If I want to tell you a story about Jojo, I have to start with Japajade. That first book was about the life and thoughts of a person with bi-polar disorder, and was published by Tuma in 2005. Two years later, Mohorjeva Družba published my second book, Depra, which was about depression. In 2011 Itaq, a love story, was published by Miš. All my books deal with my own struggles with stigma.

Japajade and Depra helped me accept my mental illness, with Itaq I forgave myself for falling in love with women, and with Jojo – well, I hope to be able to free my soul of the guilt and stigma of sexual abuse. It is still difficult, but I am still here: I breathe, I see, I hear, I walk, I eat, I drink, I smoke, I have a bathroom and I still pay my bills, so there’s really nothing to complain about.

To all of those who have suffered, I sincerely apologise. To those who helped me and believed in me, I thank them. I will not talk about the story, not now not ever, because I wrote it to forget. It is just one of many similar stories that will never be put in writing or talked about, although they should be. Only then might we realise the horror and extent of sexual abuse.

All my books are fiction. They are real only at the moment of writing.
Then it all changes. Which is why I write. For it all to change.

As a child I used to behave as a nerd and I never wanted to play by the foreset rules. My behavior never helped me to fit in. Teachers disliked me because as I was breaking their rules I also knew their subject. Schoolmates avoided me because I was a nerd and plain weird. I also didn’t want to play by their rules, I never wanted to play their games. Primary school was tough. I switched two schools, and high school was even tougher. I was helping my classmates with math and physics. Just a few of them really appreciated my help, though. University was really the first place where I realized I don’t have to fit in. I worked really hard and I learned that sometimes you have to follow the rules but there is always room for bending them.

I was born into a Jewish family. Most of my ancestors vanished in Auschwitz. My grandmother was the sole survivor on her side of the family. Ever since I can remember, mention of the Holocaust has been taboo in my family. Denying her Jewish heritage and not talking about the concentration camps were my grandmother’s way of coping.

I’ve been wearing the Star of David, proudly aligning myself with my family’s heritage. When I meet new people, most of them are overwhelmed by the fact that I am a Jew. Their reaction has always seemed pathetic to me… Why haven’t I ever seen someone overwhelmed by the Christian cross?

My family moved around a lot when I was small. I have learned that moving and accepting new, different things, people, places and situations is normal. I felt, and sometimes still do, that the biggest stigmas happen because of a feeling of displacement and by a general non-acceptance of very, very basic differences within and outside the family… I grew up in a very diverse neighbourhood where degradation and fear of being different caused people to ‘tune down’ and hide inside themselves just to fit in…  Some of my childhood friends have passed away and I have to
say that this lack of love and acceptance influenced them greatly.

All of us who remain have to learn to respect and cherish these differences as much as we can and try to protect the ones who are most vulnerable by letting them out of hiding. What is more amazing than seeing each other blossom by accepting each other without judgement? That is where the fear ends.
And when fear ends, there will be fewer stigmas.

Ever since childhood, I have lived in a far off world. At primary school, I was usually the last one to finish – and even my last name began with the last letter of the alphabet. My schoolmates used to make fun of this alienation I felt from society. I still live in that far off inner world, but I have also adapted to the world outside.

Ever since I can remember, I’ve tried to stand out. So, during my childhood years, I wore an Afro haircut. Often, schoolmates would tease me and I would stubbornly confront them. However, over the years these confrontations have become constructive debates of all kinds.
One day after the summer, I changed my haircut into dreadlocks and the teasing stopped. But I had already learned a life lesson: It is always better to make a radical statement and provoke a debate than keep in line with the general opinion and not make a statement at all.

Hey! I’m David. When I was a kid, I used to be stigmatised because everyone called me ‘Daguito’, which is short for my father’s name ‘Dagoberto’ and my older brother’s, ‘Dago’. I felt very uncomfortable because that was not my name and sometimes I would respond by saying ‘that is not my name, my name is David Alejandro’, but I guess people did not care much and still today, some of them call me Daguito.

When I was a kid I used to be stigmatised because of my height (I was rather short). I felt different to children of the same age because I didn’t understand the growth process is different for each one. Nowadays, I am usually stigmatised because of my tattoos, especially by old people. I think times have changed and they don’t really understand some cultures. First, I felt angry, but now it doesn’t bother me anymore. Appearance can be deceptive.

As a kid, I was stigmatised for having ‘weird’ music taste. Back then, adoring boy bands and listening and choreographing their music, was almost mandatory for girls. But I couldn’t identify with that. Most girls had their bedroom walls covered by boy band posters, while I had a poster of horses instead. My musical activity consisted of listening to old bands and classical music, arranging songs for the piano and inventing melodies.

As a teenager I was cursed with a body that was out of proportion, like David’s. My arms and legs were growing like crazy, and they looked even bigger on a child’s body. I had big feet and the other kids would often tease me that I was wearing fins. And because it is better to accept bullying than to resist it, I started telling them that at least I could stand firmly on the ground. This is a stigma I encountered in childhood and, today, it seems like childhood has become the stigma itself.

I look at life 100% positively — even too positiveIy. I laugh at almost everything, even at the negative things. I laugh when people point out their stigmas to me. Without any bad intentions, I just want to show them that everything will work out in the end. But I’m usually misunderstood.

As a child I used to behave as a nerd, I was chubby and I never wanted to play by the foreset rules. My behavior never helped me to fit in. Teachers disliked me because as I was breaking their rules I also knew their subject. Schoolmates avoided me because I was a nerd and plain weird. I also didn’t want to play by their rules, I never wanted to play their games. Primary school was tough. I switched two schools, and high school was even tougher. I was helping my classmates with math and physics. Just a few of them really appreciated my help, though. University was really the first place where I realized I don’t have to fit in. I worked really hard and I learned that sometimes you have to follow the rules but there is always room for bending them.

When I was twelve, I was diagnosed with psoriasis, a skin condition. Those were delicate years for me as I was entering puberty and was slowly beginning to see myself as a woman. My schoolmates didn’t take the news too well and although they knew nothing about the illness they avoided direct contact. That was difficult for me to understand or accept. For years, I desperately tried to hide any signs of my biggest weakness. But friends and family helped me to realise that to people who matter the condition doesn’t define me as a person but is only an irrelevant physical imperfection.

As a child I was skinny. My speaking disorder also didn’t help make me popular with my classmates, so I was often involved in verbal and physical fights; being small and unpopular, I lost most of them. Teasing me, my classmates would ask me to say ‘riba’, ‘raca’, ‘rak’ or any other word containing an ‘r’. So when a speech therapist tried to teach me to say ‘r’, I refused to cooperate. The good thing was that I learned not to care too much what others thought of me. Now I mostly forget that I can’t say ‘r’, except when some child asks me if I meant ‘such-and-such’, because some of them find it difficult to understand me.

I come from a fairly large rural town, where my parents moved a few years before my older sister was born. When I was nine, my father decided to run for parliament and was elected. Negative views of politicians were strong even then, and in a rural town where most of the people came from families of farmers, food workers and physical labourers, it was even stronger. The transition from the fourth to fifth grades of primary school was hard for me, not only because I’m a rather introverted person and making new friends is difficult, but because I noticed that the children had a certain opinion of me and were often mean to me because of my father’s profession.

I found it hard to go to school and I kept to myself most of the time. I still remember when I talked to this one girl from school for the first time and she said to me at the end of our conversation: ‘Hey, you’re not as stuck up as I thought you were.’ I was also probably the only girl called by my last name. By the time I got to secondary school, I had learned not to care about what other people thought, which is a helpful lesson to learn early on, I think. In the following years, I didn’t see much of the people from my primary school, as I found friends from other nearby towns. I admit that the experience I had led me to stigmatise the people of my town as well, and I was eager to leave them behind. But I recently had the opportunity to spend some time with some of them, I gave them another chance, and they helped me to truly forgive, forget and trust them again.

As a child I believed that people were good and kind, that nature was above all of us, that I would live in a tree house in the forest and that I would never pick up the habit of smoking. I was stigmatised for being a dreamer. Well, today I smoke, see and meet evil people on a daily basis, and live in an apartment in the capital. However, I still believe in nature (and in living in a tree house).

When I was a little girl, I sometimes felt other children looked down on me for not having as much as they did. As a girl, I never wanted to wear pretty dresses and accessories, or even liked the things girls usually liked, so it was about that time that I got the nickname ‘wild Katrca‘, which I detested.

Money was never a problem in our family. When I was growing up, people often assumed I was spoiled, but I was not. My parents were really strict – for example, I never got any pocket money. So I started to work at a really young age to be able to afford the things I wanted. My parents raised me in a way that I always knew I had to work hard. They also worked hard to build a successful company, and I was pretty annoyed by people who thought they just sat around simply because they were the directors.

When you are a child, you live in your own little magical bubble. You think everything is awesome and when you least expect it, the bubble explodes. In my case, that was that long period when my parents were about to get divorced. Nobody talked me to see how I felt about it. It was so hard that even my own brother, who was the only person that understood what I was going through, stopped talking to me. Even today, it hurts to think about it. My own brother. We’ll never be able to be those careless children in the magical bubble again. Life goes on.

I come from the suburbs of Kranj, where I never fitted in with the mentality and my look didn’t help. But when I started secondary school in Ljubljana, everything changed – I could be and look however I wanted and be accepted for it, and because I got very good grades, my parents had no problem with it either. Therefore I became a punk. But people in my neighbourhood still judged me on the basis of my looks, so they started spreading rumours about me doing drugs and so on. It really got to me and I promised myself never to judge people based on their looks and to be open to ‘different’ all my life – even now that I’m past my punk phase.

I’ve always felt very different, as if something were wrong with me. I used to be a loner and, as a child, I didn’t have many friends. Later in adulthood I developed depression and social anxiety, and this made me feel even more alienated from the world. I suppressed my emotions to the point where I didn’t know what I was feeling. I am now learning to be more balanced and looking for a way to fit into this beautiful world.