When I was about 14 years old, a group of girls cornered me in an empty changing room after school.

It took my neurodivergent ass decades to realise I was being bullied, which is probably a useful defence mechanism. Similarly, something the ringleader said to me has only become clear in the last couple of years.

“Why do you walk around school like you’ve got a stick up your arse?”

I’d been in ballet since I was a tiny baby. I thought she was offended by my posture. I now see that she was saying I thought I was better than other people.

And you know, up until that age, I did. I’m sure I did think I was better than those girls – it’s how I was raised. We were different, clever, special.

But this was among the first in a long series of experiences that taught me bad things happening to me was to be expected. The best way to deal with it was to stay quiet and wait for it to be over.

When, in college, those same girls printed out a guilelessly risqué photo of 16-year-old me and wrote slut-whore-bitch and many other such epithets all over it, I removed myself. I disappeared. No complaints, just acceptance and silence. A friend I’d known since those baby ballet classes told me I deserved it, what did I expect?

Those girls would probably have been suspended for what they did if I’d even thought to tell someone. They used a college printer, they distributed their pathetically mean flyer on college grounds. It never crossed my mind that I was worthy of help or justice, which unfortunately came into play so many times later in my life.

At no point did I acknowledge this as bullying. That would have required me to see that it was unacceptable, and I didn’t. It felt inevitable. As impassive as night following day.

I developed a horror of being perceived, unless I was wasted. At that point, any attention was good attention.

I’m 36 now. I post what I’m wearing on Instagram nearly every day and I have for more than 10 years. I do that in spite of the horror, which persists, but on a platform not populated by the people of my past. My love of cataloguing beautiful old clothes is greater than my discomfort, just about. But let me tell you: I am almost always in discomfort.

Out in the world, I am on edge. The closest I get to free is with earphones in, walking around this island by myself. When someone breaks that bubble, it’s back to discomfort.

I can see now that moving to the island was another step in self-removal. I don’t want to be in people’s thoughts. That was so dangerous to me when I was young that I’d rather disappear.

I know why they did it. They were furious that I didn’t seem to think the rules applied to me. Why should I feel any kind of freedom when they were trapped in self-hatred, why should I go unpunished for thinking I could be something different? Their self-worth relied on me being taken down a peg.

Thinking about it again has made me cry, which I’m sure is part of healing. So many years of trying to get back the self-acceptance I had as a child. I focus on her, the child me, the only child I’ll ever have. Before anything bad had happened to her and before she learned that ‘She loves herself’ is an insult.