Turns out I was labeled as the weirdo in high school. And I did not know it until now.
So, I just started university, it has been like a month or so.
And a friend from high school just told me that some girls at our high school used to say things about me behind my back (because of course they didn´t have the ovaries to say it to my face).
And we got along, those girls and me, I never thought they would be mean girls.
But they were.
Turns out they used to say things like, that I was a weirdo, because of my skeleton hoodie, because I liked to read, because I liked to listen to music all the time in my walkman and because I liked to be alone.
And there are a lot of things that I have thought about because of this.
First, I come from a little town, not little enough for everyone to know everyone, but little enough to be considered little. And it is a very conservative place, families tend to keep to themselves, and it is hard to enter an already formed friend group. In that place, if you are for example a grown woman, if you go somewhere, like a social event, and you go alone, everyone thinks it is because you want to steal their husbands (as if said husbands were handsome or at least actually nice or smart), or because you are not wanted at home. If you are alone most of the time, it is not because you like to be alone or because you are an introvert, it is because something is obviously wrong with you.
Not to mention that at my high school -not everyone- but a lot of people were very anti-intellectualists, they would make the dumbest sexual jokes, they would say outright stupid things (like, one time in class, we were talking about laws involved in murder cases, and a girl asked, ¿what does murder have to do with the topic?, ehm, I don't know? everything literally?!) and look, I think everyone is smart in their own way, but, honestly, they seemed to not be smart at all. Oh, and if you were smart, you said anything smart and they would snicker as if you had said the funniest thing ever. They were like “You are such a bookworm and a nerd, unlike us that we are cool, look how I throw my classmate´s water bottle through the window” (and yes, someone actually did the water bottle thing on our last year when we were all 18 years old). And some of them couldn´t take anything seriously, like, one time we were learning about the holoucaust and two girls were whispering and laughing loudly with each other, like, show some respect, please.
And I was also the kind of person that the mean girls (the ones I knew were mean girls at the time) alongside the boys (who were mostly jerks) would come to, to ask something, and then laugh as if I had said something very funny, because apparently the fact that I was shy and introvert was top tier entertainment for them.
You don´t like books, fine, that is not the problem, the problem is when you mock me for liking books. Those girls who I thought weren´t mean girls had good things, one of them was very conscious about the environment, other was very good at football, like, why not focus on those things instead of gossiping about other people?
