Hannah’s Story
Content warning: Homophobia, bullying, mental health
When I was nine, I already knew I was a little different. I found myself drawn to both guys and girls, but I didn’t have the words for what that meant yet. One day, while scrolling through YouTube, I finally discovered what I had been feeling all along: I was bisexual. For a while, though, I thought I might just be a lesbian. When I finally came out to my friends, classmates, and people around me, everything changed. I was suddenly an outcast, labelled as having “crippling depression” and left with no one to talk to. I spent lunches alone, either on the buddy bench or sitting with a teacher because I had no friends. That kind of forced isolation didn’t just make me lonely; it slowly rewired the way I saw myself. When you are constantly pushed to the side, day after day, you start to believe there is something wrong with you, not with the people hurting you. I went from being a kid who was just trying to understand who I was, to someone who questioned whether I deserved friends at all. The silence around me was loud: every empty seat next to me, every whispered comment, every time people chose to walk away instead of sit with me, it all told me the same thing: you don’t belong here. Even now, that isolation sometimes makes me question if I truly count as part of the LGBTQIA+ community, like my experiences somehow make my identity less valid. In Year 5, the bullying got so bad I moved schools, hoping I could finally escape it. But at this new school, it was no better. The same patterns followed me, with the snide comments, the stares, and the way people decided who I was before I could even introduce myself. By the time I started high school, I thought I finally knew who I truly was, so I tried to be honest. I opened up, told my peers, told my teachers. Instead of safety, I was met with more bullying and the ultimate betrayal of being outed to the world before I was ready. On top of that, in high school I was told I was going to hell just for who I liked, as if my feelings alone were something evil that needed to be punished. What made it worse was that my schools did nothing to stop it. They watched me sit alone and treated it like a seating choice, not a warning sign. They were quick to label me, to suggest I had problems, but slow to confront the people who were actually causing the harm. Policies and posters talked about “kindness” and “bullying is not tolerated,” but in reality, my pain was tolerated every single day. By failing to step in, by choosing to look away, my schools didn’t just allow the bullying; they enabled it. They taught everyone around me that treating me like this was acceptable, signalling to the whole community that queer kids like me were fair game. That inaction left me isolated and doubting my worth, forcing me to shrink myself just to survive. It’s been five years since Year 7. I graduate in six months, and I still carry this deep regret for simply being who I am. That fear of outing myself as queer or bisexual haunts me, the fear of rejection or losing the fragile life I’ve so carefully shaped to avoid more bullying. Even as I near the end of high school, the scars of those years make me hesitate, wondering if being authentic will always cost me everything I’ve built.
