Notes

From the time I was a little girl until today, standing on the threshold of adulthood, I’ve always known that there was something different about me. Until I was thirteen, however, I didn’t have a name for it, but I still knew it was there. I could feel it looming over me, threatening me, whispering in my ear about how wrong and dirty and disgusting I was. And I believed it. When I was eleven years old, I laid in bed for hours on end, unable to find enough motivation in my soul to get up and do something with my life. The more I sat there, paralyzed by fear and panic, the more I convinced myself that I was a failure for feeling this way. With my arms and legs bound by sadness, I tried to force myself to run away. But I couldn’t, of course I couldn’t. Nobody can, so I ran towards it instead, in search of the light at the end of the tunnel. After months of searching for it, any slight glimmer or flash of brightness in the dark, I told myself that it didn’t exist and to give up looking for it. I collapsed, drowning in the sea of my own emptiness, with no one around to hear my screams or see my struggle. I cried out, wishing I could feel something, anything, but my mind and body were both icy cold and numb. And so at the age of eleven years old I was dead certain that nothing in my whole life that stretched before me was worth a damn.
When I was twelve years old, things started to look up. I saw a flash, a spark, a scintillation of light at the end of the dark tunnel I crawled through. I reached towards it desperately and was able to grasp it and yank myself free. I reveled in my newfound freedom for a while, enjoying the brightness that washed over me, until I looked up and a cloud was looming over my head. This was different than you might think, though. It wasn’t dark or gloomy or sullen, rather it was loud and bright and flashing colors in all different directions like something out of a Dr. Seuss book. I tried to get rid of it, tried to look away, but even through my closed eyelids I could feel its flashing light. I couldn’t make it go away so I lived with it, walking almost hand in hand throughout my seventh grade year. It started as a whisper in my mind, feeding me second-guesses and deliberating worries. Should you have said that? They probably all think you’re weird. Now they’re all going to go tell all your friends how much of a pathetic loser you are and they’re all going to leave you and you’ll be alone forever. Soon enough the thoughts came closer and faster and louder and scarier until suddenly I couldn’t breathe because they were squeezing my throat too tight with the force of all the what-ifs in my life. I learned to breathe around that weight on my chest.
When I was thirteen, everything came to a head. I broke down. I couldn’t do it anymore. My grades slipped, I ignored my friends, and I wished over and over again for normalcy. My mind was either too loud, buzzing with worries and unknowns, or too quiet, silent as isolation. I knew that I had to do something to help myself out of the mess I’d made, something to redeem myself, something to not be so pathetic and miserable all the time. I screamed and yelled and hyperventilated and cried, and I felt myself slipping into almost lunacy. I wore my self-proclaimed identity with shame and slipped on a happy face to cover up what I knew I was. Psycho. Insane. Lunatic. Crazy person. Broken.
When I was fourteen I got help. It wasn’t easy and it’s never going to be easy. I leaned on my friends and my family and slowly I got better. I learned my worth, my value, the light that glimmers in my eyes, the power I hold in my soul. I saw the compassion in my heart, the ideas in my brain, the sweetness in my voice, the softness in my cheeks. And so at the age of fourteen I loved myself more than anyone has ever loved anyone in the world. And I deserved it.