Ah, but what about the sportos, motorheads, ****s, bloods, waistoids, dweebies and dickheads - did they all think you were a righteous dude as well?Originally Posted by Karren Hutton
As for me, despite being fairly small, skinny, unathletic, and more than a little STRANGE as a child, I didn't seem to get picked on too much growing up. Sure, I went through a bit of crap every now and again, but nothing horrible that went on for years and years, as unfortunately seems to have been the case with some of the people who've already commented. I don't know if I was considered terribly feminine as a child, although there were things about me that may've led people to think that. For example, I cried a little too easily; apparently had very expressive body language; and once volunteered without hesitation to play the only female part in a play I'd written for me and all the boys in my class to perform in. I also remember seeing video footage of myself at a school sports day jumping up and down with excitement during an event, which in retrospect seems a rather girly way to have behaved. Funnily enough, another boy once grabbed me around the waist in the schoolyard and said, "I love you! I want to root you!" (Aussie slang for "f**k you"), which seems to suggest that others may have perceived there to have been something feminine about me. (At the time, what he did terrified me, because AIDS was just starting to make the headlines, and in my childish ignorance, I thought it was something that any kind of male-on-male intimacy would give you.)
Interestingly, I enjoyed at least a couple of periods of popularity during my school years. At one time during primary school, for example, my classmates thought I was so cool they'd actually pick me up and carry me around like I was some kind of god in human form or something (no, seriously) - I wish I could remember what I'd done to earn that kind of treatment! - while during my final years, I became so unabashedly eccentric that people either admired me for my ballsiness or simply left me alone. It was probably for that reason that I was able to wear pink satin pyjamas on my final school camp, and live to tell the tale!
