Hi, my name is Arabella Austin but I prefer to be called Belle. I grew up in a small town called Wolfwater and this is my experience from elementary school to my current year. I am a freshman at Somerset School for Girls. They have girls and boys separated so that we don’t do anything stupid, which I can kind of understand but like what about the lgbt kids that like their own gender what exactly do they think is going to happen. There is a river that separates each school from each other. So in order for girls and boys to see each other they would have to skip school or sneak out in the middle of the night.
Somerset School for Girls is a summer school, so we come here every year to get “girly” and I don’t like the fact that they force us to act like our original gender since I am non-binary. Everyone at this school hates me, since I am different from them. They want me to act girly but I’d rather be a male than act girly for people that I barely know.
I have disorders that no one knows about, not even the teachers know about them and the disorders make me somewhat different from the rest of the kids. I don’t really have any friends except for 1 person and that person is Rose Best, because we both hate how teachers at the school force us to dress and act girly. So we intend on making the school mad by breaking the dress code a lot. Me and Rose have a lot of Mental Disorders, but we didn’t want to tell anyone because we didn’t want to be an outcast but now we are since we like to cause trouble for all the teachers and students.
I was fine with the dress code at the beginning of being at this school but now I am not ok with it. Ever since I found out that they would force us to wear a dress every single day, I didn’t really like it. To me I thought it was rude to most of us because of the stupid dress code, but that wasn’t the only thing that we hated. We hated how the girls all had to wear makeup, we weren’t allowed to wear boy clothes, we weren’t allowed to do any sports that can “hurt” us like seriously not all girls are that fragile.
I never knew how it felt to have any friends since everyone most of my life hated me. All through my childhood people would just bully me and I wouldn’t know why. No one was there for me.
I remember that when I was younger my family went to the doctor and they said that I had a few mental disorders that I developed at a young age for someone that is my age I shouldn’t have them, but my parents didn’t worry or think too much of it. They were always super busy then worrying about me. I remember being told that I had ADHD, Anxiety disorder, multi-personality disorder and there were more that I can’t remember, but they didn’t really pay any attention when I was 2.
At the age of 5, I was doing what most other kids couldn’t do, which was taking care of myself. My parents were always away on business trips which is understandable because they need to make money for us to be able to eat but they were barely even there to the point that I learned how to cook and take care of simple things at the age of 7. At the age of 10, I got a job to help clean tables off, soon later on in that same year, I got promoted to being able to serve and cook for people. I was making double what my parents make in a year.
I think most of the kids bullied me because my parents were never around, so I just keep to myself. Rose has had a similar thing except basically all her friends were toxic and they were very rude to her and would force her to do their homework and that I call is a bad friendship that we don’t have, we have a special type of friendship that no one else has. Rose has been there for me when the group of girls would physically hurt me and be mean to me.
Autumn Afton
