Throughout third and fourth grade, not a single kid in my class at boarding school spoke to me. In the beginning, they would act like I wasn't in the room and say mean things about me, but a month or so after that just became 2 years of them pretending I didn't exist. They wouldn't make eye contact if I passed by them in corridors. They looked right through me if I walked into a room. They didn't put my name on lists teachers asked them for, for things like clubs or extracurricular activities. For long stretches of time I wasn't even sure if I did exist, since most of the time I was just by myself. I stopped answering questions in class. I started to do really badly at tests and exams. Teachers generally reacted to this with clear contempt for the idiot I appeared to be. I got sick often. I lost a lot of weight. A cafeteria worker once told me I looked like "one of those African famine kids." I got sick often.
I struggled for years, and still continue to struggle to some extent, to trust people. I am 28 now and still uncomfortable when anyone actually looks at me, eye contact feels like an unnatural thing. I've struggled for years with how I think I look. I've been told by so, so many people that I am an attractive man but I just can't believe them and believe that I am fucking repulsive. I feel constantly judged, I feel constantly that the people I'm friends with really aren't my friends, even though all evidence proves otherwise. I'm a shitty friend to them in return as a result.
The reason for the way the kids in my class treated me? I'd complained to my parents who complained in turn to the school's Principal about a matron who physically abused me (and other kids). She had a cane she used frequently on our knees, shins, and arses for the stupidest of fucking reasons: a dab of toothpaste remaining in the sink after brushing, slightly unmade beds, shoes not "fully" polishes, socks not pulled up to the knees, random shit.
Corporal punishment was allowed in the school then (I don't live in a first world country) but there was some semblance of a system for when it could be used, and it was clear she violated it and so was fired. Her kid was in my class and although he didn't have to, he left too.
Just before their treatment of me started, a kid, all of fucking 8 years old, told me to my face that I shouldn't have complained and that I would pay for it. Well, wherever those cunts are now, they should know that I did, I guess. I am better than I was through the next school I was at, my teenage years, and my early 20s, but I don't think I'll ever, fully, 100% get over that. It's fucked me up for life.