Episode 11

During my time in the U.S., I kept in touch via chat with my friends from Paraguay, specially with Ana, one of my best childhood friends. I noticed how she became very good friends with this new girl in school, Victoria. They seemed unbreakable together, all the time the two of them, in every photo. I felt curious about who she was. Funny thing is that Victoria heard all about me and felt curious too. She added me on Orkut -old social media platform kinda like Facebook, before it existed-. We started chatting a lot and we got along pretty well. And she lived two blocks away from me! That brought us closer and we became inseparable throughout our last two High School years. Now we don’t even live in the same contintent, but I will always be there for her.

I went back to Paraguay in December 2008 and started my High School paperwork, validated them from Spain and started school again with my same classmates. I must confess I felt a bit iffy about going back to the same people that were so racist towards me all those years. But I had friends there too, just a few though but I prefered to continue with them. After all, that school was like my second home for so many years.

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To my surprise, almost daily I got one or two comments from my class-mates and from the other classes, things like: “Hey, I love your eyes”, “What a lovely smile”, or “I love your curls”. Those flattering comments plus those ten guys back in Florida, could not have been a coincidence. They saw something in me I wasn’t seeing, so I realized there was more to me than what I could see. Little by little, that ugly image I had of myself, started vanishing. I started seeing my true self, and not the one I created in my head. I started accepting myself, loving my body, my lips, my eyes and all of me. I started loving myself, and no one could ever take that away from me…

Funny thing is that my curls are part of my identity today, I love them and it’s the part of me I get the most compliments for. I decided to look at myself with eyes of love. Never again would I let someone else’s comments about me, condition or affect the way I see myself. You shouldn’t allow it either, because nobody can define you, you are the only one that can define yourself and can decide who you are…

Fortunately, my former class-mates grew up and were nicer to me than before, they still were a bit close-minded when it came to foreigners though. It was all good until, out of the blue, they started insulting me as a group again. Sometimes they were kidding, sometimes they really meant it.

Beyond those little teenage jokes out of ignorance, what I am never going to forget is how the teachers let the bullying happen and even laughed at it with them instead of making it stop. There is one particular day that hurt me more than the sum of all those years. And I am going to tell you, so I can finally let it off my chest because it’s something I‘ve never talked about with anyone, I never said out loud how bad that made me feel. But not only that, I’ll tell you, to as well rise at least a bit of consciousness on the subject; and if you ever witness an abussive behaviour of any kind…you could intervene and not be indifferent, because indifference hurts just as much: