What’s Wrong With You?
Stigma is more than a label — it is a mark of disgrace, weights of shame holding onto a person simply for being perceived as different. It shows up in the form of negative stereotypes and social disapproval, often directed at those living with mental illness, struggling with substance use, or occupying a social status that others have quietly decided is lesser. It is not always loud. Sometimes it’s in a glance, a silence, or the way a conversation shifts.
What makes stigma so excruciating is not just that it exists in systems or institutions — it lives within. We carry it in our assumptions, in the stories we've absorbed about who deserves compassion and who doesn't. Someone perhaps a victim over someone who self inflicts harm for unknown reasons. Most painfully, people inflict it on one another, often without recognizing the damage being done. That casual cruelty — the offhand comment, the quiet exclusion is what keeps stigma alive. It passes from person to person like something inherited, and the person on the receiving end is left to carry the shame.
The consequences are real and lasting. Stigma isolates. It pushes people away from the help they need, from the communities that could hold them, from the opportunities that might change their lives. The shame it produces doesn't just hurt in the moment — it settles in, becomes ingrained, and begins to reshape how a person sees themselves. It’s cruel, it turns an external judgment into an internal one. Could be related to early onset bullying types and lack of compassion to others, or the natural instinct to deem others lower than you.
I had a friend growing up. We got along easily — we shared books, watched movies, listened to music together. But even at a young age, she showed signs of something she couldn't name. She would get angry without warning, hold in her emotions until they spilled over, and sometimes hurt herself in the middle of class. I stayed beside her through it. When things got bad I pushed through my own discomfort and showed up. She got into trouble often and missed school constantly. I was different that way — I had emotions too, but I kept them quiet, or let them out in humor or in something more sincere.
Back then, mental illness wasn't openly talked about. What we had instead was celebrity awareness campaigns — Howie Mandel has OCD, so now you know what that looks like. It was meant to make these things feel more human, but it mostly just made them feel quirky, safe, digestible. It didn't change how people treated each other in the hallways, and I’m sure you know those campaigns can be uncool so it gives the opposite reaction.
By the first week of high school, I was hearing that my friend was being bullied for being a lesbian — she had simply been trying to come out. I'm not entirely sure what happened after that, but she stopped coming to school. Four years passed and she was never in class. I saw her briefly at her parents' place when we were older, but she was different. I didn't know how to reach her, how to ask the right questions, though I understood some of it without needing to. I never found out how she finished her schooling, or what her life became. She was never visible online — not under her own name, not anywhere traceable. She had simply disappeared from the places people usually leave a trace.
I found myself being bullied as well, and I developed a serious eating disorder that had me hospitalized a few times. I was fainting unexpectedly and disoriented whenever I stood up — at one point I nearly fell down the stairs, but I just didn't care. Nobody did. People started paying attention to me once I got skinny. I heard it all: the hate comments, the compliments, the comparisons to what I looked like before. I knew what I was going through, and I saw other girls going through it too — but none of them had it as bad as I did. I was doing things I probably shouldn't have survived, and the damage should’ve killed me at such a young age.
I saw others being comforted in their pain. I even did some of that comforting myself, stepping in where it wasn't really my place, but none of it came back to me. I hid behind jokes the way I always did, and when I was sincere, I really meant it. I had family issues too, but they didn't weigh on me the way school did. I didn't fully understand why people didn't like me, except that my background was Middle Eastern. When I was younger I told people I was Italian just to make my presence digestible — but you can't cover your skin colour when you get older and people grow into their hatred.
In religion class I was called a terrorist. I was mocked for answering questions correctly in science. Someone who couldn't control themselves nearly forced my first kiss on me while I was drinking from a water bottle in the middle of class. Lies were spread about who took my virginity, to which I was being questioned about years later, wondering what the heck are you talking about? I was called names. I was called thunder thighs at close to a hundred pounds. These are just the things I still remember — not all of it, but going to school was a terrible feeling.
As I got older I realized things weren't going to change. After high school it got worse — any group I joined, any extracurricular, I kept meeting the same types of people just wearing a new outer shell. When I did form real connections they hit hard, they were deep and meaningful, but the stigma always became a problem. Something undeniable. Nobody wanted to know where I'd spent most of high school, nobody wanted to know about my past. It was always about what I could offer in the present — not the future, because who could picture a future with someone like me. This abomination. This joke of a person.
I love education, and I'm grateful for the chance to learn, but the environment was never healthy. Never. I missed out on so much trying to drown out other people's noise, but it clung to me anyway like a skunk's spray, it didn't matter how much I changed on the outside. New appearance, new aesthetic, new look — same result. It just follows you. Even my name became a target. Nadia — what kind of name is that, couldn't I have been given something more caucasian? But in all seriousness: education matters because it's a gateway to the rest of your life. When people take that from you, when you're left permanently scarred by their words, carrying the fear of being nothing, that really does something to a person.
People don’t realize how flawed the system is for mental health, how hard it is to get in contact with actual help, or how much it costs, or even how much medication and health risk there are that align with it. To tell a stupid joke, to hurt someone over something they can’t change, harmful. It’s different if someone’s behaviour is affecting you and you say something snarky to make them stop, it’s different this way. That’s just unawareness, but to blatantly mold and shape someone’s future based on your own hatred towards whatever they may think you are… it’s just… like why?
Stigma. It took me 10 years of my life of endless thoughts and deepened thinking to remember what I went through, because I forgot, because I forgot everything. I was pushing myself aside the way everyone else did, because I believed I didn’t matter. I wasn’t even given a chance to matter, and that really sucks.
Stigma, you’d see me now and wonder what’s wrong with me, but I just think, what the heck is wrong with you.