Reflection

Dramatically long story time in three… two… one…

One day I found a note in my locker. It was a small piece of notebook paper and it said kill yourself… My locker was right next to my math teachers classroom and I ran to her room and immediately began crying so the kids in the hall wouldn’t see me.

I owned a black pair of sandals. I can’t remember what brand they were but my mom had bought them for me from Nordstrom. I wore them to school as they were one of the very few things brand named that I owned at the time. A girl who was popular at school ended up wearing the same shoes that day. I tried to talk to her about how we had the same sandals on because I was excited, I felt cool. She looked at me and she said, “oh yeah” and gave her friend a look of mockery and turned back around in her seat.

I was sitting at the lunch table away from the group of girls who’d bullied me all year. My guy friend, Jordan, who was popular in the school, convinced me to sit with him just that once. I had my long hair tied up in a high sloppy bun. I wore my hair that way almost every day. I guess those girls thought it would be funny to mock me so when I sat there, they all put their hair up in a bun just like mine and were laughing. I still to this day don’t know why that was funny to them, let alone why it hurt me so much.

So I transferred schools.

My friend at the time (at my new school) was friends with someone who thought I was ugly. I didn’t know this girl who thought so low of me, in fact I’ve never met her in person. But she hated me for some reason and when I blocked her on Instagram she took her hatred of me to Twitter. She tweeted, “lol fire crotch c*nt”. She was mad that I blocked her and I guess my red hair offended her. That was three years ago and I still remember it vividly. Those four meaningless words hurt me so badly, coming from a girl I’d never even met, that I wanted to kill myself right then and there after reading that. Thank God and thank my mothers advice that I deleted social media for a bit instead.

Then I caught on fire from the waist down because somehow that was a thing that happened in my life.

I had an overwhelming amount of support from friends who I didn’t quite know cared about me as much as they did. While I was on bedrest the people that did come to see me weren’t people from my school who I considered close friends of mine, they were mainly family friends or the few close friends I’d held onto over the years.

It was time for me to go back to school, on crutches and wrapped in gauze from the waist down. I went back to school and walked in on people talking about how I thought I was cool because I posted on social media about my scars. That I was using the situation to my advantage for attention…

They weren’t wrong. Yes, being in a bed all day long and being unable to go to the bathroom without my mother and father carrying me and holding me over the toilet, having to only wash my face and dry shampoo my hair, and wearing dresses without undies because my third degree burns were up to my private parts… I craved attention. I craved having someone to talk to. Someone who wasn’t feeling so sorry for me or looking at me like I’m a freak. So I went to social media to get that attention, I acted like everything was fine, and I smiled in every photo even though I cried at least once a day.

Going back to school after experiencing that, to be looked at like I was crazy… Well I went crazy. I lost a lot of my friends, almost all of my friends.

I know for a hard fact that if I didn’t have the loving, supportive family that I have, I would not be here today. All because I let a few pretty girls hurt my feelings.

Throughout all of this, I’ve been extremely privileged. I live in a nice home with a loving family. I have so much to be grateful for yet I still felt so helpless.

Was a lot of this depression due to my insecurity or due to the people I allowed to hurt me?

I still don’t know.

I’m now confident enough in myself to know how silly it was that I took the harsh opinions of those teenagers into consideration to the extent that I did. However when you’re feeling that insecure, that isolated, and that hated, those few teenagers feel like the Universe. No matter how small humans are, their impact is large.

I think the point of me telling this small portion of my experience is in hopes that someone in high school will read it and have a realization small enough to get them through the night. So…

Dear high school student if you’re reading this, no one is mean to you because they genuinely hate you. They’re mean to you because you’re an easy target. So pretend like you’re strong. Their harshness is a direct reflection of their own being. Teenagers are all lost and confused and unaware of who they are as people. Don’t think for ten seconds that you deserve what has come your way, don’t believe that anything degrading anyone says to you is of worth. No matter how alone you feel, there is at least one single person who loves you and cares about you. Oh, and if you think that you look good wearing two different colored shoes to school, you do. And the people who made fun of you doing so will probably do the same thing in a year when it’s considered “cool”.

Learn to apologize, learn to forgive, know your worth, and tell your favorite high school teacher just how great they are because they deserve it.

Thank you to the teachers who over the years let me feel safe and appreciated. Thank you to my mom who would hold me while I cried for hours on end staring at my phone screen unaware of what I did to deserve the hatred coming my way. And thank you to my dad for always thinking I was the coolest girl in school, with my two different colored shoes, regardless of what anyone had to say.