A Quote by Michelle Visage

Growing up in the '80s in central New Jersey as a weird kid with a blue mohawk listening to the Sex Pistols and dressing really funky, I was bullied pretty badly. It was every single day in elementary school and kept going into middle school, too. I felt totally alone, without a single person there for me.
I was bullied pretty badly especially in middle school. High school was not as bad as middle school, but I was not a macho kid at all. And the kids saw me as different from a very, very early age.
I was bullied every second of every day in elementary and middle school. Obviously, people are going to bring you down because of your drive. But, ultimately, it makes you a stronger person to turn your cheek and go the other way.
During my elementary and middle school years, my mother made me and my siblings' lunches every single day - this was affordable for a Marine climbing the ranks and supporting a family of six.
I think I'm slightly older than the generation that was really bred on social media - I had Facebook in high school, but I was growing up in a time where these things were relatively new, and every generation below me is growing up having every single thing they do seen. And that is kind of frightening.
My middle school experience was pretty hellish. There was a lot of negativity, a lot of bullying and a lot of insecurity. It was the reason I ended up going to my arts high school because I was pretty bullied.
My family moved from California to New Jersey in the beginning of my sophomore year of high school. I will never forget the first day in a new school, walking into the cafeteria during lunch and not knowing a single soul. I didn't feel confident enough to share a seat at just anyone's table.
There was certainly nothing really sexual about my youth growing up, simply because the fact remains if you're the fat kid in a school and I was the only fat black kid in the school - in fact, I was the only black kid in the school - but if you are kind of ostracized on many different levels in your school the last thing you're worried about is sex.
I was never really bullied at school. I was pretty confident in terms of school work and teachers and I've never shyed away from much but a lot of people have come up to me and said that they were bullied at school and my portrayal of Neville has influenced them a lot in their lives and helped them out.
And that really captures the difference for the bullied straight kid versus the bullied gay kid, is that the bullied straight kid goes home to a shoulder to cry on and support and can talk freely about his experience at school and why he's being bullied. [...] And I couldn't go home and open up to my parents.
I think that everybody has hard work side, no matter what your job is, you have bad days, you have people you don't get along with. The thing about modeling is every single day you're working with a completely new team so every single day is your first day of work or your first day of school. And you can't really have an off day because that will be the only experience they have with you.
To be honest, there are so many things I learned in acting school beyond the method; it was a safe place to practice. So acting school was about exercising that acting muscle and doing it every single day - and having people tell you that you're bad every single day! Which pushes you to work even harder.
It's strange, somebody asked for my autograph the other day. Because I finished school and I'm not really doing anything at the moment, I was just kind of aimlessly wandering around London and these two guys who were about 30 came up and asked for my autograph. I was really quite proud at the time, and they wanted to take photos and stuff. And then they were sort of wandering around and I was kind of wandering around and I bumped into them about three times, and every single time their respect for me kept growing and growing and growing.
Going into a new school, you don't want to be the new kid and be quiet and shy. You want to stand out. You want people to know who you are in that school. I think that also helped me growing up. I always wanted people to know me throughout the school.
Every single kid in my group of friends at school was from a single-parent family.
I was bullied from grade one to six. Even middle school was tough for me. Everyone had these pre-existing friendships, and I was the new kid, who was acting, so that didn't help much either. It was really tough.
I was always the poor kid, even though I very much tried to pretend to be the other way. Always well presented. Always really active in the school, doing fashion shows, plays, involved in every single aspect of the school. Overcompensating, I think, for the fact that I knew I wouldn't be going on the ski trip every January.
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