Please allow me to die soon – I just want to leave, beside Tinside Lido, Plymouth, UK
I want to let you know what happened to me at Orwell Park School.
My rugby coach very seriously physically attacked me in the south of France – because a pupil told him I was being intimate with my boyfriend.
I was assaulted by the Head Master, Ian, in his office – because a gay erotic drawing I’d made for my boyfriend was discovered by staff.
My boyfriend was barred from staying at my house at the weekends. He was told that we could not be together at school. We were separated through physical and emotional violence.
The shame and embarrassment, the sense that I had done something wrong, became so wounding, as the first person I ever loved, my first love – a shy, unique, blonde, perhaps trans like myself, non-binary, gay or bi ‘boy’ – so fucking like myself – said to me that we couldn’t be together anymore.
I felt that shame and hurt so very deeply then, it so cut into my heart, because his beautiful eyes were filled with it.
I self-harmed at Orwell Park as a result of these traumas. I repeatedly cut into my left wrist and likewise, opened up a vein with a needle – for months I walked around with my wrist bound in a blood soaked bandage.
My boyfriend and myself became withdrawn.
My step mother, Sally, had just died in a horse riding accident, and I had no idea what that actually meant, but I eventually understood that she was gone. No one helped me with that loss.
On walking out of that place, my rugby coach spoke to me, he said, that I knew I had done something wrong. That I knew why he had to punished me. But I didn’t. It was incomprehensible to me. I didn’t know what the fuck he talking about or why he had betrayed and hurt me.
I didn’t know LGBTQ+ people existed, and the school, in the Section 28 era, could not explain my crime to me. I simply did not exist, and my existence was a crime.
We survived that place. Sort of, not exactly. I’m not sure my boyfriend, James survived it at all.
In 1999, James Whitwell, founded a self-harm forum called, RuinYourLife.com. In September, 2002, James took his life away from the world, after completing his first novel, The Godthief. I have been saying the first line in James’ book, to myself since forever, ‘I will be the judge of God, after everything that has happened to me’.
When I was told of James’ death by my twin brother in 2003, at my art school’s the end of first year Ba show celebrations – I felt like I had killed him.
My transness was not allowed to exist in my mind. It was annexed out.
It is not safe to be myself.
I only became able, in my own deaths, my suicides, to live, to exist as myself, a year or so ago.
It has taken me 22 years to accept and face, and cry again, for the hurt and damage inflicted upon James and myself.
People should know what is done to us, to so many, everyone like us, and how we came to be so injured.
maryemmaholly.uk 