26/11/2025
Thank you Diversity Doodles for this humbling share of your personal experience. ❤️ Everybody should read this!
Essentially, we should teach (explicitly but also through modelling it ourselves with our daily behaviours and actions) our children to do all things with kindness in their heart and there is NEVER a good reason to bully anyone, whether that's because of their untrendy bag, their ear defenders, their wheelchair, their taste in music, their skin colour, their accent, their academic abilities, etc...
I'm a little late to the conversation regarding Richard Tice and the use of ear defenders. Because I couldn't quite put my finger on why a certain part of this rattled me so much. There's a lot to pick apart in his statements, which others very skillfully have, but It's taken a while to process and a conversation I had with a therapist yesterday to work out what it was that underpinned the frustration I felt. But now it's clicked.
The number of times that I have had to take the hit on disregarding physical discomfort for the sake of trying to avoid the emotional discomfort are uncountable. Not all, but mostly, centered around bullying and rejection. Other people's notions of what was acceptable based only in their own reality. Not mine.
Imagine in school being bullied for the coat you wear. And speaking up about this. Being upset. And the solution being to provide an alternative coat. But the new coat isn't comfortable. The old one was. It feels wrong. You can't explain why but if you reject it as a replacement then you are seen as difficult. Ungrateful. Actively choosing bullying as the alternative. The bulling is no longer the issue to be solved. You are. So you chose discomfort over active emotional distress. Because there's no way to explain that the physical discomfort exists, let alone that it too is actually emotionally distressing. Their opinions and emotions override yours.
And the food you are presented with every school meal. it makes you feel physically sick. But to reject what has been given to you means you'd rather starve. And not eating it is ungrateful. Disrespectful . After all that effort to buy it and cook it, and there's starving kids in war torn places you know.... And it's now loaded with guilt and shame. The emotions overwhelming. So you eat it. And try to ignore the physical feeling of needing to puke.
The comfortable rucksack, worn on both shoulders that gets you bullied at the bus stop. So, like the coat, it's replaced with a alternative in fashionable style, because you cried. And now the bullying stops. But your shoulder hurts and you can't make it comfortable to carry,even though you haul it round all day. But choosing your physical comfort means choosing ridicule and rejection. And then the bullying is of your own making if you don't dismiss your own actual discomfort.
I tried to wear headphones. Not in lessons, but during transitions. That got them confiscated. I lost my break time and carried a stern letter home.
This, and so many other scenarios so similar to them, was my childhood. Admittedly in a time before better information and supposed understanding.
And this is really what Tice was also stating underneath it all. Allowing those kids whose physical discomfort needs accomodation should be ridiculed. Told that it's nonsense or ridiculous. Or in his words 'insane'. Essentially bullying kids into physical distress, or rightfully choosing to listen to their own bodies and be mocked. Passing on message that a child who's physical discomfort from sensory issues is 'insane' to put those needs first and can be bullied for doing so. Presumably in the hope that they, like me, eventually learn that the only options are ignore your own interoception or suffer the emotional distress. Simply because someone else tells them that having very real needs is actually 'insane'.
This. This is what it's taken me time to unpick in my brain. The underlying ignorance. The dismissal. The struggles that are ignored. The presumption that your needs are too difficult. Too different. A choice even.
No.
❤️🧡💛💚💙💜
