Does anyone know what it's like to feel out of place where you used to feel so confident and so alive? Does anyone know what it's like to feel like a zombie, the living dead? To be haunted by the demons in your head? To look at yourself in the mirror and say, "I'm so fat and ugly. Why am I alive?" Does anyone else know what it's like to see anything and wonder to yourself how it could be used to kill yourself? To dream of the methods you'd use to die, and to mentally plot it during school? Forget Hell, sinners should be sent back to grade school.
I like to set myself "personal goals". In first, second, and third grade, I worked on growing out my hair to donate it to Locks of Love, a charity for cancer children in need of wigs. In fourth grade, I got good grades for the whole year. In fifth and sixth grade, I made it my goal to develop a better sense of style from my regular jeans, Adidas, and old T-shirt. All these personals goals were fulfilled, and I was satisfied.
In the summer between sixth and seventh grade, however, my long time best friend Jessica was instantly killed in a car accident. I couldn't think straight afterwards. One moment she was here, and the next I couldn't comprehend that she was gone forever. She was never coming back. I pushed away everyone during seventh grade, and was still friendless by eighth grade. The August before eighth grade, I made it my personal goal to be happy that year and make new friends. I thought I had accepted that Jessia was gone.
I recall walking into eighth grade that day, smiling at all my classmates, and trying - genuinely trying - to at least appear friendly, approachable, and excited to be here. Unfortunately for me, the self-proclaimed popular girls Heather Wright and Rachel Miller decided that it was the perfect time to strike and jeer me with hateful words. Why then and not in seventh grade?
That first time, a group of teachers greeting everyone told them to knock it off, but the next times, no one would be there to save me. I couldn't save myself, even if I tried. Eventually I lost my voice to a giant lump of self-pity in my throat. Then, I would begin to look in the mirror and notice all the flaws Heather and Rachel made sure I saw. I pinpointed them and studied them. I obsessed over them.
I was fourteen years old, five foot seven on the dot, and weighed one hundred and thirty one pounds. A normal height and weight ratio, but I couldn't see it. My thighs were touching and my collarbone didn't stick out. I still have some baby fat around my jaw and my front teeth overlapped. Why did the things that hadn't bothered me before suddenly became a nuisance clawing at my mind? I hadn't done anything bad in my life, and so I didn't understand why I was supposedly so ugly.
Ninth grade was a mess. Heather and Rachel had been sent off the a fancy Catholic boarding school by their parents, so I didn't have to see them, and I was actually a little happy as long as I avoided mirrors. I made a friend named Alyson Fischer and she was rather understanding about my past. We sat at lunch together until winter break, but when we got back she was suddenly distant. She ate lunch with some floaters, and shot me evil eyes from her seat in the cafeteria. I didn't understand what went wrong, and so I went back to the depressed thoughts.
Tenth grade is starting now, though. My knees are practically gelatin and my heart is threatening to explode right out of my flat chest.
My name is Moe, by the way - Moe Hawthorne, your average American depressed sixteen-year-old girl, ready to screw up and have a misadventurous life.
