’m writing all of this so that people know these kinds of things actually happen. To let others that are like me know that they are by no means alone.

Bullying affects hundreds of thousands of kids every day.

It is a miracle that I’m alive for many reasons. I feel that this is an important story to share.