It’s strange how things you were told early in life stay with you. For instance, when I was in Junior School, one of my teachers told me I had “a butterfly mind”. It was probably intended as a kindly comment, due to my propensity to lose concentration with the greatest of ease and be oblivious to everything that was going on in the classroom, and everywhere else, for that matter. Over half a century later, I learned that my butterfly mind was as a result of my non-diagnosed ADHD. For most of my life, I wore it as a badge of dishonour. Another teacher, at the same school, was then critical of my handwriting, referring to me as “a spider writer”, adding that looking at a page of my work, it appeared a spider had wandered into an inkpot and walked across it. I remember being amused at first, but then stung by what I saw as criticism. In both cases, I never got over it. Words matter.
In later life, the same thing happened again. When I was subject to bullying and abuse by managers while working for the British Red Cross, I suffered a full-on mental breakdown. There seemed no end to the cruelty dished out by this allegedly compassionate charity, but I had seen nothing by the time they referred me to their Occupational Health Service (OHS).
I attended in a dismal mental state, broken by the institutional cruelty of the organisation and things got even worse. The stone-faced woman from the OHS showed no compassion nor empathy, instead telling me I was, and I’ll never forget this, “Emotionally weak.” Shocked doesn’t come close to the way I felt that day. If I was emotionally weak, I had been made even weaker by this awful charity. They even moved me from the main office in Bristol to what was little more than a dreary stationary cupboard in an office in Easton, completely on my own, unsupported, in what was clearly an attempt to get rid of me. That’s how you treat someone you consider to be emotionally weak, eh? In the world of the British Red Cross it certainly is.
I doubt that the butterfly and spider comments were meant to hurt, although the emotionally weak barb most certainly was, but the truth is they did. The fact that I am still writing about something that happened sometime in the late 1960s tells you how much. Throwaway comments or ill-intentioned comments, it’s all the same thing. So, what to do about it?
The last thing we need is some kind of crackdown on what people can and cannot say. And I don’t want anyone to have to spend all their time worrying they might say something offensive and instead say nothing. We all get it wrong sometimes and if we do we can apologise and/or clarify. The comments about me when I was a child hurt because I was struggling with all sorts of things at the time, not least trying to understand anything teachers were trying to teach me. But then, I suppose ADHD hadn’t been invented back then. You were either bright or thick. It was clearly assumed that I was in the latter category.
It’s the one size fits all attitude, too. I know people who wouldn’t give a fuck if someone had referred to them as people referred to me. Maybe I am emotionally weak after all. But I just wish people would engage their brain before barking out some bollocks that sticks in the head, possibly forever.
Every time my concentration saps, which is most of the time, and when I write something, the comments are at the fore of my mind. It certainly hasn’t helped me, but I’d like to think it was made me a better person than I might have been, at least in the way I treat others. As for the British Red Cross and their “emotionally weak” jibe, all I can do is to spread my story and how they refuse to apologise (or even reply to me: I write to them every year) and to urge everyone not to give them a single penny.
Sticks and stones can break my bones and words can hurt me, too. And they have done.
