I just watched Jaiden's video, and honestly, we couldn't be more alike. The entire time I was watching it, it didn't make me sad, because I am currently going through the exact same thing... I... am starving myself, and I love it. Ever since I was a little, I've heard the same things over and over again: "Oh, you're so pretty" "Oh, you're so skinny" "Oh, you should be a model"... but what about what I think of myself? A long time ago, when I was still in elementary school, I noticed that I was gaining weight. I realized that it was from the MASSIVE amount of stress that I had, as I was stress eating. The stress would get so bad, that I would have to take melatonin and drink almost six cups of chamomile tea just to calm me down a bit in only a span of 7 hours. It didn't help that I was crying myself to sleep every night because of a friendship that I had accidentally ruined, but that's a different story. I tried to exercise to loose weight, and it did help, and I went back to my original size. Of course this didn't help with the stress. I started to fail my classes, and one day after parent conferences, my dad looked at my grades and said, " This is not the grades that our family makes. You're not a part of our family if you come home with grades like this." He called me a disgrace, to our ENTIRE family... after we drove home and he went to his job, I packed my things, thinking that I wasn't a part of this family anymore as my dad had said. I remember that I was so close, SO CLOSE to the outside world, I opened the door, and I had one foot out the house, before my older sister heard me and stopped me. she told my mom what had happened, and she told my dad off and told him to apologize. He did, and I accepted it, but that still didn't fix the hurt that I had in my heart, that didn't automatically make it okay to say something like that. And I know that he meant what he said, because when he apologized, he said it quickly and in a monotone voice. Like he was...annoyed of me. Then, the stress quickly turned to depression, and it was constant. A couple of years later, I had entered middle school. I had met new friends, and had severed any loose ties with those that mistreated me. I had devolved a crush on one of my best friends too, and I thought he felt the same as did everyone that knew us. Of course that wasn't true, but I'll get to that later. This was also the same year that I found out about anime and another thing. Suicide. I found out about all the different ways that you could commit suicide, and one caught my eye. It was a way that you could die and get skinny at the same time. I started to give ALL of my food to my friends, then I would get home and skip snack, eat as little dinner as my parents allowed me, and the in the morning, I would skip breakfast. The cycle repeated for the entire school year, 180 days, without break. When I went to my annual doctor checkup, the doctor scanned my body, then pulled my mother outside. After we left the office, I asked what she was pulled out for. She told me that I had been diagnosed with anemia, and depression. In case you don't know, anemia is a condition when you don't have enough iron in your body. You need iron to survive, to do the simplest functions like get out of bed, and you get iron from food. (Do you see the problem?) I was given a prescription to help with my anemia, since my parents couldn't get me to eat. Fast forward to December, to when my family went to California as a family trip. I was finally happy with my weight, even if you could easily see my ribcage, even if it was hard for me to still function and move without my legs aching or me getting a migraine. However, the entire trip I was being teased by my family, they said how malnourished I looked. They called me twig and they said that I could be blown away by the smallest breeze, they called me all these offensive things and they DIDN'T STOP. I was finally happy after months of work, happy with my image and they tore it down. I started to eat again, hoping that the teasing would stop and they would leave me alone, but as Jaiden mentioned in the video, my body wasn't used to food. It's been storing extra fat to save me from the next time I would starve myself. For the past couple months I have been gaining weight in my thighs and stomach, and now when I look in the mirror every day when I leave for school, or everyday when I get out the shower, I think the same thing, " you're fat." You're ugly." "No one loves you." "You're a waste of time for everyone you meet." "You should just kill yourself, you're a waste of space in the world anyway." I shake off these thoughts quickly and go to school, I put on a plastic mask that no one can see through, and act happy. I act like I'm fine, like I don't have a care in the world, but I'm lying. To myself and to others that I care about so dearly. I think that I'm not good enough for them, that I should be erased from their memories. The voice never goes away and it never will. I hide myself in my shy, nerdy exterior, but when you take that away, you see a broken person who feelings and trust has been shattered so many times that when you try to put her back together, you end up with something completely different from how she was before. I try to please everyone, to meet their standards so they will keep me around, so I wouldn't be alone with that VOICE. THAT HORRIBLE, DISGUSTING VOICE THAT WONT LET ME BE HAPPY WITH MY LIFE FOR AS LONG AS I LIVE AND I JUST WANT TO GET RID OF IT. IT LEAVES ME ALONE FOR ONE SECOND THEN COMES BACK TO CHOKE ME, AND IT OBSTRUCTS MY AIRWAYS AND JUST WHEN IM ABOUT TO BREAK, IT LETS GO SO I CAN SUFFER THE PAIN OVER AND OVER AGAIN.
No. No I'm not going to kill myself Winged-Writer and RachaelMcGinnis because I can't. I'm tired of going back and forth about it too. I'm going to end this argument that I have with myself once and for all, by just putting the mask back on, and never taking it off. I'm going to go back to my bright and bubbly self, the person that I was almost 7 years ago, and just say that I'm fine.
I guess if you look back at all the things I've said, you can kind of see why I love Dazai.
