Bullying at school did not end with childhood for me

Dear Delyara, I thought I had outgrown it. What I really did was adapt around it. There are still rooms that can wake the old thing in me — group settings, cliques, subtle exclusion, a certain kind of laughter, people bonding through cruelty disguised as humour. My adult mind understands more nuance now, but my body still knows the old script instantly: be smaller, say less, don’t make yourself easy to target, monitor the room, read the mood, go quiet before you are pushed there. That is what school bullying did. It trained my nervous system for future rooms too. So even now, decades later, adult social environments can still touch that old humiliation if the dynamics are wrong enough. And then I feel ashamed — not only because of what is happening now, but because some part of me is still reacting from a younger, more wounded map of belonging. That’s a hard thing to admit. It is also true.