Let's muse on my troubled past

My school system has a very high suicide rate, but it also has a high rate of students who go on to higher education. What's up with that?
My friend thinks that it's because they systematically exclude, bully, and harass everyone who doesn't fit their idea of a perfect student until they either drop out or kill themselves. I wasn't sure whether or not I believed her hypothesis until I went in to take part of my GED and found myself face-to-face with seven people, six of whom I recognized as having mysteriously vanished from school months or years previously. And I didn't just remember them from across the cafeteria, these were people who I'd seen being screamed at in the halls by teachers while I tried to look away and not stare because I'd been there and I knew how horrible it was when people stared. People who no longer wanted to speak in class, like me, and who tried not to look a teacher in the face, like me. I think I was probably the only one who routinely received death threats, but that's probably to be expected when you've got such a prominent Achilles heel.

I think my friend might be right, and I kind of hope she is. Because I've read other blogs and it looks like I'm unique in the sheer volume of shit I had to tolerate over my malfunctioning immune system. And I've read news articles where they arrested kids for doing once what my classmates did on a daily basis. And if that's the reality then I must have either deserved what happened because no one wanted to stop it, or no one wanted to stop it because these aren't nice people and it's in no way my fault.
Although the fact that I had no less than five teachers who blatantly waved peanuts around just to see what I would do makes me lean towards the "it's not my fault" line of reasoning.

Great. Now what do I do?

There was a plane crash when I was in junior high. Some kids died. It's a small community; we all knew them. At least one of them. At least in passing.
I knew this boy, but not really by name. I recognized his picture. He went to this summer program with me, a day camp to keep us out of our parent's hair. Every year there were fewer and fewer of us there, depending on when their parents through they were mature enough to stay home alone. I went there when I was ten and everything was fine. There were about fifteen of us. We had free run of the place, and for the most part we didn't abuse the privilege. I carried my EpiPen (I only had one then, and it had a friendly green cap. The dosage changed as I got older and now I've got two of them and they're an ugly yellow) in a soft black camera case tossed carelessly over my shoulder because I didn't know yet that I should care enough to buy a purse, and nobody really noticed. I wandered off when someone had a snack with peanuts. That was it.
I went there when I was eleven and it didn't even take an hour for everyone to hate me. I'd never been allergy bullied before, or beaten up in a ball pit, but there's a first time for everything, I guess.
There was a boy who waved a crust in the air and said that it came from a peanut butter sandwich, and I crossed my arms and said that it wasn't funny, and he tossed it into the trash and gave me a quick apology and left the room. He didn't try to help me, but he didn't do it again, either. He just kind of stayed away while I learned that I shouldn't use a camera case; it doesn't matter if your EpiPen is undamaged if it's been stolen and hung from a pipe. Honestly, girl. What were you thinking? You use a purse.
I withdrew a month early. Last year I'd made friends by taking off my shoes and shimmying up a light pole. It nearly gave the woman watching us a heart attack, but I knew I wouldn't fall. This year I'd made enemies by existing. I wasn't sure what I'd done, I'm still not, but I irritated a lot of people. Last year the adults said I was cute. This year they told me not to be so sensitive.
And then I went back to school, and I got a purse with multicolored stripes and a pocket that I carried a book in, and I was annoyed but not surprised when I was bullied some more, and I learned that the boy with the crust was dead in a plane crash.
What do you do with that kind of information?
He'd tried bullying me, but he'd stopped, and we'd called a truce of sorts. He certainly wasn't my friend. I didn't know if I hated him. Now he was dead. Now what?
I cried. And I think if the death threat girl died I would cry for her too.
What does that make me?

What's wrong with me? I mean, besides the whole peanut thing...

I really hated myself for a while.
Whenever I mentioned my allergies at school people would groan and roll their eyes and ask me if I could please just drop it, just stop, why did I keep doing this? Whenever I got up and left a classroom the teacher would ask me if it was really necessary and the whole class would start whispering about me. Not to mention the death threats and the teasing and the way people liked to shout "PEANUT!" as I passed in the hallway.
There was this one day, about three weeks before I left school, that made me so mad I literally did see red. Poodleface and I were going to lunch along with a third of the school. Everyone, myself included, was wearing a really heavy backpack because the school issued us laptops, and backpacks to go with those laptops, and we were required to use them so that the laptops would stay protected. But the bottom of the bag was reinforced and wouldn't bend and was too big to fit in a locker, so we had to carry them everywhere for the whole day. There was also a rule that said that we couldn't take them into the cafeteria, so we tossed them in a pile at the door, which pissed the teachers off but it wasn't like we had a choice. At the beginning of the year someone had figured out that if you grabbed the handle of someone's backpack and gave it a light tug it would overbalance them and they would fall over. When I first felt my center of gravity shift dramatically backwards that's what I thought was happening, but the boy who'd yanked my bag caught me before I fell. So there I was, in his arms, unable to see who it was because he was behind me, wondering what the hell he was doing and why he was holding me so gently. We stood like that for a few seconds, and then he leaned forward and whispered in my ear, "peanut." Then he set me back on my feet and when I turned around he was gone, thus completing the most intimate insult I have ever gotten.
What really pissed me off is that no other boy had ever held me like that. Other girls who share my social standing get sexually harassed, but all anyone ever shouted at me was "peanut." I wasn't even a girl anymore, they hated me so much.
They hated me for being allergic to peanuts, and they acted like I was doing it deliberately and they wished I'd just stop.
So why didn't I stop? Why didn't I just stop it? I wanted to stop, I really did. I wanted to cry and lay  on the ground and say I was sorry, I was really sorry, I hadn't meant to do it, it just happened, I couldn't stop it, I was so, so sorry and I understood that they hated me and wanted to hurt me, I hated myself too.
I left school because my only other alternative was to start harming myself.

Death threats

When I was in junior high I did something that irritated another girl. I'm not sure what. I just remember that one day she tapped me on the shoulder, and when I turned to her she smiled at me and told me that she was going to take a peanut and kill me.
I slapped her. I was so angry I could barely think. Not about what she'd said, but the look on her face when she'd said it. Positively gleeful.
I went to the office and said that I wanted to speak to the principal because someone had given me a death threat. He was very serious about it, very official, until I mentioned that it wasn't a knife or a gun she'd threatened me with, but a peanut. Then he relaxed. He told me that she had only been teasing me, and talked over my protests to say that kids will be kids, everyone is bullied in school. Then he told me that he could suspend me for hitting her, and if anyone was ever being mean to me again I shouldn't fight back, because if I fought back we would both have to be punished.
The next day she found me again and re-told her story, expanding the plot a little to include her going to my house and killing my pets and smearing their bodies with peanut butter so I couldn't bury them, and then killing me slowly in the empty house when I came home and was crying.
This time I didn't hit her. I didn't touch her. I didn't even insult her. I just went back to the principal, who reminded me that this happens to every kid before sending me back out of his office.
And then she would not leave me alone.
And I completely believed her. I believed that if she ever got an opportunity, if we were ever alone together, she would kill me. She looked happiest when she was imaging scenarios of my death.
And she wouldn't stop touching me. She sat behind me in third period, and she loved to brush her hands along the back of my neck and whisper threats in my ear. I hated being touched. I knew that someone's breakfast, or their hand lotion, or their pet cat could make me sick if they touched me. But my teachers told me to just ignore her, and my principal ordered me to stop using reporting her as an excuse to get out of class.
And she laughed at me. She looked so happy. I wanted to attack her and scratch her face off with my nails, but I'd been told that I would be suspended if I hurt her.
I didn't want to go anywhere alone. If I met her alone, off school grounds, I knew she'd try to kill me. But as long as I was only seeing her in the classroom she would never have a chance, and all she'd be able to do to me was imagine in my ear.
And she had friends. After a few weeks there were others who realized that no one would stop them if they wanted to threaten me. People passed me notes with threats on them, and they shouldered past me in the hall, shouting "PEANUT!" as they went. I took the notes to the office, but by now I'd so annoyed the principal that the secretaries threw me out as soon as I walked in the door. My English teacher was the only one who took the notes seriously, and she called their parents herself instead of trying to go through the principal.
I started getting sick much more often than before. My teachers got mad at me, said this was just my latest excuse to get out of class. I'd always gotten skin rashes, always felt a little off, but now it was like I was always prickly, always gray, always on the edge of sick. I wanted to tear the skin off my fingers or slam my hands in a door, do something to them because they always hurt now.
I started wearing long sleeves, and I pulled them over my hands before I touched anything. It made me feel better.
And I got used to death threats. I learned to recognize the voice of boredom and the voice of hatred and know which threats I should fear. And I learned to pretend I felt fine, and to quickly get out of the way of someone who wanted to touch me.
And sometime in eighth grade, they stopped caring. I got boring. And the girl who I'd been so sure would kill me seemed to hit some kind of anger wall, and she lashed out at everyone, and now she was the one being bullied.
But I spent a year afraid for my life, and none of my teachers cared. I told my parents a few times, when it got bad, when I was really angry, and they called the school and my teachers brushed them off and didn't actually do anything, and it upset them so much I just stopped bringing it up.
And people still threatened me, every now and then, when they felt like it.
I guess that's why they thought it would be okay to hurt my service dog.
That's why I left, you know. Someone kicked my service dog. And my teachers didn't see anything wrong with it.
So now I have a blog.
What else am I supposed to do?