Jesy Nelson’s ‘Odd One Out’ – My story

‘Odd One Out‘ is a BBC documentary from Little Mix star, Jesy Nelson, discussing the horrific cyber bullying she has been forced to deal with on her rise to fame. Since winning the X Factor in 2011, Jesy has been called fat, ugly, a monster and several other names.

Worse than anything else, she’s been repeatedly told to kill herself.

After years of dealing with the bullying, Jesy broke completely and tried to take her own life.

Luckily – thankfully – she was unsuccessful, and is now working to raise awareness of just how damaging social media can be. ‘Odd One Out’ was an intense hour of real life stories, and followed Jesy’s own journey of overcoming the bullying.

Now, I want to share my own journey.

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Odd One Out – Where did it start?

Growing up, I was always pretty popular, a bit of a social butterfly.

I had a lot of friends, I went to lots of parties and sleepovers. I loved having such a large circle of friends. This was the same throughout primary school, and then in secondary… up until I was 14.

When I was 14 – almost 15 – I got a boyfriend. I was over the moon to be honest, I felt like a ‘proper’ teenager; good pals around me, a boyfriend, parties every weekend. Life felt good!

Until it didn’t.

Suddenly, I was finding myself the butt of people’s jokes on Facebook. People would imitate my photos, take the piss out of my status updates and photo captions. Ignoring it was fairly easy – Facebook was a relatively new platform at the time, and I wasn’t too fussed by it back then.

Mostly, I was just confused that people who were pretending to be my friend in real life were being so mean about me online… but more of that was to come.

I decided to join Twitter

Twitter was another up-and-coming social media platform, and I’d heard my friends talking about it at school, so one day, out of boredom, I decided to join.

When you join Twitter, it gives you a list of people you might like to follow, right?

So lots of my Facebook friends were coming up. Obviously I followed them all, my friends from school, some even from primary school.

I followed for a while before heading to the home page, to my Twitter feed, where I saw a tweet from one of the girls I called a ‘friend’. I remember her tweet so clearly as if it’s practically burned in my brain. Her tweet read:

“The downfall of Twitter”

I didn’t get what that meant at first; in fact, it meant nothing. Until I saw more and more people I had just followed writing about the fact that Twitter was ruined now, how they couldn’t write on Twitter anymore and so on.

They were talking about me.

I just didn’t get it.

These people were my friends, weren’t they? We hung out at school, didn’t we? They invited me to their parties, to their house. We spent our free time together. How could they be writing so many nasty things about me online behind my back?

I spoke to my best friend at the time, and she awkwardly told me that yes, there were some girls who bitched about me on Twitter because they knew I wouldn’t see it.

I was absolutely stunned and honestly felt sick to my stomach. From then on, my relationship with everyone changed – even with my best friend. Because a real best friend would have told me what was going on, or even stood up for me, right?

I honestly felt like my life was falling apart. I couldn’t trust anyone, I didn’t know who was real and who was fake and as a result, I don’t keep in touch with anyone from school really. They ruined my life.

Because it wasn’t just one day, one time, one thing. It went on and on and on for the next three years until I left school, and even for some time after that. People didn’t like what I tweeted, they made fun of my relationship (which I was very open about online, as I am today), they called me names and made my life a living hell.

Rising to it and defending myself was just fuel to the fire because they found it funny – they fed off of the fact they knew they were getting to me.

I turned to the police for help

Twice, I think, my then boyfriend called the police on them because I couldn’t deal with the tweets. There were people I didn’t even know writing about me. People who were friends with someone who knew me, so just wanted to join in ‘for fun’. My then boyfriend, who was pretty violent as it was, wanted to kill them all. So he called the police.

The police told him that until I was physically harmed by the bullies, they couldn’t do anything. They could only take a list of names and I could go back to them if I was physically harmed.

Of course, I never would be. Because nothing happened in real life. These people, these cowards, they never once said a thing to me in real life. Not once. They would just walk past me like nothing ever happened, some would even try and be my friend and acted totally normally with me! It was utterly bizarre behaviour, and only demonstrates further just how toxic cyber bullying is.

I admit, at 15/16/17/18 sometimes I tweeted stupid things – never harmful, or racist, or anything like that at all, just stupid. But it didn’t matter what I tweeted. I could have tweeted the sky was blue and they would have ripped into me.

I asked my school for help

In my last year of school, my one remaining friend pressed me to tell the Head of Sixth Form about what I was dealing with. Like my then-boyfriend, she was so upset seeing what I was going through and wanted to help.

So I went to my Head of Sixth Form and relayed everything that had happened since I was 15. I gave a list of names, over 200 people from both my school and the boys school across the road. And do you know what she said?

“Think about this very carefully. You’re in your final year of school. You’re 18. Do you really want to start all this drama, for it to potentially be unresolved? Just think about if it’s worth it.”

And what do you do when an adult you respect tells you that?

You listen.

It went unreported, it went unresolved and I carried on being incredibly unhappy with very few friends for the rest of my time at school. I was bullied on Facebook and Twitter, as well as on platforms I didn’t even have, like Formspring. People would write nasty things about me on an anonymous platform I didn’t even use. People hated me and I just couldn’t work out why.

School should have been the end of it, but it wasn’t

I left school at 18 on a ‘gap year’, studying two days a week at college, blogging and running my own radio show in that time. I was starting over – I had a group of brand new friends at college, who had never met or heard of me. Everyone who had been nasty to me was long gone from my life, and I could move on.

Or so I thought.

One day, in the midst of the ASL Ice Bucket challenge (remember that?) I wrote a somewhat controversial blog post about the fact that cancer charities had taken the idea and made it about cancer, something we’re all very aware of, rather than ASL, something we’re not all aware of. I also wrote about how people weren’t actually donating, but were just doing it for social media.

These are all points I still stand by.

However, one of the popular girls from the year below hated everything I’d said, disagreed and her and her friends shared my post online, all leaving nasty comments and insulting me/my writing.

For a short time after that, every blog post was mocked and criticised and once again I felt pushed into hiding, too scared to go into town or out clubbing in case I saw these people and they made my life hell in real life.

I made the time to go through all these tweets, all the people who were retweeting and liking, and blocked them all. To this day, there is almost 300 people on my block list, and almost all of them are from my school.

But it still wasn’t over

I had a few years of peace after that, and blogged happily, sharing my life online and so on. I didn’t experience cyber bullying again until last year, at the age of 22.

Someone I believed was a ‘friend’ (it’s always the friends, isn’t it?) made a horrible photo of me, making fun of my boobs. I’ve been very open about the fact that I have saggy boobs because it’s literally not a big deal! But it became a big deal when someone made a nasty photo of me and circulated it around people who, again, I thought were ‘friends’.

I reported it to the police, and gave them names of who was involved. The police called the ‘ringleader’, and if he bothers me again, I am entitled to file for harassment, which is reassuring to some extent.

But it didn’t change how I felt. Again, feeling like I couldn’t trust anyone, like no one was genuine, feeling alone and feeling ugly and confused.

And it still wasn’t over

Because in May of this year, I went ‘viral’. I was on holiday in a bikini and had several people make nasty remarks about me and how I looked. It was covered by The Metro, and whilst so many good things came out of what happened (going on Radio 1, getting a special message from Annie Mac, getting some brand work etc), everything has two sides to it.

The bad side was awful.

I was called a whale. I was told I needed harpooning, that I needed to get back in the sea. Someone commented that they felt sorry for my boyfriend having to wake up next to me every morning.

Eventually, I was sensible enough to stop reading the comments and I haven’t looked at them since. I was absolutely heartbroken.

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This post has gone on and on without much of a point, I know. But I hope it proves a couple of things:

1. Cyber bullying can happen at any age and doesn’t just affect school kids or celebrities. Ordinary people living their lives can be bullied online for absolutely no reason, just like I was. It can affect anyone.
2. Cyber bullying is tricky to prevent and even trickier to punish. Whilst there are more rules, regulations and laws in place now, it’s still hard to punish someone for typing an offhand comment they don’t think matters. People love to argue ‘freedom of speech’ without actually believing how toxic their words can be.
3. “Sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me” is no longer relevant. Because words do hurt. They hurt a hell of a lot, and you can’t ever forget them.

Where does that leave me?

It’s been almost 10 years since the bullying started for me. My life now is better than I could ever have even dreamed – but on my bad days, it’s the bullies’ words I hear in my mind.

When I read through something I’ve written, I can’t help but wonder how they would criticise it.

If I’m walking through town, I am so tense in case I bump into one of them and they grab me, or say something to me.

I am an incredibly confident young women, and not much phases me – but the memories of the bullies and what they did to me does.

Because of bullies, I stopped being a happy, bubbly, social butterfly. Instead, I spent my time with my boyfriend, who became abusive, or alone in my room. Bullies made me skip meals and throw away food in a bid to be thinner. They made me self harm in a bid to eradicate the pain and forget about the words that stuck to my skin like hot tar – burning me day in, day out. I fell out of love with school, refusing to throw myself into my work, desperate to leave.

Because of bullies, I hated myself, my life and being alive. My life was ruined for years, memories tarnished with the presence of nastiness, cattiness, bullying.

But I’m here. I’m alive.

I made it. Through everything, I made it.

People have tried to ruin my life and bring me down at every hurdle. People have tried over and over to make me hate myself. But do you know what?

Every time someone tries to bring me down, or bring some kind of toxicity to my life, I am only delivered more blessings. Every. Single. Time.

I know I’m a good person who deserves good things. Even on my worst days, where the words of the bullies are ringing in my ears and I doubt everything about myself, I am able to remind myself that I am a good person and I deserve good things.

Cyber bullying is serious and we need to be more mindful of how we treat others online. We need to remember not to speak if we have nothing nice to say. We all need to be reminded that there is a difference between freedom of speech and being a dick.

My bullies will never be held accountable, and neither will Jesy’s. But we can start holding other bullies accountable, and I intend on doing just that.

My story is not unique – and neither is Jesy’s. People are suffering all day, every day, and it’s got to stop. I, like Jesy, will not give up until I’ve done all I can to make the online world a better, happier place.

I’m happy and grateful to be here, living my best life, stronger than ever.

Living well is the best revenge.

Love from, Florence Grace