Personal Narrative: Completing The Monkey Bar

It started when I was in the second grade, the name calling, the self-consciousness, the irrational anxiety. It was supposed to be a normal day at school; kids would eat breakfast and then go to their assigned classroom; after about 3 hours, we would have a short recess, then back to class; at noon, we would devour our lunch to have half an hour of recess. During recess, there were first and second graders playing in the blue swings, over and under the red slides, jumping from yellow stepping stones that seem to be miles apart to a child, and dangling from the yellow monkey bars. Completing the monkey bars was the way the kids showed their dominance over everyone else. I did not care, I just enjoyed them. I can remember the children in the

I guess Fátima is not a common name, or maybe it was just because it sounded foreign, but the kids laughed; they laughed, and I was confused. I did not know what was happening in that moment; I felt as if I had left my body and was watching the scene as another. I had felt hollow, and at the same time, this painful feeling, as if someone was crushing my lungs, I could not breathe. My heart raced and my palms began to sweat. Then, Jared-- a tall, gangly, white boy--realized that my name had the word “fat” in it, he encouraged the other kids to start calling me fat or fatty; and soon enough I started to believe them. At that moment, while they all snickered and smirked, I had started to weep, a little girl weep. Utterly rejected, I ran to the bathroom and stayed there until recess was over. The bullying went on for weeks until one day I told my mother about the kids that had started to call me fat during

I started to bite my nails that year; and I hated my name that year. Thankfully, I did not have any kids from my second-grade class in my third and fourth-grade class and I was saved from another two years of harassment. However, my fifth-grade class was not as pleasant. The boys in my class were the most horrible kids. A boy named Jace was especially cruel towards me, always teasing me and calling me ugly names, but his friends were also my friends and I had no alternative but to learn to live with it. The situation only worsened in middle school. I had gained a close group of friends and I allowed them to call me by my family’s nickname for me, Fáti (which is different from fatty). My friends, mostly Latinas, could pronounce my name being Spanish speakers and learning the correct tone and accent. I only let my closest friends and family call me Fati. But, of course, since there are people in this world that cannot, for the life of them, pronounce my name right, would make my name sound unlike it really is. The boys that would bully me would hear my friends calling me Fati and assume they could call me that too, but, of course, they would say it in a snickering or mocking way, and then follow it with a childish giggle. I would ask them to stop, that I did not like it, but then they would ask how it was different from my friends calling me that. How is it different? First,