When I was six years old, I fell over in the playground and grazed my knee, as kids do. Later in the day, my friends were all messing around and throwing these things at eachother which were the size of stones but much lighter and softer idk what they’re called.
So I join in and accidentally throw one in my friends eye because that’s just my luck, and then she goes and tells the teaching assistant who’s stood nearby. This I don’t blame her for, because even though it was an accident I’d hurt her and she had the right to be upset. I did a lot of apologising for the remainder of breaktime.
When I was walking back inside when it was time to get back to class, I overheard the teaching assistants talking about me, saying I’d deserved to get hurt earlier because of how I accidentally hurt my friend. For a while I’d believed this, feeling guilty about what I did.
But I was six. I made a mistake, and I was still in the wrong but I apologised for it, and I’d never have intentionally hurt anyone. My friends left me out a lot of the time, so before this happened I often went up to the teaching assistants and talked to them instead of my friends. My parents were often busy with work, and with the way I was third-wheeling my two best friends, those teachibg assistants were some of the people I trusted most, and hearing them say that I’d deserved to get hurt felt like such a huge betrayal.
A lot of people just say what they want about kids because they think they’ll just forget about it within minutes, but it’s been over eight years and I still remember. I remember how I let what they’d said convince me that I’d deserved to get hurt because of a mistake that I’d made. I remember thinking that if that was the kind the kind of thing the people who I trusted more than anyone said about me, then how could I trust that my family and friends didn’t hate me just as much.
It is ‘that deep’, and these kind of things did have a terrible long-term effect on my ability to trust others and the way I viewed myself, because when you’re as young as I was, your brain’s still developing and when these things happen, they can have a huge impact on the person you become.
No six year old child deserves to hear that they deserved to get hurt, no matter the circumstances, and no one deserves to have to wait eight years before they realise that.
