Such a simple task requires so much effort for her. Just walking through the hallway. But, she sensed eyes on her. She glanced left and right, only to hear crude remarks being thrown her way. She was getting bullied every day.

For SMCHS freshman Kate*, “sticks and stones may break your bones, but words will never hurt me” is a lie. Although she has never been physically hurt from bullying, the damage of the verbal abuse she endured in middle school still haunts her to this day.

Kate has a birth defect that makes her stand out from the crowd.

In second grade, none of the kids took real notice of her “different” appearance. However, in fifth grade, the comments started rolling in. By seventh grade, people who she didn’t even know were insulting her looks in the hallways.

“By seventh and eighth grade I had lost myself completely,” Kate said. “I had become a person I didn’t even know anymore.”

Her birth defect made it hard for her to breathe, chew and pronounce certain words.

The continuation of bullying caused Kate to develop depression — something one in eight teens struggle with, according to the Depression and Bipolar Support Alliance.

“We think that just because people look differently than we do, that they are considered to be an automatically ugly person,” Kate said. “Society just didn’t want me to be myself.”

When she looks back, she is ashamed to think how much the bullies got to her.

“The bullying beat my self-esteem down so much to where I hated myself,” Kate said. “I hated looking in the mirror.”

Kate was diagnosed specifically with bipolar depression, which caused her to bottle up all of her emotions until she finally “explodes”, and the feelings are released all at once. The depression impacted her tremendously, to the point where it became a bigger problem than the actual bullying.

“No one can really understand why [I was] depressed or how [I] got that way, because I don’t even know how myself,” Kate said. “All the comments I used to brush off and act like I didn’t care eventually come back around.”

As time went by, she found a healthy way to release some to the pressure of her depression: blogging. In it, she described her experiences with bullying and depression. Though she used the blog to cope, it still didn’t stop the rising impact it had on her.

“I just remember coming home and having their comments stay in my head,” Kate said. “Sometimes, I couldn’t even get them out.”

As the bullying continued, she also fell victim to what many other kids succumb to when they struggle with depression: self-harm.

She explained that cutting was “the only thing you can think of when wanting to release some of the ‘demons’ inside.”

Ultimately, her mom found out by word of mouth about the blog, and immediately confronted her daughter about the problem. Kate denied it, but once her mom found her journals, she sent her to therapy.

After a year and a half of cutting, Kate got sick of feeling sorry for herself.

“I said enough was enough, and that’s when I started to change myself,” Kate said.

Since then, she has had to get surgery for her birth defect. Not necessarily for the bullying, although it helped, but it had become a health issue as well.

For Kate, SMCHS felt like whole new fresh start. Now when she walks down the hallway she is greeted with friendly smiles and no crude comments.

Though she still struggles with depression, she has decided to not care as much about what people think of her and to stand up for herself more often.

“Some days, I even agree with myself that ‘I am pretty’, but that’s not all the time,” Kate said. “The best person to tell me who I am is myself; not these other people who only want to make themselves feel better.”

*name changed to protect privacy.