“I never thought humanity could be that cruel,” Sarah McCarthy states.

McCarthy, a Senior from Golden High School, finally accepted the challenge of telling the world her story, explaining which factors made her who she is in present time and also trying to help others with her own experience.

Sarah suffered from bullying all her life until her junior year of high school, when she realized she could not cope with it anymore and that she needed to ask for help.

Everything started on Shelton Elementary School. Sarah was born with a facial deformity making her different from the rest of the children. She has undergone 14 surgeries and spent most of her childhood at the hospital, that is why their parents decided to home school her. She did not have time to assist a normal school routine everyday and her parents were scared her problem could affect her social life: “We weren’t sure if we should do that because kids could insult her because of her problem.”

Two years later, everything started to seem good, and, although Sarah still had her facial deformity, she did not go to the hospital that often and all the family started to live a normal life, that was the reason why her parents decided she would go to a normal school at the age of seven.

At the beginning, she was quite happy, the teachers were nice and the school was big and beautiful. However, things changed the first day when Sarah entered to class, hoping she would make friends, but suddenly, everyone started looking at her and making rude comments:  

“People asked me what was going on with my ugly face and they didn’t want me to sit next to them,” said McCarthy. 

We can all imagine how hard this day was, but not only this one, also the next six years of elementary school and, although she went she went to a lot different schools, bullying followed her everywhere she went.

20% of students suffer bullying all over the world, and 77% of them in the US say they have been mental, verbal or psychologically abused at least once in their life and, unfortunately, McCarthy was part of this percentage.

McCarthy shared insults turned into physical damage:

“I remember a guy slapping my face saying that way he would fix my ugly cheeks. Nobody wanted to be my friend, people laughed at me or they simply ignored me and made me feel invisible. Life in those moments was a continuous emotional torture.”

McCarthy even thought about committing suicide. But, when everything seemed to get darker and darker, she changed to Golden High school, where she found a friend, Laura: “I cannot imagine my life without her, she saved me from all that bullies by introducing me into her friends and saying I was a wonderful person. That was the moment I felt truly alive, when my life started to look like a great one.”

McCarthy shares that sometimes, all we need is just one person to carry on and everything will be as you dreamed, that is what McCarthy thinks: “Maybe this was a horrible and hard experience, but, even from the most difficult moments, you can learn something, and I learned a lot about self-love, because I am the only one who can judge me, and also about friendship, real one, like mine with Laura, my best friend.”