Damaged?

Dear 14 year old Anne

WARNING: depression, alcohol abuse, suicide attempts and rape are subjects touched in this text. It's something I wrote while dealing with another anxiety episode, so it will be in english, cause it's the language that I tend to use at the moment of facing emotional distress. I'll translate this in another entry. As always, the song is important.

Dear 14 year old Anne, it's me!, you 10 nearly 11 years later. Guess what? We're still alive.

Your first suicide attempt it's gonna be at 15, and you'll spend the next two months of that incident sleeping with a knife under your pillow. Good thing is that there are no visible scars on your arms or legs now.

Your second suicide attempt is gonna be the next year. Spending countless nights sitting at the edge of your rooftop staring first at the sky, then to the street below your feet. You were never brave enough to jump because you thought it would be very traumatic for your mom to find you crushed in the ground the next morning.

Until when you are 17 years old, you're gonna have a friend you loved deeply. He's gonna have an accident and lose a kidney, so you can't drink with him like you used to (yeah, you know you drink a lot since 12, you still do till 19). Later he's gonna try to kill himself too drinking rat poison after you both discussed the posibility to do that together. He backed off last minute and told his parents, so you will recieve a phone call from his ex girlfriend crying and telling you he's at the hospital getting a gastric lavage to safe his life. Your mom will cry and tell you she'd die if you ever try to do that. So you never told her about the times you actually tried. Couple of years later you're gonna tell her that you were planning to drink the poison with your friend but he did it first. She'll cry and blame herself.

When you're 18 is gonna be a tough year. After the miserable graduation you had at 17, crying the whole ceremony and having your parents fight in front of you cause you weren't happy of leaving your best friend, Louis, behind, ending up drinking with your cousin and asking yourself what the fuck are you going to do; you'll end up entering college at a carrer you don't like, break up with your boyfriend of that time and feel used cause he tried to have sex with you but you refused. Your parent's marriage is finally broken so you move with your mom and brother and chaos starts when your bro starts drinking and using drugs nonstop while still in high school and you try to survive your fist year at university. One of his friends will try to abuse you, but you manage to scape and get back to school to meet your classmates and Harry, the guy you'll love for years (but that's another story).

Highlight of this messy period: you'll go to the very first Justin Bieber's concert in your country, at a very good seat for the economic situation of your family, cause your mom saved for months to give you the tickets as a birthday present, plus, it's the first concert you go by yourself.

Back to the not so good stuff, your first failure at college. It's a career you don't like but you'll still be mad at yourself for having to take two subjects again the next semester, being that it never happened before.

This year is gonna mark yourself forever. You're gonna take your first trip by yourself ever, going with some friends to the beach, plus a guy you met at a high school party once and turned to be friends with one of your best buds so you met him at your friends' 18th birthday party. The trip was part of the celebration. He hit on you at the party and you made out with him because he told you he was a musician and was impressed with your voice. You liked the attention, but still thought about Harry, you already liked him, so you felt kinda guilty for the trip, even when you both were distancing from each other, cause another girl kissed him at a party. And this dude even went to your class to pick you up a couple days before the trip.

This guy, the "musician", is your rapist.

He'll flirt with you and start make promises, and comments about yourself and your figure, but you won't notice his intentions, cause he'll treat you really good and even pay your part of the car budget for the trip. He really wanted you to go, you'll think it's cause he likes you, that's what he tells everyone, that you are HIS girl. You never started dating actually, you were just hanging out and barely getting to know him, but he always put excuses for not talking more about himself, you were fooled by his act.

Once you arrive at the beach, he'll act even more "couple like" with you, to convince your friends he loves you good. All lies. Even one of your bros got so fooled by his act, that he'll advice him to treat you right and be a good boyfriend when you're drinking together that night.You sort beds cause the group only reserved two rooms with multiple beds. You share bed with him, and everyone agrees cause for the public you are already a couple. It was never like that. Next morning everything appears normal. You go to the beach, swim and have fun at the hotel's pool later. Then you'll decide to take a shower and the guy jokes about joining you. You avoid the comments. This is when it all starts going south...

You enter the shower and start doing your stuff while playing music in your cellphone as always, so you don't notice when he sneaks in the bathroom until he's at the shower with you. You didn't even take off your swimsuit cause it was only a shower to get back to the beach later. Next thing you'll know is that you are pressed to the wall by him, and he moves aside your swimsuit to get inside you, you'll freeze and won't be able to fight because of the shock. You will not remember anything after that until you wake up next to him in bed a few hours later. By this point you won't know what to do or say, you'll think that no one will believe you cause he told averyone you were dating, so you won't say anything, and he'll repeatedley coerce you to have sex with him for the rest of the trip and even one more time when you get back to town. Then you'll block him in all social media, and his number and everyone will think you broke up. Your period will be late because of what happened, and you freak out. You were taking birth control for a medical condition so it was just a scare.

You'll keep the truth as a secret for months, until your 19th birthday party. You'll get drunk and tell Louis what actually happened. He'll get mad and try to console you. You don't remember this happened, he'll tell you the next time you hang out together that year. No one else will know until years later, but still, your mom and Harry will never know.

A lot of other important stuff happens that year, that involves Harry, and point the beggining of your story together. A really long story with moments that will also mark how you'll be the next years.

You'll change your major at 19. Be stable for a year and have a breakdown in your 3th semester there. You seek for help and tell you're mom about your depression, but she doesn't know what to do. You'll manage to try and recover by yourself with your friends and boyfriend's support. Try and be stable for a couple more years that pass by so fast and have another breakdown by the beggining of your last semester at college.

At 24, you had another and more heavy breakdown, getting into self harm again, but less violent now. And guess what? We're still alive. It's hard as fuck, a lot happened on this decade, and I still don't know where are we going, what are we doing here, because you and I thought at the time that we would be dead by now. You never thought we would ever be this age, and I don't know what am I supposed to do. Life was on automatic all this time, and I'm tired, and fucking scared. I'm done.

But we can't die yet. Not today. Not now. Life is hell, yeah, but we also met amazing people that swear to love us, so I hang up to that. When I started to write you this, I was recalling all the shit we survived and why we were supposed to be dead. But I seeked for help again, and our soulmates came to the rescue. So the scratches on my arm are totally healed and I made contact with mental health assistance.

Everything is awful, and there are things in our story until now that will haunt us forever. But we survived, and that's what we have to hold on to. I still don't know what to do, and actually I don't want to do anything besides what we've been doing lately...keep surviving. One day at a time.

Dear future Anne, everything is uncertain, but I hope that, when the time comes, We're still alive.