Bullied For My Name And Haircolour

Hello, my name is J. I’m 18 now, but for years I was bullied. It started when I was 9 yrs old, your basic exclusion and teasing at that point. It wasn’t until my classmates hit puberty that the real bullying began. They started calling me ugly in many different ways. To this day I don’t know if they were right or wrong because all I see in the mirror is an ugly girl and, though my mum and grandparents insist I’m good looking, I can’t really trust the opinions of family members as they usually wouldn’t call you ugly to your face. The ugly comments continued alongside people ostracising me for being a red head and having the name J because of a famous J. I’d heard all the red head comments before, being compared to an orangutan was their favourite. But they never bothered me as much as this one. It wasn’t the name calling itself(I could’ve cared less about famous J) but how they treated me alongside it. They were constantly laughing at me, purposely excluding me and most breaks I found myself hiding and crying behind the science building. What’s worse is that the bullying wasn’t restricted to school aged children. At that point I lived in a really small country town and just about the entire town, adults and children alike, ostracised me for my name and hair colour with one man going to the extreme of banning me for the local pool.(I had done nothing to actually deserve this. I used to help them clean their pool, set up for events and always stuck to myself) Because of this I absolutely hate my name and cringe when I hear it and can never truly love the colour of my hair even though my mum constantly tells me how many people pay to get the same colour for them.
The bullying got so bad that I began thinking I suicide, started harming myself and developed an eating disorder because i had begun to hate myself over the years of bullying. I dropped out of school and did homeschooling for year nine because my mum could take me coming home from school crying every day. I went to a new school for year 10, that last shred of hope wasted and crushed when I experienced the bullying all over again just with new people and I dropped out again. Even though I know I would of killed myself, I wish I hadn’t of given them the power to make my feel as though leaving was my only option because now I’m stuck at home without a completed education and finding it incredibly difficult to get a job.
I was prompted to write this when I found an old diary entry by fourteen year old self, who wrote about wanting to commit suicide because of how horrible everyone was to her. A girl who’d never had a true friend and was constantly alone. A girl who couldn’t fathom why the world was so cruel to her. I even jokingly claim to have been hitler in my last life and that all that crap I’ve suffered through is my punishment.
I don’t really know how to end this so I won’t say that it gets better cause it hasn’t for me, I’m emotionally scarred with an inability to trust anyone and the the reason I haven’t killed myself is because I am genuinely afraid I’ll be forced to suffer even in death.
To any bullies that may be reading this, you should really take into consideration the lives you may be destroying. Some people take criticism and use it to make themselves stronger, but most times bullying causes pain to lasts for years to a lifetime. It scars a person and even leads to serious mental health issues and/or suicide. So think about that next time you call someone fat or ugly, because their reaction might be to go force themselves to puke or contemplate pulling the trigger.