#peer abuse

there was a girl named aofie in my class and she got made fun of a lot for being visibly, culturally Irish. she did tap dancing and wore traditional dress. i think she knew some Gaeilge too but i can't remember.

all i did was look up to her. i wished my parents would put me into Irish dance. tried to learn myself (very poorly). i read a lot about Irish folklore. a lot of historical fiction. i also chose to learn italian against my dad's family's opinions. they thought it was useless and that i should learn spanish bc "thats how it is these days." i hate most of my dad's family.

but. when it came to it, i just kept thinking about all the people who came before me. how cool it was that there were people who lived in a different time and place than me. i never knew them, but they're still connected to me.

they had their own traditions and languages, and they... resulted in me being born. i wouldn't be alive without them. especially after learning that, on the Irish side, they survived an Gorta Mór (The Great Hunger, aka, a genocide). and then my family conformed here. colonized here. but i don't have to conform to that. i can learn and choose different. anyone can, it's just. too many people refuse.

i guess i kinda have always been like this huh. i hope aofie is doing okay now. i think she eventually switched schools. i don't blame her. i didn't finish school in our district either.

p.s: her name is pronounced "ee-fah" =) there is no other correct pronounciation of HER name!! i am still so fucking angry at how people refused to learn her name and would purposefully mispronounce it. and it's been decades.

what would I have liked? how would I have spoken? how would I feel about myself? about other people? would I have been more social? would I still have the same hobbies?

As I've spoken about before, I was a victim of peer abuse growing up (I'm using that term because bullying doesn't really cut it here). It was primarily conducted by my male peers - sure, there were occasionally girls who participated, but most of the girls were just neutral to me and some were actually kind. It was the boys who were the ones doing the damage.

I turn 37 in a few months and I've never properly tried to date because the whole thing gives me massive anxiety - after all, all I learned growing up was that I liked boys but they very much did not like me. I tend to dress down to keep myself fairly hidden because if I stand out too much I'll get attention that I don't necessarily want. When I worked at a public library for half a decade, I got hit on (and harassed) more when working the reference desk than I ever had before or have since.

Whenever someone regardless of gender hits on me, I actually get anxious, since I'm so guarded about things that I find it hard to allow myself to experience attraction to real people because I know they won't like me back (and because I have to figure out how to gently turn down people of genders I'm not attracted to back). But when it's a man in my age group who hits on me, I have an acute panic response.

My brain literally sees being flirted with as a threat, even though this is something I want to be able to experience, because it expects to be made fun of or hurt. I am fully prepared for it to be a joke, or to be called ugly again, or to be reacted to with disgust for acting like myself. So my brain flags any potential interest in me as a dangerous emergency, and I make zero progress on working towards being okay with things I want to be okay with.