One of the things I’ve learned about the consequences of bullying is that when people tell you things like “I’m pretty bad at math” or “computers aren’t for me” or “I don’t really get art or fashion” and you talk to them for a bit what you often find - not always, but often - is what that really means is “somebody treated me like shit for trying to like this when I was 9.”
People will tell damn near any awful, demeaning story about themselves, build a whole identity around damn near any narrow, constrained, paranoid worldview only to give themselves some glimmer of meaning, some reason, when the alternative - the truth - is all that pain, all the cruelty of the people inflicting it, meant nothing. Confronting the fact that you've spent a lifetime convinced to hate something you could have loved, for no reason at all, is too monstrous to consider.
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