I grew up in the small, rural, central town of Winthrop, Maine and from the time I moved there at the age of seven, I always felt that my town was different than others. We are small, a population that has slowly increased to 6000 people within the last decade, but there was an attitude that we possessed—a large, we-are-the-center-of-the-world, type of attitude. Being an outsider coming in made it easy to recognize this kind of mindset that some of my peers and their families had around me. If you weren’t from here, well, it was unlikely that you would ever be from here. In the aftermath of our little town’s most recent tragedy, I wanted to write a letter to my town to say, it is time for a change.

Throughout elementary and junior high school, we all had our weird phases. I was the chubby sporty girl who hardly ever went with the crowd and because of that, I was picked on more than some of my friends. That’s not to say there weren’t a few boys I didn’t pick on too, but for the most part, I wasn’t on the inside of our town. In fact, it took me until high school to really feel as if I was a part of this town I grew up in, and even then, I still questioned my parents as to why they moved us here. We’re all taught that bullying isn’t accepted and would be dealt with, but when my grandmother passed when I was thirteen and my classmates laughed at me because I wore a cancer awareness bracelet every day, my school said nothing. Then, when a boy in my class shoved a stuffed animal that one of our teacher’s kept on their desk, down my shirt during class, he was spoken to by the principle and little else happened.

Fast forward to high school and bullying was something that seemed to be a norm in our school. It wasn’t the type of bullying where you’d see one kid get pushed into a locker or kicked around, but just the same, I was picked on throughout high school. My sophomore year, I dated a boy who was emotionally abusive and few understood that. Most of my classmates noticed how often I cried and a few actually told me that it was fun to get a reaction out of me so they created arguments in class with me or spread rumors—some classmates even being a few girls I considered to be close friends. I found out a year later by a peer who barely ever spoke to me, that my classmates wouldn’t talk to me because of my relationship with the boy my sophomore year. They called me crazy and obsessive, but what most of them didn’t understand was that during my sophomore year, my ex-boyfriend had been stalking me and harassing me on social media. They didn’t know that he had told me to go kill myself. When my school found out about this, they barely talked to my ex-SO about his behavior.

The following year, my junior year, I watched my little brother be harassed and threatened by my classmates, people who were two years older, because he didn’t believe in the same values they did. It got to a point where he quit soccer, a sport we’ve both played since elementary school, and he was reprimanded by our high school for doing so and for sticking up for beliefs. Our school spoke to the older classmen who were harassing him but none of them were put on probation with the soccer team because of their behavior.

Then my senior year came and our town was shaken by a loss of one of our students. She was close to many and the loss was sudden and devastated our community and communities across the state. Our school came together to honor her loss and we all started to recognize how much we needed to be there for one another. However, three months later, when we lost another student at our school, this time to suicide, our school offered little support to its student body and though our students were angry by the loss, little was to be said about suicide prevention, how to ask for help, or people to go to. I remember a number of my classmates saying that the boy should not have been honored by our school, simply because of how he died. The saddest part, is that this had not been our town’s first suicide, yet the community had tried its best to hush needed conversations about suicide prevention, and had tried to cover up its history with young adults committing or trying to commit suicide in our town.

Now, as a student at UNH, I am once again an outsider looking in. Recently, one of the students in our town committed a horrendous act and we lost two community members because of it. In talking with my family and friends that are still back home, I’ve heard a numerous amount of comments about how no one was surprised it was him and that he was a freak, but no one knows the full story except for the student. People have told me that the student had reached out at the beginning of the year to apologize for his behavior towards others and ask for a second chance. Though the situation may not have ended differently, I question how many people looked past their previously-made judgments to extend more kindness.

The point of this article is not to point fingers at people in our town, but it is raise awareness that change must be made. This article is a calling for our community to recognize its behavior and to reach out to those in need. We all felt and understand the loss that our community has been riddled with, we cannot look past it anymore. We must recognize that we never know the full story, we never know the struggles that people are facing, and having a small town stigma doesn’t give us right of way to make us believe otherwise.