dear heather,
I go to an average high school where if you drop your pencil someone on the other end of the school knows. Well, I recently broke up with my boyfriend of ten months. After that I started to see a friend of his but we decided that it was a mistake. Now people are saying that I slept with him and calling me very nasty descriptive names having to do with street corners.

I don’t know what to do…I know I shouldn’t let it bother me but I find myself crying myself to sleep at night. I also have to deal with the fact that everyone loves my ex-boyfriend so they’re saying stuff about me breaking up with him. And I’m not the type to usually let people bother me. I’m labeled a freak at school so I’ve learned to deal with this…but i can’t. Please help me.

Rumors are pretty bad. This situation seems to be really bothering you and I can understand why. It is hard to deal with people believing things about you that aren’t true no matter how strong you are and how much you know that you are not supposed to let people get to you. School sometimes just seems to breed some kind of atmosphere where all people can do is talk about each other and things that they don’t know anything about.

I think what you need to do is to continue to try as hard as you can to ignore these people and then remember all the great things about yourself when you are feeling really down. Try to just be around your close friends for awhile until the whole thing blows over. It seems like you are strong and understand that the opinions of other people don’t really matter but I think you really have to believe this at this difficult moment.

take care,
heather