Never Worked

Prologue

I am completely and totally screwed up. I've known this for a while now, this isn't news to me. However, that wasn't always the case. There were times where I thought everything I had been through had absolutely no effect on me at all. That I was immune and indestructible.

Young and stupid's what I call it now. I knew everything. I was better than everybody, and they were all doomed to make the same mistakes everyone else made simply because they didn't think like me. Or so I thought. Pretty arrogant, wasn't it?

See, looking back, my life was really quite sad and depressing at its beginning. Well, if you compare to others anyway. The sad parts, the depressing parts, they're what made me who I am today. They built this hard, impenetrable shell and ability to take what anyone had to say without breaking down and crying (I did enough of that when I was younger). Unfortunately, my past also made me what I am today.

Totally and completely screwed up.

How am I'm screwed up? Well, that's a hard question to answer. There are still some things I have yet to figure out. See, therapy wasn't really an option for a struggling working-class girl from Baltimore. Not to mention, I would have had to be completely open and honest with my family about what was going on with me. And that just wasn't going to happen. Openness is something I didn't know how to do that well, because I was raised by, and around, so many people incapable of it. It's something I'm not sure I even wanted to do sometimes. Opening yourself up to people gives them the ability to hurt you. I didn't want to be hurt anymore. Anything to prevent being hurt again. My family happened to be the cause of most of my pain, so expressing it to the ones responsible made it twice as difficult.

The pain was something I got used to. It was all I knew. How do you convince a girl men aren't supposed to treat you like you're disposable and lie to you when that is all you have familiar to you? That people aren't supposed to remind you of your weight every time you eat and pick apart everything you choose to wear with a judgmental gaze. How do you convince a girl that she is beautiful when the closest she's ever come to being called that was her mother and grandmother looking her up and down, commenting "Alright, miss thang."

Now before you go and assume this is some sappy love story about a man coming to the rescue to save some low self-esteem having charity case, that's not what this is. This isn't a story about a boy fixing a girl's broken heart. This is a story about a heart that never really worked in the first place.