When I was in primary school, I used to get teased and bullied by the popular children. They used to call me fat, ugly and odd looking. This happened throughout my primary school years. I didn’t know whether I was actually those things or it was because I was different or because of the way my parents used to dress me and get my hair cut really short, like I was a boy. To this day I still don’t know, but I remember and was scared by the teasing, taunting and bullying that I went through back then for a very long time. This bullying continued to happen to me throughout my high school years until I moved out of my parents’ home and changed schools. I went to 3 different high schools trying to fit in, but never did.
My parents let my sister grow her hair long, but they always got mine cut like a little boy and I hated it so very much. My parents, more than 85% of the time, used to dress me in my sisters’ hand-me-down second hand school clothes that were way too big for me even though I was chubby. The only new clothes I remember getting was when my aunt told my mum she needed to get me some fitting clothes and so because my mother loved to sew my sister dresses, she would sew me a dress or outfit every now and again. In those years, I used to wish soooo hard that I would become beautiful one day because I hated what I looked like.
My parents used to compare me to my older sister, who was their chosen child all the time, and it would hurt. My parents made me feel emotionally abandoned and unloved and unwanted and when I moved out of home into my aunts’ house for a while I had to get the living away from home allowance\austudy for youth and they assessed me psychologically to find out why I could no longer live at my parents place. I won’t tell you what their findings were today, but I will tell you I had to family counselling for a while as a condition of me getting the payments. The counselling never did any good as my parents could not see how they were doing anything wrong and so they just never changed. They were always twisting things to suit themselves. I guess that was a product of their upbringing.
I used to get belted with the strap for no good reason except that my sister would be naughty and blame me for the things she had done. They never saw any good in me and always saw my older sister as the chosen child who could never do anything wrong. How I wished I was her at times. As they gave her all the love in the world and never had any time for me. They offered her dance classes, self-defence classes and sports group memberships and I was never offered any of those things. I was simply told that money didn’t grow on trees and that they couldn’t afford to do it for both of us. On a regular basis, I was told I was ugly, good for nothing, useless, had a heart of stone and that no one will ever be able to love me by my father.
I remember getting rejected many, many times in high school by the boys I liked, and it really hurt. Even the boys in my youth group at church rejected me. I couldn’t figure out what was wrong with me. I ended up thinking it was because I didn’t fit in to the stereotyping and that I was ugly, unlovable and unlikeable, like the school bullies and my family used to tell me. I left school close to the end-of-year 11 and got myself a job. At that point in my life, I was sad, lonely and a little depressed.
Throughout my young adult years, I was in emotionally abusive relationships where the men in my life would build my self-confidence up to a certain level only to smash it back down again and manipulate me so that they could get their own way. The first one ended up having a 3 some with my best friend from school who was married and had only just had a baby and her husband and the other one had an emotional affair with the best friend I had had for 3 year prior to getting involved with him and he tried to keep it from me as he said it meant nothing to him which showed exactly how much he really thought of me to do that to begin with.
During this timeframe I was also raped and abducted and dragged through court (trial) twice only to have the rapist get 8 years behind bars for what he had done to me, his cousin, and a 14-year-old girl. I would plan birthday parties for myself and none of my friends would turn up as they always went on holidays on or before the week of my birthday, so they didn’t have to attend my parties.
Because all these things happened in my life, I had very low self-esteem, no self-respect and always thought I was ugly and believed what my father had said that I was ugly and that no one could ever truly love me.
It all changed, though, when I fell deep down into the depths of despair and had a breakdown. As I had reached rock bottom and the only why forward for me was up. So, I started getting into personal development and build my holistic health system up and completely change my lifestyle.
In Christmas in 2008 I bought myself a professional photo shoot to see how photos would turn out when they were taken by a professional photographer as all the other nonprofessional photos I had made me look ugly and I came out looking like this odd golem shaped creature in those photos. I hated getting my photo taken by my friends because of this. Anyway, I was very surprised to find that the star shots photos in 2008 made me look amazing and through those I realised I was not ugly at all and that the way I saw myself wasn’t the same way that other people saw me in fact it was way off.
Due to the programming I had had from childhood and the limiting beliefs I had built up from those experiences and the programming I had from childhood I had perceived myself to be completely different because of them filtering out all the positives I had about myself because I didn’t know any better. All I could see before getting those photos done was a hideous woman who didn’t know who she was and couldn’t see the positives or how other people really saw her.
I was that impressed with those professional photos that I put them up on Facebook and my entire world and views on myself changed from then on as I got so many compliments and likes on my photos which made me feel good about myself and the way I looked for the first time.
Since that time I became friends with some photographers in Brisbane and did amateur modelling and now have a stash of amazing photos of myself throughout my 30s and have an amazing system that holistically supports me in my life’s journey and helps move me forward from the many other things that happened in my life to where I am today.
Here is a song that practically tells you my childhood journey with the bullying in school and it also means a lot to me it is called Ugly https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4nD2vZfdzGg this song has a lot of depth and meaning to it and whenever I get down, I play it along with another song called Beautiful https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eAfyFTzZDMM these 2 help pick me up. ©
Copyright © 2022 Lynette Diehm.
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