The Outcast.

Post 4. Me.

Dear....you,

Here's what I promised...some facts about me (yay):

•I am 17

•I have been to 12 different schools

•I have never been to a school for more than two years

•I have never had a boyfriend

•I am chronically depressed

•I don't know what to do with my existence

•I have to write these posts to avoid taking anti-depressants from my doctor.

•I am an outcast

•Oh, and my name is Alex (subject to change)

The worst part about moving around so much is the fact that everywhere, I was the outcast. There would be times when I actually made friends, but I could always tell that they held me at a distance because they didn't know how to talk to me or how to deal with me or how to accept me. Also, I was always considered the weird one. I would always either be stuck in a book or actively paying attention to the teacher. It wasn't even that I was a nerd because even the nerds couldn't relate to me. I was useless to them. I was useless to me. I was useless to everybody. When you are automatically labeled an outcast when you go to a new place, it's your label forever. Trust me, I know.

When you're a social pariah for so long, you start hating yourself. You tell yourself that no one is ever going to love you, accept you, or even like you. When you're an outcast like me, depression becomes the only real friend that you can depend on. Whenever you're even remotely happy, you can count on depression to bring you speeding down towards the hell that we call Earth. When you're an outcast, you learn to stop hoping.

Lesson 1: When you have hope, the world will crush it.

When I was younger, I had a brown teddy bear. I loved that bear so much. It had a faded blue bow tie and there was a small tear in its right shoulder, but he was my best friend. I named him Hope.

Hope went everywhere with me. And even when I would move and go to a new school, Hope would get me through the loneliness.

My mom always hated it when I took Hope to school because she would get calls from my teacher. They would tell her that keeping a stuffed animal was 'unhealthy' for me at my age. And one day, because of the ongoing complaints from my teachers, my mom made me leave Hope at home. It was the first day I left him at home since I got him.  That day, my mother was late on paying the rent on the shabby apartment we lived in. I was around eight or nine, and I came home from school to see all of our stuff scattered on the sidewalk outside our home.

 I remember my mom getting angry at the building manager. When she saw him dragging the rest of our things out of the apartment, she went up to him and started yelling in his face. As she was yelling, I looked around at the few items we had and I couldn't find Hope. I dug through everything. After a few minutes of digging and finding nothing, I was the one who started getting hysterical. My mom stopped yelling and came over to help look, but we never found him. I was devastated. The only friend I had in the world was gone. The only thing that kept me from being in complete isolation had vanished. I was broken. My Hope was lost.

And I don't think it ever came back.

Signed,

The Outcast.