Troubling Love

Part One

Loving someone is never easy, but what's harder is being hurt by the ones we love. Those kinds of wounds never seem to heal easily, especially when those wounds are deep. How does one heal from the pain of heartache? There are many various ways, but some people don't heal from the pain and instead they hide it away. I am guilty of being someone who hides away their pain. My name is Amora and this is my story of love, family and a bit of my life.

Growing up I was a social kid, I had lots of friends that I would play with and talk to. This was mostly in elementary school though because some big changes happened in my life that changed me forever. I lost my mother just before I was 8 years old and it was a sad time, but I had my step father and my two younger sisters. Things were going well for the four of us until I was around 9 years old, when my younger sister was taken from me and my youngest sister. Her biological father claimed her back due to the fear that she was being abused at home. My younger sister got spankings for being in trouble, but because she bruised easily it showed up worse than what it was. Then when I was 10, my life changed forever. I was sent to live with my grandmother in another city instead of with my step father and youngest sister.

So, the rest of my childhood was spent living with my grandmother and my uncle since my step father didn't adopt me into his family. It wasn't bad though, since my grandmother and uncle raised me pretty well up until this point. I was happy for the most part, but like any child I made many mistakes. Some were big and some were small. I dealt with all kinds of emotions and became a recluse, refusing to talk about my feelings with anyone except maybe my closest friend.

Now, moving to the gracious period of middle school for me. I went through quite the phase and had quite the experiences during that time. When I started 6th grade, it was a pretty great experience for me to spend time with most of the people I knew from the previous year and meeting new people. Then before Christmas break that year, I learned that we were gonna have to move out of our house due to the landlord's issues. That turned my life upside down completely because I had to move away from the friends I had just made at this new school since I started living with my grandmother.

Winter break was over and I was at a new school and new city once again. At this new school I was very quiet, real quiet, because I was in an unknown environment. Since I was starting to grow up, that meant that it was harder for me to be social due to anxiety. I was a bit overweight during this time too, so I often wore baggy clothing in order to hide that. I didn't care much about what kind of clothes I wore, despite being a girl. I just didn't want people to see my weight.

When it comes to a new school, that means being the new kid and being the new kid means bullies. As a kid, I never dealt with bullies that much mainly because I never cared what anyone had to say to me, but as you get older you start to care. The things that were said to me were pretty mild, but at the same time it hurt me personally due to my personal life. My bullies didn't know anything about me, yet somehow they knew how to hurt me. It got real bad one day when my bully, Camryn, made fun of my ethnicity. She told me I was white-washed and continued to make comments like that. I am an African American, but I am light skinned due to my mixing of some white in my family. I was being defensive and even trying to say something about her, but her friend from the other table, Chris, jumped in to defend her and he said mean things to me.

Bullies can be the worst, really they can, especially when you're new because you have no friends to back you up. The comments hurled towards me got worse once Camryn said something about my mother that really triggered me. I was swirled up in anger and sadness because I had lost my mother 4 years prior and it still ached in my heart. Class was ending during that time and I began to cry and scream at them because they didn't know anything about me or my family. I left class in a hurry to my next one, but they followed me and Camryn even blocked my path to class. I kept yelling at her to move out of my way and her friend Chris yelled something at me as I was trying to walk away. He said to me, "Why don't you go f*** your dad!" As he said that to me, I turned around and yelled something back as retaliation. "Why don't you f*** your mom!!" I yelled in defense to him. His friends had to hold him back from trying to come hit me. Camryn had told me that his mom died and I yelled back to tell them that mine did as well. Since that day, they had stopped bothering me and the bullying since then had been pretty minimal. Even so, I had never felt so insecure about myself before then and because of that I became less social. My life as a social butterfly had depleted almost completely that year and I have never been the same.