Fashion designer and former Spice Girl Victoria Beckham has opened up about being bullied as a child for struggling with dyscalculia, a little-known learning disorder that affects math and number processing.
Speaking on the Call Her Daddy podcast hosted by Alex Cooper on October 22, Beckham, 51, shared that growing up was far from glamorous. “I was quite shy. I was quite an awkward child,” she said. “I also struggled academically enormously. I’m a self-diagnosed dyslexic. I suffer from dyscalculia. All those things that weren’t recognised when I was a kid. They just called me ‘thick.’”
Victoria Beckham on her struggles and school bullying
Beckham revealed that her struggles in school went beyond academics. “It gave me a thick skin because that bullying continued when I went to college and I was told that I wasn’t good enough, that I didn’t look right. I was told I was too fat to even be on the stage. And that gave me a thick skin.”
The Beckham star, who explored more of her personal life in the Netflix docuseries “Victoria Beckham”, explained that she often felt out of place socially, too. “I didn’t fit in socially because when all the other kids after school were smoking and hanging out, I was going to dancing lessons or I was going to drama lessons. So, socially, I didn’t fit in.”
Beckham added that her physical appearance made things worse. “I had terrible skin. I had awful awful acne. I had very limp hair. I remember standing on the playground, literally standing on my own, and kids just picking up Coke cans from puddles and throwing them at me. I was physically and mentally really bullied at school.”
She reflected that back then, “we didn’t talk about mental health like we do nowadays, so, I just internalised all of that and it just made me more and more shy.” Though she described her parents as “such supportive parents,” she admitted, “I suppose I was ashamed, embarrassed, and so I didn’t tell anybody. But my entire school life was miserable.”
Looking back, Beckham now believes that those experiences helped her prepare for public life. “That gave me a thick skin. I suppose, for what I was going to get next, which was very much a public bullying, really, from the media. So I think it toughened me up and prepared me for what was coming next.”
