I think it's important to preface this post by highlighting that this is not a complaint per say, and that, further to this, this is not the result of a low mood. Just as Keynes argues we should spend during times of economic bust, and save during economic boom, I believe we should discuss the things that are most negative about our lives when things are good (just as we save during a boom).
Ever since I can remember, the people that have surrounded me have felt comfortable disrespecting me, being rude to me, and being horrible to me. I have never been respected, liked, or wanted. This has been the case since at least my first day of nursery, when I told my father, after he asked how my first day of school had been, with shock, that people were mean at nursery. My second cousin once told me that he was glad that people don't treat him the way that they treat me. A boy I went to school with wrote in our school year book that 'Few people seem to respect me' (before, to be fair to him, listing a bunch of reasons why I deserve to be respected, and why my year group had got me wrong). This is a continuous theme of my life.
All my life I have tried to understand why. When I was incredibly overweight in junior school, and mocked for my weight, I attributed it to that, and lost it (it is lamentable that I still have a chubby face) but that made no difference. I then attributed it to my low grades at school, I was always mocked as the stupid kid in my year, and so I worked hard in year 11,, and excelled in all public examinations, and got into my first (and only) choice of university - but again, that made little difference. Whether I excelled in sports, from being the worst in the year at cross country to being one of the best, qualifying to represent the city at the sport, academics, voluntary work, or employment, I earned nobody's respect. I remember crying to a colleague at a place I worked at during intermission, at a workplace I excelled in. I told her I wasn't respected and she replied with a meaningless platitude. I then asked her what would happen if I told her to 'fuck off you fucking bitch' and she smiled and replied that I would face some kind of punishment from our workplace. I then asked her what would happen should she say the same to me - she looked uncomfortable and admitted that I was right, and that she saw my point.
Nothing I do seems to earn the respect of any great number of people (of course there are individual people who do respect, and value me, but they are few and far between). Others can be as incompetent, and immature as they like, they can be as horrible, and rude as they want, but they are left uneffected, but no matter what I do, I face the same brick wall.
A boy at school once commented that I was the barometer of kindness. I was, he argued, a person you could say and do anything to, and there would be no social, and often no formal repercussions. Pupils in my year would openly mock me in front of my teachers, and no teacher would say anything. My father told me that he liked my first year German teacher because she told him she found it difficult to tell me off for not working hard in German, because she saw the way the other pupils in my class were openly horrible to me. She couldn't tell a boy off, she said, who was being ostracised so much socially.
You can mock, deride, swear at, bully, punch, assault, and hurt me, and nobody will back me, I stand alone. This, for me, is incredibly interesting. What is it about me that brings that out in people? Many have tried to explain it away. People at school would tell me that it was because I was too political, I didn't have light hearted topics of conversations, all I discussed was the evils of neoliberalism, and how much I hated austerity. But, that explanation didn't stand. I had no friends, and was disrespected years before I developed a strong interest in politics, and since then, I have largely depoliticised myself, for example I don't think anybody I knew would have accused me of being too serious in my conversation (although I become politicised close to election times) - and I am still treated the same way. In fact, I was treated the same way at the time within political circles - the argument that I was too political did not stand. Am I, perhaps, too loud? I doubt it, plenty of others are loud, and have friends, and equally around some I am incredibly quiet, and again I am treated the same way. I could provide a long list of explanations provided by a number of people for why I am treated this way, but all can be debunked.
A part of me has often blamed specific people for the way they have treated me, for either physically or verbally abusing me, but I have always known that this issue is systematic. No one person is to blame, you all play a small part of a bigger picture, a bigger picture I have yet to understand.
There seems to be no clear reason for why this is the case, but I believe it is, and perhaps one day I will know why.
What's the most negative thing about your life?
