// Moving Towns…//

When I was seven my parents decided to move from the city to a smaller town, after wanting more land to grow vegetables and raise animals – and more room for another child. I was the only person who didn’t want to move. My big sister was having a tough time with bullies, but at the school I was ‘popular’ to some degree, always had ‘boyfriends’ and was super confident. My class was cultured and embraced every faith and colour, which was great and I just liked the school in general.

Then we moved to a nice bigger house on the edge of this town, where the first school and middle school were right next to each other. On the first day of school it was alright and it was exciting. I kind of remained my confident self for a little while, until I realised that even at that age people know who their friends are very early on. I was lucky as my sporty side meant I didn’t suffer the normal ‘new kid’ phase as a lot of my class loved running around the playground and playing competitive sports.

The moment my self esteem crashed though was after my seven-year-old self approached a boy I really liked. In the city we had all been quite into ‘getting with each other’ early on and to be fair here there were already lots of power couples, even at our young age. He was stood with his friend in this corner you can’t really escape from and I’m pretty sure I just went straight towards him with my lips puckered. In the end I just kissed him on the cheek and ran off, but that was it everyone was coming and asking me about it and I got super embarrassed. I still really regret doing it, though no one really probably cared the next day. But that was it… It ruined my relationships with boys for a long time and to be fair I had lots of crushes, but I wasn’t the coolest person to date. I had to put up for many years seeing all my friends lusted up with guys whilst I sufficed with rom-coms and just depressed myself more about it all.

// Something else to do with my hair…//

After the episode of being told my face didn’t rate as well as my hair, obviously it didn’t do too much for my confidence. When moving onto middle school, the person who made the comment before had left to go to the school her Mum taught at – funnily enough a friend I made on the first day of university who went to that school and had had very similar nightmarish problems with her.

I’ve never really been too fussed about my hair though. I’ve never dyed it and at that point my Grandmother was making the decisions about my hair for me – now I just go in and say ‘do whatever you want’ that has led to hairstyles I’ll talk about another time. I believe it was the Monday after getting my hair cut on the Saturday and we’re just coming back off the playground and walking back to class. A guy whose house I used to also go play round and WAS good friends with, looks at me and just yells ‘YOU HAVE A HAIRCUT LIKE A FIVE-YEAR-OLD’.

Well I was super embarrassed and cried in whatever class it was. My friends were consoling me telling me it wasn’t like that at all. To be fair it was the same haircut I had all the time… a bob and fringe. I think after that I never spoke to him again and he wasn’t sure why I was avoiding him, even seeing him in later years I would get angry for the years of self-esteem issues he gave me.

After that I went home and stuck a glittery green star slide in my hair and for the next couple of years was forever sliding clips into my hair and getting the fringe of my face. When it finally grew out I wore it up in a ponytail, but my hair is super thick and uncontrollable so it would look terrible. I then discovered hair products and made my hair supershiny and pushed all the uncontrollable bits down to my scalp. A few years later in high school someone asked to see my hair down, so I put it down and felt really uncomfortable. I was so super-paranoid about my hair. I hated it and felt so self-concious. That person loved it and told me I should wear it down more… so the next couple of weeks I did and felt super insecure as my hair was really wavy when everyone was straightening the hell out of theirs. After then I only used to wear it up for sports and during one phase I always wore a beanie - that made me look like a boy- and at one point I would wear it every day until it flattened my hair out. Obviously by then though it was very greasy and I needed to wash it anyways.

Looking back it feels so stupid now, but I feel bad for my younger self having one comment make an impact on my life for at least 3 or 4 years.

// Something to do with wanting to be a cheerleader…//

It was around the time where Bring It On had come out and the whole school had watched it numerous times – I for one rented it on my birthday and watched it 20 times. At this time I was in middle school, not really sure what year, but I am guessing one of the last couple of years of it. (So I was 12/13?)

A lot of the ‘popular’ girls wanted to start a cheerleading squad and I had heard about it on the not so discrete grapevine. The teacher that would be running it would be my cool English teacher who had been on gladiators and was a ‘proper’ athlete… and who all the boys had a huge crush on.

I loved dancing from a young age, though one ballet report did say I danced like an elephant… I’ve always been a heavy walker and my shoes can get ruined in 2 weeks which is very bad for my wallet and my time as I am the most picky when it comes to buying clothes – though no one would really say I have fashion sense.

Anyways, I bought some pom-poms and decided to gatecrash the cheerleading club. It was very classily held in the girls changing room that was worse for wear and to say the least tiny. 15 of the schools most ‘popular’ girls – including the annoying ones from the year below – and then a sub-group of 10 ‘not-so-popular-but-the-boys-still-date-them’ were crammed into this room and we’re all there shaking our pom-poms and not really doing gymnastics.

It was either the very first session or the second when a few of the girls went up to the teacher and were like ‘what is SHE doing here?’ – pointing their overly manicured tweenage fingers at me. ‘She’s here for what the rest of you are here for?’ she replied. ‘Well we don’t want her here… !’ I tell you these girls weren’t discrete. Basically the argument went on for quite a while, before they gave up and huffed back to their places to carry on the mediocre routine…

It’s fair to say we never went to nationals as the club disbanded pretty quickly.

// Something to do with my hair…//

From a young age after moving towns I used to go out and play a lot. I was a kid who loved sports, playing games and just running around like an idiot. My best friends didn’t live so close to me or their parents were over-protective so I had to make do with the people who lived in a close proximity.

One girl was in the ‘older’ class in my year, though I was actually the oldest in my class by over a month and older than this girl. She was very brainy, great at gymnastics, good at sports, always the lead in plays, could kind of sing, was in the school orchestra and went out with the guy who sat next to her who was in the year above (and also a lead in the school play… and good at sports…. and quite brainy… and probably good at gymnastics). She was quite ‘popular’ – a term that never made sense to me as everyone generally hated those girls… even at 8/9 or whatever we were.

She lived not too far from me, so I started to visit her house more after my friend had moved away. Her brother worked at McDonalds and had an old beat up car, which all seemed very glamorous then.

One day we did our usual stuff of running around, cycling around and talking about school. She always made quite snooty comments that used to annoy me and really I used to dislike hanging around with her, but especially in the summer months it was great to be outdoors. But this day topped all the comments, which must be as I can’t remember anything else she ever said to me but this one I clearly remember.

‘You have such lovely hair!’

‘Ah thanks, that’s nice.’

‘Yeah…shame about your face.’

Now the worst thing about it all was then she just carried on as normal and acted like she hadn’t said such a thing… and in those days you can’t blame alcohol or anything. Nice one.

// About This Blog//

I’ve always loved writing, but recently I have got out of it and fell into other artistic ventures. Walking to work the other day I starting thinking about stories of events that have helped shape my life. Randomly I will cringe about something that happened 10 years ago and things that probably only I remember, but I felt like making a platform to share these life experiences for people to laugh it or to perhaps feel comforted by.

I’ll start posting stories and see where it leads - maybe one day people will send in their own stories, but for now… lets all laugh at my expense!