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I, Isabel, created this blog because I wanted to share my experiences with others in the hopes of helping them to overcome their struggles. When I was in middle school, I felt incredibly alone and I wished was to be able to relate to someone over what was happening to me. One day, I was sitting in the car over summer break after graduating eighth grade. I thought about how much I have changed from being a young smiley, happy, and trusting girl who hugged everyone to someone who is still happy but doesn’t trust people as easily and has walls up with others. And what happened? Well, a lot. First, I would like to say that I my middle school experience wasn’t nearly as bad as what some other girls (and boys) have to go through and it doesn’t equate at all. However, that isn’t to say that I wasn’t affected by what I was surrounded by. Starting in fourth grade I was bullied verbally by a girl I thought I was friends with. Everyday it was some version of “your an idiot,” “you are so stupid,” “are you retarded?” over and over and over. She even threatened my friend and I if I ever told anyone her secret crush. She made it very clear that I would be the one suffering the most injuries if I ever told anyone. I obviously told everyone in the class who her crush was to prove that she couldn’t hurt me and then I told my parents about it. We discussed it with the principal who took action from there. After that, I thought that everything would be fine and I would have a great rest of elementary and middle school.  Oh, how wrong was I. In fifth grade, I got attacked by a girl who was my previous best friend in the hallway. She came up behind me and hit me in the back of the head. I turned around and I can’t exactly remember what happened after that but I know at some point she grabbed onto my arm. After grabbed my arm she dug her fingernails into my skin as hard as she could until it broke the skin and I was bleeding (it was so bad that you can still see one of the scars to this day, which is years later). I was trying to get her off of my arm but just couldn’t so I swung my arm so she would hit a wall and she finally let go. I got to my next period class and told one of my incredibly close friends and she brushed it off as if nothing happened and blamed me for causing that. That hurt almost as bad as the cuts in my skin. I was sitting in the front row with tissues trying to get my arm from hurting and also trying to clean up the blood discreetly. When I got home that day, I broke down crying in front of my mom and she drove me back to school to talk with the principal. The next day both my parents went to talk to her after the principal had spoken to the girl who attacked me. I wasn’t inside the room but when my mom left she told me that the principal defended the other girl saying that she didn’t have sharp fingernails when I very clearly had two fingernail prints in my skin. She received no punishment and went off the hook. About one week after the incident, the principal called me into the office and pressured me into forgiving her and giving her a hug. She just made me feel terrible about myself because she kept saying that I need to forgive the other girl and insinuated that I was the cause of all of this. I felt so much pressure that I agreed to hug the girl and “forgive” her, after this I ran to the bathroom and just cried. After that, I became so stressed out about going to school that I made myself sick. I often had to call my parents to pick me up because my stomach hurt so bad because of the stress. The stress just worsened once I got to sixth grade because everyone was against me. All the girls sided against me and my only friends was two boys who hanged out with me occasionally. Later in seventh grade, I was entirely alone and isolated from everything. At the beginning of eighth grade I actually thought everything would get better but it went downhill towards the end. I had made friends with more of the boys and started to hang out with them more until I got accused of dating all fo them. Any boy I was friends with instantly became my boyfriend. My friends that were boys started to distant themselves from me after we were shipped together. So there I was, alone all again. I started to make friends with two other girls who seemed to be on the outs of the “popular” group. I became really good friends with one in particular but at the end of the year, she completely ditched me and ignored me every single day. At lunch, I felt so alone and isolated because no one would really talk to me. I was ignored if I said something and then coincidentally someone would say what I had just said. At the end of eighth grade we had two school trips. One was Washington, D.C., and the other was in Williamsburg, Virginia.  In Washington, D.C., I had begged my group to go to Starbucks and the entire group went without me when I went back to my room to grab something. When I confronted them about it, they “forgot” me when I had told them right before I went upstairs to tell me if they were going to go to Starbucks. That wasn’t even the worst of it. In Williamsburg, we went to Busch Gardens and while we were in a gift shop avoiding the rain I went to a smaller corner to see if I wanted to buy something. Once I left the group they all decided to leave and the only reason I was found was because of a chaperone. Otherwise the entire group would have left without me. Yes, these could be two coincidences but it also only happened to me, the one who was always excluded from the groups. There is so much more that I just can’t fit into one page. Every single day was a new experience, a new internal scar, a new horrific memory. But I came out strong, I somehow managed to stay afloat. And hopefully, Isabel In Color will help you to do the same. 

I often have difficulty sharing my experiences because I am afraid of the backlash. I told myself while I was in middle school that I would never tell anyone what happened with the bullying because I was afraid that the principal would try to make my life difficult. I didn’t really speak out about the social isolation either because I knew nothing would change. Even now as I’m writing this page, I find myself thinking about how someone might try to lie and say that I made this all up. Would anyone believe them? Or would they believe me? There are so many “what if” questions swimming around in my head that I’m not even sure how I was able to create this blog. Some might say incentive, but I’m thinking more big picture. More about helping young girls, teens, and women who struggle with mental health issues, and even those who don’t but aren’t liked because of the jealousy of others or are often excluded for dense reasons. 

With love,

Isabel