There was a time when being noticed was one of the last things I wanted. When I look at where I am now, it’s difficult to reconcile that with the person I became because of what happened at school.
I was outed before I’d even had the chance to understand what I was myself. Other people put a label on me first, and the bullying that followed made my secondary school years something I learnt to endure rather than enjoy.
Eventually, hiding became my way of coping. I withdrew from society and became something of a hermit, living with enormous anxiety and trying my best not to attract attention. Other people appeared to be getting on with life while I was concentrating on making myself as invisible as possible.
Then I did something with those memories that probably helped me carry on at the time. I buried them. For around 30 years, I tried not to think about what had happened at school. I thought I’d left it behind. Only recently have I realised that pushing something away for decades doesn’t necessarily mean you’ve dealt with it.
I’ve started revisiting those years, and with the memories have come feelings that I haven’t always found easy to accept. Sometimes I’m angry about what happened. Then I can find myself feeling guilty for being angry, as though I’m supposed to have reached an age where none of it should matter anymore.
I’m beginning to accept that both things can exist together. I can recognise how much those experiences affected me while refusing to let anger determine the rest of my life.
The feeling I struggle with most is the thought of what I might have missed. I wonder sometimes what choices I would have made without all that anxiety. Would I have met different people? Taken more opportunities? Lived differently if my first instinct hadn’t so often been to retreat? There are no answers to those questions, and there never will be.
What matters to me now is what is beginning to happen at the other end of that story.
I’m at last finding success in business. I’m putting myself into situations that the younger version of me would probably have done almost anything to avoid. Instead of trying not to be noticed, I’m learning how to be visible.
One of the ways I’ve been doing that is by standing in front of a camera and filming myself. It was uncomfortable because it went against years of instinct. But the more I’ve done it, the more I’ve understood that confidence wasn’t something I needed to find before pressing record. It developed through repeatedly pressing record.
I’ve learnt to stop demanding perfection from myself. I can forget a word. I can pause. I can stumble and carry on. I don’t need to turn into a performer just because there’s a camera pointing at me. I can simply be myself.
Perhaps the most unexpected part of all this is that I’m now beginning to help other people do the same thing.
I’m showing people who lack confidence on camera how to film themselves and become more comfortable being seen. I’m encouraging them not to hide behind perfection or believe they need to become somebody else when the camera starts recording. In many ways, I’m teaching them the same process I’ve been going through myself.
There’s something significant about that. I spent years trying to disappear, and now I’m deliberately putting myself in front of a camera and helping other people find the confidence to do it too.
I’m also speaking more, meeting people, developing my business and deliberately walking towards situations I once would have avoided. That old instinct to hide hasn’t simply vanished, but I’m challenging it rather than automatically obeying it.
I don’t want to rewrite my past and pretend those school years didn’t have consequences. They did. Nor can I go back and give my younger self the adolescence he might have had without the bullying. I’ll never know what a different version of my life would have looked like.
But those people don’t get to own the rest of the story.
Perhaps dealing with my past isn’t about forgetting it, pretending it didn’t matter or even forgiving the people responsible. Perhaps it’s about finally acknowledging what happened, understanding how it shaped me and choosing not to spend the years ahead hiding because of it.
They took enough from me.
They don’t get what comes next.
Ray
