Insults/comments that have stayed with you

[hellocats]

Has anyone ever said something so mean and cutting that it's stayed with you for years and years?

A boy at school said I looked like a man, this was between the ages of 12-14 so very sensitive age. It ruined my confidence, and even now when I'm in my early 30s, it's still there in my head. I don't believe any compliments if I receive them, and I've had very low standards in men because quite frankly I've been amazed a heterosexual man would be attracted to me in the first place.

No amount of therapy or reassurance from others will eradicate it from my head.

I've just thought of another! I'd just turned 18 and was wearing a new outfit that I felt really good in. Two men walked past me in the street and one whistled at me 🤢🤮 bad enough until the other one said to his pal, "mate, she's about 13!"

Loads of things-
being told I shouldn’t get my ears pierced any more because I didn’t want to bring attention to them.
Being told I shouldn’t wear short skirts by my boyfriend at 16 (because I was naturally very slim).
Told I looked like ‘ET on stilts’ by an older boy.
Told by my best friend I shouldn’t wear my tight flared trousers because they looked awful on me. (Again because I was too thin)
After these (plus lots of others) I imagined myself as a 16/17 year old to look awful and weird. I tried to put weight on but couldn’t!
Then when I got to 19/20 people would shout at me in the street to eat or when I worked my manager would laugh at me saying he couldn’t see me because I was behind the pillar etc and should eat more. I probably held on to all of this until I was about 38! I remember feeling self conscious wearing shorter dresses with friends even at 36/37 due to my knobbly knees and they told me I really should wear them and I got past it.
Then other sorts of comments too about my general self - There are 6 failures in this class, and ** is one of them. Told to my parents at parent evening. I’ve always lacked confidence and feel like I’m not good enough at things so think those sorts of comments contributed!

I never did anything to invite this sort of criticism.

We never do. It says everything about the critic but we are the ones who are often very badly affected for life because of these weak people who need to put others down to feel better about themselves.

The sad thing is, I loved her so much regardless and never once, even in her last weeks asked to stop and now she's gone I actually regret not doing it.

My family were very unkind about me in general and it really fucked me up tbh.
Around 22 though I grew into my face and became a sex icon for a while 😂 but it didn't matter until I met my DP, I was just so destroyed no matter what I felt gross. I can see now looking back at my rare pictures that I was actually just an adorable little person. My family are just deeply flawed.

Thank you so much for your reply, seeing someone who I don't know who is a stranger to me validate how awful it is helps far more than I can tell you. Genuine many thanks 💐

I had a couple of people ask if I was anorexic or needed to eat more. Imagine if I had actually been anorexic, what then?

I once tried to defend myself by telling a 'friend' (she prided herself on being honest, but was only ever honest about negative things) my weight, as I wasn't underweight, and she said something like 'yeah, if you had stones in your pockets'

That was in my teenage years.

Many, many years ago I went shopping for my wedding dress. Walked into a store on Oxford Street (which later went bust so maybe there is karma) and the sales assistant greeted me in her snooty voice with 'We won't have anything to fit you'. (I was a muscular size 16)

i left the shop and have had issues with my shape and confidence ever since.

Take your pick....I've had a lot of comments that were not "filtered" before my parents speak (still love them dearly though).

I had an awful time at school - bullied over my hair colour and my appearance.

To this day i have recoginsed that I have distorted eating patterns and my confidence has been wrecked.

I'm so sorry to hear all these stories and how they have affected us. 💐

I won an award at school and was told repeatedly I was overweight. The head of department (English) said to me I 'had all the grace of an African elephant' when I left the stage. This was early 90's and when I look back I wouldn't be considered large.

If I was ever hungry at home my dad used to say' do you need that?' When I went and got something.

I have really disordered eating still and I am mid forties :(

I was bullied pretty horrifically back in primary school. There was one particular girl that used to travel on the same school bus at me who had a particular dislike of me. I remember one day her just calling me an "Ugly pig ". Looking back I never saw myself as an ugly child. I had a phase of being overweight (in my teens I became very unwell with anorexia) but nobody deserves to be bullied regardless of how they look.

This same person is a nurse now and last weekend both her parents died within 2 days of each other so she is someone I feel sorry for now. I get the sense deep down she was always a very unhappy and insecure person

In my line of work I deal with abusive aggressive people regularly and get called all sorts.
One guy in particular called me all kinds of insults spat at me and called me a fat cunt. Tbh some of the other stuff he said was probably worse but it really stuck with me because I was unhappy about my weight at the time. That was about a year ago.
Recently dealing with the same guy again, similar happened, he was actually more aggressive this time threatened to hit me, find my family and stab them, set my car on fire etc and called me a cunt. Situation over I was debriefing with a colleague who had asked if I was ok, I said to her yeah I'm great, she thought I'd gone mad. I told her last year he called me a fat cunt, this year he just called me a cunt.
She knows I've lost quite a bit of weight and I've been going to the gym etc, so I said clearly the gym classes are working. We both had a good laugh about it.
Our line of work is pretty bleak though, so you do develop a dark sense of humour.

I messed up my A Levels and couldn't go to my chosen uni. Instead I got in to the 'new' university. Anyway I was thrilled to get a 2.1 and felt vindicated for the A Level debacle. Apparently my dad said to my mum that employers might not look at it as being as good cos it was only this uni. My mum collected me from the bus stop and I was jubilant but she told me what my dad said and I was crushed. She didn't have to do that, it was mean. I told her that and she tried to act all innocent by saying 'it was me that said it' but I feel she did it deliberately to put me down.

On a trip to New York in high school I was bullied by the group of girls I was sharing a hotel room with. Not unusual as I was bullied a lot in school. I had very few friends as I'm autistic and was quite quiet and shy (undiagnosed at the time). Anyway, I told the teacher who came to our room, took me to one side and said 'Well, no one wanted you in their room so you should be grateful to these girls.'

I will never forget it. It's perhaps the worst thing anyone has ever said to me.

"Sticks and stones may break my bones but names don't hurt me" was the rhyme me and my peers sung; so the cutting statement didn't work much with me, despite DM's efforts. Generally. the 'cutting' comments that can be remembered are categorized under 'funny things people have said to me'.

More difficult are the PA comments where I'm too bemused to come up with an immediate reposte, now those really irk me.

’Dark’s getting fat’ said by a boy in the canteen queue at lunch time by a boy in my year. I’d gone from a size 8 to 12 and it started me off on a destructive starve/binge cycle.

‘Your nose is weird, it has 2 bends in it’ by an older student on the bus when I was doing A-levels. It made me incredibly self-conscious over something that had never really bothered me before,

The comment that I’ll always remember my mother saying when I was about 7 was “I didn’t want you, I wanted another boy”. I’ve sort of forgiven her, I was probably being a pain at the time, but now that I am her carer and my two elder brothers don’t do a thing for her, the thought occasionally goes through my mind “ bet that you’re glad you had me after all!”

I've always been small-of-breast.
My name begins with T. My nickname at school was 'titless T'. It was shit and really damaged how I felt about being a young woman - especially as my periods started at age 10, so quite early, and I had all of that to deal with too.

and massive hugs to the posters here. Whether or not badly meant, words can hurt so deeply.

I was born late, lots of years between me and my next siblings, so they were in relationships or married when I was getting a little bit older

Used by the grown ups to go to the shops with a list and they thought it was funny (see how fast you can run to get the stuff felix, I will time you ha ha ha ha)
Sister, Brother and in-laws

Ooh felix whats them things sticking out of your chest - brother, I kicked him in the nads and I got told off. I was about 10 and an early devoloper

Called fat by my brother, go on just one more potato, I was sporty and fit and 14 yrs

Tug boat by someone else

I could go on

An uncle said I was a 'loony leftie' after I let slip I voted Labour. I'm still proud of that moniker now 30 years later.

Why are so many cutting comments remembered here are regarding 'body image'? However one of my favourite cutting comments of all time does involve 'fat-shaming'

One of my sisters was (and still is) rather 'weighty' - we both found it very funny when DM said to sis "you can't possibly ride on the back of a motorcycle, you're far too fat."

Far supercedes the general comments such as "don't ever have children, they ruin your life". Like fat blokes never ride motorcycles?

Gotta laugh really.

I find alot of people obsessed with my height. Told I'm a short arse, have tiny legs etc etc. It's odd. I don't mention how fat they are I'm 5 foot 3.

I had a primary school teacher who singled out me and about 5 boys as ‘droners’ and told us that we weren’t allowed to sing in school performances (or practices). We were to mine instead so our lower-than-the-other-children voices didn’t ruin the performance. It was mortifying.

I still have a lower than average for a woman voice as an adult. And feel so self
conscious that I have to force myself to sing in public at baby classes.

That’s despite knowing (as an adult) that she was just an arsehole. And the problem was not our voices at all; the problem
was that she lacked the musical
talent and knowledge to adapt what she was doing to accommodate a group (25% of her class!) of children with lower voices. Instead she chose to publicly single us out and shame us for not being the same as the majority of the children.

It has stuck with me though. More than 30 years later.

Oh yes, I've had loads of comments about my height. An otherwise lovely funny woman of 6 foot kept telling me I was short (i'm 5'1''). Once we were out with a group and she was laughing because ''you're so short''. My dancing as a short person made her laugh. I would never in a million years have said, look, I know I'm shorter than average, but you are taller than average and I'd pick my height over yours and I've never ever said anything to you to make that obvious, so here you are, laughing at me while I staple gun on the 'not bothered' smile. I did wonder just that once how she would have reacted if I'd said to her ''I wouldn't swap with you''. I feel bad typing that because she was nice otherwise but she saw my height as some kind of disability that she could laugh at while never ever ever acknowledging that her own height was further from average than my own. So strange.

Did he really say it though or was your friend being a bitch?

Loads as I was bullied at school by a group of boys who would follow me around and kick/throw stones at me and laugh. They would wait outside class for me and call me a "stupid cow". Now I look back and think it's laughable that that's the worst they could come up with but it's stayed with me.

Also I seemed to be easy pickings for men to shout stuff out to me in the street when I was young. Two that stick with me, in particular are being told I'd "hit every branch of the ugly tree on the way down" and a few years later being told I had "bandy legs".

It just felt like literally everyone, from those at school who would snigger behind my back, to randoms in the street thought I was hideous and I felt like a freak. I look back at photos of myself and I looked like a perfectly average teenage girl but my self esteem was destroyed for life. I still feel like an ugly, stupid freak.

Sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me..... What a load of bollocks.