The mistakes of a naive girl

Before freshman year: the horrors of Middle school part 1

It's the summer before school starts back, and I'm in High school now. I have a few friends, a couple of mean girls who love to bully me and all the guys I know don't exactly like me, at least not in the way I want them to. The last few years haven't been the best, they haven't really been all that easy either. I'm socially awkward, my anxiety is everywhere, I don't like change, I have dumb little family problems that I don't tell anyone about, and to top it all off I not only have depression as well but I cut myself. The self harm started back in middle school. 6th grade or maybe 7th I guess. When you get told about a magical "cure all" for your dumb mental health bullshit you want to believe it. When you get told "cutting up your skin helps ease your mind because the physical pain takes over and you don't notice the emotional pain anymore" Well if you're naive then you believe them, especially when it's one of your friends that tells you that. What no one expected with that was the addiction to self harm that you ended up developing, from the first time, the first cut. When Hailey, your middle school bully found out you were cutting yourself back in 7th grade, well she had a field day with it. "Emo, freak, cutter, loser, bitch, weirdo, attention seeker, pathetic, whore" these were just some of the things you'd hear from her on the daily. Why does she hate me so much? I never figured it out. I wasn't ever mean to her, I tried to ignore what she'd say to me, what she called me, why did she go out of her way to be so mean to me? To top off the end of 7th grade I got in trouble, I turned around in my seat in my science class with a pencil in my hand to talk to this annoying guy Dayton who never shuts up. Why was he sitting so close? When I turned around my mechanical pencil scraped his arm, he had a huge scratch about an inch long down his arm. I completely freaked out. I never meant to hurt him, or anyone else other than myself. I felt so bad, I immediately started apologizing, asking if he was okay, if I could get him a paper towel, and I told him over and over that it was an accident. That I didn't mean to do it, why was he sitting so damn close? Regardless of what I said and what the people sitting around us saw and said, which is still a mystery to me, I got in trouble. What happens when stupid kids or bad students get in trouble you ask. Well that depends on the severity of the trouble they get in. For me, even though it was an accident they still said that I "attacked" another student. I was just another violent trouble maker in their hypocritical, uncaring eyes. And where does a person like that go? Pace Academy, an alternative school for troubled kids. I was there for the last 3.5 months of 7th grade. At Pace I was exceptional, I was one of the best and most well behaved students, I followed all the rules, I made friends with the teachers, the principal and the class aids that helped to make sure that everyone did what they were supposed to when they were supposed to. The school required uniform for Pace was khaki pants, a black t-shirt, or a sweat shirt was allowed on colder days, plain sneakers, socks that weren't too crazy or distracting, no jewelry, no unnatural dyed hair. Before being allowed in to your classrooms in the morning you had to go throw a metal detector, empty all your pockets, roll up your pants legs to show you weren't concealing anything there, toll up your shirt sleeves, take off your belt if you wore one, go through the metal detector again then get patted down and have another hand held metal detector wand swept over you. Then you were allowed to fix yourself, pull down your sleeves and pant legs, put your belt back on, poke your pockets back in and go to your seat where you were to remain quiet until the teacher came over to you. After a while it becomes easy to be quiet, talking may even become difficult or a foreign concept to your brain. My escape from this, my voice then became the books I read. I went through a book every other week if not every week. The more words I could read, the more emotions and situations and things happening that I could read about the more alive I felt. I worked so hard to get done with all of my school work as fast as I could. Considering you could only read books from the library in your free time. Monday's were for math and English. Tuesday's were for Science and History. Wednesday's well I'd work on whatever homework or schoolwork I had not finished yet. Either Wednesday morning or afternoon I would get to go to the library to pick a book. At Pace I was everyone's favorite. I was quiet, obedient, I didn't cause trouble, I helped other students with their schoolwork on occasion, and all I did really in my free tile or spare time was read book after book after book from the library. I wasn't a "bad student" I wasn't a "bad kid" or a "violent person" or "risk" like what I had been told I was at New Heaven, the school I went to. I learned at Pace that I wasn't actually as bad as what I had always heard that I was, I started to believe that maybe everything could be different. When I went back I could be different. I could be the Mackenzie that I was at Pace, but this time I could be her at New Heaven.