The Tilburg Emma (21) was a child like everyone else, with chubby legs, a sweet smile and a thumb in her mouth when she was sleepy. Until she got a bladder infection at the age of third, just before she went to primary school and became incontinent. “I couldn’t do anything about it, but suddenly I was an easy bullying victim,” she says. “I had accidents and of course other children saw that.”
She still knows how it started. “In group three I walked to the toilet when an older child turned a wooden block tower, against me. I had a hole in my head and had to go to the doctor. That was pretty much the start.”
Emma was different from the rest and she became the target of harassment. Laughing and smie games on the schoolyard grew into swearing and calling, and that the entire primary school period long. “Then they shouted,” Hey, you have to see, the pants peeer that runs there. “
She was eight or nine then. She was not bullied in her own class, but Emma was an outsider because no one dared to be friends, for fear of becoming the target of the older children and their venom. “I was really alone in that period.”
She says softly: “At some point I was even encouraged to put an end to my life.” What are you actually doing here? “They said.” Do you see that you don’t have anyone who loves you. ” “
“If you are told every day that the world is better off without you, then you will eventually believe that. At that time I walked around with suicide thoughts and I have been in doubt at school several times whether I would go to the track. Instead of cycling home.”
“The mask I set up, nobody could get through that.”
Talking about it with her parents did not stand up in her. “I think it was a kind of shame,” she says. “Mom and Dad did notice that there was something with me. But when they asked about it, I pushed the carefree hatch up and waved their worries away:” No, there is nothing. “The mask I set up, nobody could get through that.”
Emma didn’t want her parents to see her grief. “I was crying in bed, hoping they didn’t hear it. In the morning I went to school with stomach pain and I thumbing that I would get through the day well.”
In that period she sought her comfort in food and secretly eating. So much that she received obesity at a young age. Only around the age of twelve, she was just off the school where she had been bullied, did she find the power to speak to her mother about what had happened to her.
“She was shocked, but reacted so sweetly,” Emma looks back. “The next morning, Mama immediately called the doctor. I was lucky that I was right at the youth mental health care, who had just opened in our neighborhood. It was very tough, because I was 12 and I got therapy that was actually meant for adults. But I continued, because I knew I needed help.”
When she could close her plague period at the age of sixteen after intensive therapy sessions, her fight against the kilos began. “I had morbid obesity. I prefer to do horse riding, but my weight got in my way and it was gradually no longer responsible for driving. I really had to do something about the kilos.”
With the help of a dietician and a lot of perseverance, Emma managed to lose almost forty kilos. “I went for a walk every day and watched my calories,” she says. “Because of the kilos and bullying, I didn’t like my body, but then there was slowly a change in how I saw myself.”
“That tattoo paints a picture of the challenges I had to endure.”
The tattoo, which she had put at the age of 19, is an ode to this change. “It sketches a picture about my life, the challenges, which I had to endure and overcome, despite my early age.”
Emma’s tattoo consists of three different flowers: the cherry blossom, the gladiolus and the rose. Every flower has its own meaning for her. The cherry blossom stands for happiness, the gladiolus for power and the rose for love.
Last December she had a abdominal wall correction and breast lift done to get the excess skin away. “I got a little more self -love,” she says. It meant a definitive closure of the blackest page of its existence. “The page that gave me a blow for the rest of my life. But also the realization that I am still there despite everything. Then I think: dear, you have just done it, all those years.”
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