Am I allowed to cry?

When I was in seventh grade I had a bad allergic reaction while shopping with my father in a store that had several open bins of peanuts. My throat burned and I had trouble breathing, and although I took Benadryl, showered, and changed my clothes, I coughed for the rest of the night. The next day I was terrified to go to school. In the past I'd tried to talk to my teachers about class parties or snacks that were going to be provided during standardized testing, and they'd brushed me off or told me not to worry so much or, in one case, assured me that it would be okay, then later pulled me out of the test because they'd been wrong, but threatened to call my mother when I cried about it. I never wanted to have another allergic reaction, and I didn't know how I could go into a place that wouldn't let me protect myself.
My mother talked to my assigned counselor and to the office staff while I clutched her jacket, thinking that she might relent and take me home if I acted childish enough. I was twelve, and after she'd left one of the adults snapped at me to knock it off. They'd promised my mother that I could spend the day alone in a classroom and have all my work brought to me, and that they would try to work through this with me, but the teacher who was supervising me got in my face and threatened me in a low and deadly voice when I put aside my math to write a poem, and scornfully told me that I wasn't fooling anyone when I started to cry.
The same things happened when I was bullied, when I was afraid to attend a certain class. I would be sick and in pain and never, never want it to happen again, but when I said I was scared I was told, "No you're not. You only want attention, and everyone knows it."
I don't know how to deal with the things I'm feeling now, when I think back to when I was going to school and wonder if people at college will treat me differently, because I've half-believed for years that they were right. That I wasn't really traumatized, that I'm still not, and that I'm just trying to manipulate people for attention. I try not to let people see me when I'm emotional, because what if they realize I'm trying to manipulate them? But don't I have real emotions too? Am I ever allowed to cry?

Can I please explain to you that I am not your cousin?

I really, really hated my high school Geography class. We had to take notes in the dark because the teacher insisted on projecting pictures, we had to make power point presentations and then waste two days listening to our classmates stumble through them, we had to memorize the names of small rivers and then regurgitate them on quizzes, and I sat near a girl who clearly knew more about my allergy than I did.
You see, she had a cousin. And her cousin was allergic to peanuts. But her cousin never mentioned it, and she ate at restaurants, and she didn't carry an EpiPen, and she certainly didn't have a service dog, and so, really, what was wrong with me that I had to be such an attention whore about the whole thing?
We had this conversation about once a week. She told me condescendingly that her cousin got along fine without a service dog, I pointed out that some allergies are more severe than others, and then she either called me a bitch or said I was a liar, depending on the tone of that week's conversation. Logical reasoning did not get rid of her. Providing accurate information and citing my sources did not get rid of her. Refusing to speak or make eye contact or acknowledge her presence did not get rid of her. Fighting fire with fire did not get rid of her. And asking to have my desk moved did not work.
I felt like this girl was trying to persuade me that I didn't need to use little paper wrappers to bake cupcakes because she baked cookies last week and didn't need them, and still insisted that I didn't need them even when I explained how a cupcake is different from a cookie and not all desserts are exactly alike. And she was angry about it. Why was I using paper wrappers? What did I think I was doing? That was wrong, wrong, wrong! Did I want to kill trees?

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.

I'm just like Jane!

My father and I love to watch The Mentalist. In one episode (spoiler alert!) we get to see Patrick Jane consciously mess with his body's reactions to fake alcohol poisoning. He goes the whole mile, even influencing his heart rate and blood pressure to make it look real.

And I, apparently, can do the same thing. Although my reasons are less honorable; I don't want to catch a killer, I just want to get out of class, and I might also want your sympathy, although opinions vary on just how devious I am. 

You see, someone at my school read an article that said that allergic people can actually make themselves have a reaction by focusing hard enough on what it feels like to have a reaction. 

This was fascinating! It explained that weird nut girl perfectly! We all knew it wasn't possible to be that allergic; she must be doing it to herself!

The article made the rounds, and soon I couldn't cough without half a dozen of my fellow thirteen-year-olds furiously cursing me out for daring to try and pull this crap again.

Opinions varied on why I was actually doing it. Some people thought I didn't realize what I was doing, I was just so helplessly paranoid I wound myself up into fits of panic. I was clearly sick and I needed psychiatric help. Others thought I wanted to be special. I wanted adults to feel sorry for me and treat me differently. I was so desperate to have a disability I was doing everything in my power to fake one. And some people just thought I didn't have the balls to cut class the traditional way.

I showed people that I had a rash, that my skin was patched with angry red. They told me I'd rubbed my skin raw with my nails in an attempt to make it look real. I coughed and coughed, covering my mouth like I wanted to stop, but they told me they knew I was just a good actress. 

And I wasn't sure whether or not they were right. I mean, so many people furious at a thirteen-year-old girl for being sick, shouting at her that what she was claiming wasn't even possible? How could I not begin to believe them?

I asked my parents whether they were right. Was I faking all of this? Did I have something wrong with me mentally? 

My parents had my doctor write the school a note about my allergy. They took it into the office and made sure everyone saw it, and they asked to speak with all my teachers and re-explained what I'd already told them, and left the note with the school nurse to put in my file.

But as soon as my parents left everyone went back to treating me like I was crazy. My teachers told me to stop being dramatic, my classmates shouted at me for being such a bitch. And then they all took it one step further and demanded to know why I was pretending to have an allergy in the first place.

Now it wasn't just the attacks I was faking.

It was the whole allergy.

I really, really hated myself for daring to be allergic to peanuts. Clearly it wasn't right. Clearly it wasn't acceptable. I should just do what everyone was telling me to and stop having the allergy.

But I couldn't do it. 

And there was something else I couldn't do.

I thought, if I was already doing it, already subconsciously faking to get myself out of class, what was wrong with doing it deliberately? If I can't stop, if it's a compulsion that I have no control over, I might as well make it useful and do it to get out of a class I really hate, right? 

So I tried it during math class.

I concentrated really hard on the way it felt to have a reaction. The way my neck and chin prickled. The hot, unpleasant taste in my mouth. The way light was too bright, and the compulsion to cough that I couldn't fight, even when I was barely getting enough air to breathe. 

Nothing happened.

Okay, that was okay, I'd just pretend I was feeling it. It only had to look real. So I scratched at my arms a bit and tried to recreate a rash.

It didn't look right. Rashes are patchy-looking, this just looked like I'd scratched too hard. Why couldn't I do it? If I'd done it so many times before, why couldn't I do it now???

Maybe because I'd actually been telling the truth?

Not that it mattered to everyone else. They all still hated me. Which is probably why they had no problem handing out death threats; I clearly wasn't allergic, so the threat wasn't even real. And why the hell did the school let me get a service dog for a condition I didn't have? That didn't even exist?

I hate this town. 

And the feeling appears to be mutual.

What the eff happened?

Something that has puzzled me for many years: why do so many people think I'm a liar?
My parents did what all good parents are supposed to do. They got in touch with my school every year, made sure all my teachers knew about my allergy, dropped off a doctor's note saying I should be able to carry an EpiPen, and generally reminded everyone not to poison their daughter. So what the eff happened to convince a very vocal portion of the community that I'm boldly faking it for attention???
I've had teachers who were wonderful, and I've had friends who were wonderful, but I've also been approached by people who want me to know they think I'm a lying sack of crap.
One of my assigned guidance counselors, when I asked her to help me with some kids who were taunting me about peanuts, told me that it was because they knew what I was saying was ridiculous, and if I dropped the whole peanut thing and ate school lunch like a normal person everyone would like me again. My art teacher, although she seemed to like me, never understood why I wanted her to check ingredients lists, and I was constantly storming out of the art room under an irritated black cloud because she'd brought us yet another snack I couldn't be in the room with. Kids have come up to me in the lunch room or the halls and asked me why I'm so dramatic about my allergy, and I've been issued one or two detentions, which I opted not to show up for, because I left a room to go to the nurse to get treatment for a reaction the teacher didn't believe I was having. So what did I do to convince these people that I'm a liar?
And not everyone stops the conspiracy train with the idea that I crave the spotlight. In a terrifying shouting match with a teacher I was very intimidated by, I was asked why I felt the need to control everyone around me. All this because I asked him if, this time, he could bring us a candy I could have too. And when I got my service dog the shit really hit the fan, with people snarling at me that it must be wonderful for me to be able to bring my pet to school.
I have wondered for years and I am really at a loss for explanations, what did I do?!?!?!?!
For a while, even after leaving school, I secretly feared I was all the things they'd said I was. That subconsciously I really did want attention.
Then I read about the conflict in Florida.
For those of you who didn't follow it, a group of parents decided to protest the security measures an elementary school had put in place to protect a six-year-old with peanut allergies. And I mean protest protest, as in, they stood outside with signs. Because of a six-year-old girl.
So now I'm hopeful that maybe it's the world that's crazy and not me. Kind of like that line from one of the more poorly-written episodes of Star Trek, "If there's nothing wrong with me, maybe there's something wrong with the universe!"
Well, maybe there is something wrong with the universe if it's so determined to be angry with allergic children. So what can I do to change the world, besides blog about it?