'It's OK to get help'

For years, Paige Gillette has been tormented by bullying.

And for years, she kept it to herself.

After missing about a month of school to deal with related anxiety and depression, she’s still not sharing the names of those who have harassed her.

But she is doing something to address the problem.

Rather than seeking punishment for her bullies, Paige, a seventh grader, is instead focusing on education and awareness. She returned Oct. 3 to West Jay Middle School, before she was even back to attending classes, stood in front of a gathering of her peers in the gym and shared what she had been going through.

Since then, she’s also told her story at Randolph Southern and Wapakoneta (Ohio) middle schools, and at A Better Life – Brianna’s Hope meetings in Redkey and Dunkirk.

“I came up with the idea to talk to people,” said Paige, 13. “Everybody thought it was my parents’ idea, but it was my idea to talk.”

It came from a conversation she had with a classmate during the time she was out of the hospital but not yet back at school. He questioned the validity of the reason for her absence.

That created an emotional — angry — response.

She decided, with the support of her parents, to channel that anger in an effort to help others.

“I think educating everyone about this is a lot better than trying to get somebody in trouble,” said Paige’s mom, Erin.

In the video of her speech at WJMS — available on Facebook at bit.ly/paigegillette where it has been viewed nearly 7,000 times — she shares the story of how a girl who loves softball and Harry Potter books was pushed to the brink of suicide.

Paige’s first signs of anxiety — vomiting on the way to a softball tournament — happened when she was in third grade, about the same time she says her bullying began. They became more severe, as she made up excuses to avoid going to school, including missing three of the first six days of sixth grade and 30 days last year overall.

When vomiting continued to be a problem, her parents had her checked for stomach ailments. There were none. She was put on medication to help cope with her anxiety.

Without telling her parents, Paige eventually stopped taking the medication. Meanwhile, the bullying was getting worse.

“I didn’t tell anybody,” she said, noting that she would put on a tough face at school but would cry when she was alone in her room at home. “I kept it to myself because I was trying to protect other people from getting bullied, and then I would take all the bullying.”

Paige’s parents had thought she was doing better.

On Sept. 18, they learned that couldn’t have been further from the truth.

Paige came home and told her parents that she didn’t want to be there anymore, that they would be better off without her.

“I had thoughts of suicide,” she told her classmates during her Oct. 3 presentation. “If I just ended my life, then I wouldn’t feel the pain anymore and everybody would be happier.”

Erin and her husband, Steve, took their daughter for medical attention. She would spend the next four days in a behavioral health unit, limited to two one-hour visits during that period.

“It was the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do as a parent,” Erin said.

Paige was hospitalized in part to make sure she didn’t hurt herself. (She had developed a plan to do so.)

But she was also taught methods for coping with the anxiety that could sometimes be crippling. Those include first getting away from whatever situation is causing the anxiety and then doing any of a list of sensory activities — things like sorting cards, using a fidget spinner or playing with beads.

If she gets anxious at school, she’s allowed to leave the room and go to a place she feels safe, such as the nurse’s or principal’s office.

Jay School Corporation and especially principal Mike Crull, Erin said, have been extremely supportive.

“(Crull has) genuinely cared about Paige’s health and well-being,” she said. “He’s been an awesome principal to work with on this.

“The schools, they’ve bent over backward for us. They’ve helped us so much.”

The bullying and anxiety go hand-in-hand. It’s difficult to tell whether the former caused the latter or exacerbated a condition that already existed, in part because Paige never let on that the bullying was happening.

Those problems, she said, started with insults about her clothing choices as far back as third grade. (“I was a sweatpants and T-shirt kind of person, with a ponytail,” she said.) And they got worse as the years went on.

The comments about her clothing choices continued. She said would also get ganged up on when she would try to defend friends from being tormented about their physical appearance. And, she added, in the last couple of years fellow students have spread false and derogatory rumors about her relationships with boys.

“Some of them think it’s teasing,” she said, “but others, it’s deeper than that.”

And it was the repetitive nature, day after day of the same hurtful comments, that wore on her. She said it was possible to brush off when she was younger, but that as children get older the opinions of others mean more and more.

It wasn’t easy, either, for Paige to stand up in front of hundreds of fellow students and share the details of her ordeal.

“It was really scary,” she said. “It was nerve-wracking, because I didn’t know how everybody was going to react. Those are my peers.”

Some of them were the very bullies who contributed to her spiraling out of control. She was afraid of what those students might say and how they would react.

But she also had a message for them.

“You guys that are bullying people need to stop,” she told her fellow students, “because it’s not fair to other people to make them feel that way, to make them feel so bad that they think taking their life away is the right answer.”

During her presentation, she also told her fellow WJMS students that she would be back to the “same old Paige.” She’s a girl who loves wrestling in addition to softball, is a stand-out on the archery team and plans to be a nurse.

She remained away from school for about another three weeks, returning to classes on Oct. 23. There are still days when she doesn’t want to be there, but she’s better equipped to handle her anxiety now.

Sharing her story has helped her cope, and she hopes it will help others speak out about their problems — bullying, anxiety, depression, etc. — well before they become as extreme as hers did.

“It’s OK to get help,” she said. “If you get help, your life can be better.”