The Beginning of Trust Nightmares by Julia

The Beginning of Trust Nightmares by Julia - September 2017 Scholarship Essay

Freshmen year photography was a class that I was looking forward to because growing up, I would see my dad’s passion for photography as something to strive towards. I figured that if something was that impactful for my dad, that it was obviously something worth doing to discover what impact it would have on me. That class became my daily hell. So as far as the impact it has had on my education, I would say its a bad one. I became untrusting of teachers and of my safety in school. I became someone who felt I had to bottle up my feelings and bad experiences, and use them to build up a wall of hostility to protect myself.
My photography teacher was an old man who wore the same outfit every day and consistently smelled of stale coffee and cigarettes. It might seem weird that I know what he smelled like and you might even be asking yourself why I was close enough to him to smell what his breath smelled like. That’s because he sexually harassed me. Every day. Every day I had to endure a man who was rude and invasive make me feel on edge even while doing something as simple as walking into class. His uninvited hand on my shoulder gave me anxious chills and cold tense muscles. His inappropriate words to me made my vision muddy and my ears rings.
Everyday before class started I would wait in front of the door, but in a spot I knew he couldn't see me in, and wait for my two friends in the class to arrive so that I could be walked in by people who made me feel at least slightly shielded from him. However, we were the only three girls in his class so we were is primary, and honestly only, targets. He would come to us during class and listen in on our hushed conversations. One of us was stupidity harassment, and another his sexual harassment target. He would tell my friend she was dumber than a can of air and then turn around and tell me a pedophilic story about his “adventures” taking nude portraits of “hot young women”.
About a quarter way into the year the class caused me to develop severe anxiety, so severe that I would have to excuse myself from class almost everyday and walk out trying not to think about is gaze burning on my ass, and have a panic attack in the bathroom. When I say that this was an everyday occurrence, I mean it. He was on a mission to gain power over me and in a way he didn't even know about, he did.
Once I told my parents the school year was only a couple months away from being over, but still those couple months could not have felt any longer than they already did for me. They immediately went to the school and their actions against the school gave me some hope. My hope disappeared about 2 days after when I was called into the principals office and told, in a few words, to suck it up. I lost my feeling of safety completely. I became numb during the class and had to finally accept what was being done to me.
After that, I became hostile towards my teachers when they when I felt they were trying to get too close to me, physically or emotionally. I felt threatened by teachers who were sometimes only trying to give me constructive criticism. It took two years for me to break down my hostility enough to trust one of my teachers again, and then slowly I trusted more and more. I had to not only relearn to trust my teachers, but also people who hadn't been in my life before. Accepting new people into my life took even more time but I eventually got there too.
I don’t place all the blame of my problems with trust onto this one class, but I do credit this class with being the beginning.