Don’t look them in the eye. Don’t speak unless spoken to. Don’t make a fool of yourself. 

I was constantly on edge, a withering pariah of a girl lost in the throes of a ridiculous nightmare. The earth has around 8 billion people wandering across it’s surface, one thousand of those 8 billion wandering through the halls of my school. And I was blatantly, undoubtedly, and absolutely terrified of every single one of them. I don’t remember exactly when the fear shattered me– erupting like a nuclear explosion from behind a rickety, unhinged door in a dusty corner of my heart. There wasn’t anything specific I was actually afraid of, and thinking back, maybe it wasn’t a fear of them, but a hatred of myself that ran so deep I imagined everyone must have shared my thoughts. I couldn’t run from myself, and that scared me, so I subconsciously decided to run from everyone else.

Those years, the last two years of middle school, I can say with the utmost certainty were the worst years of my life. Each day was filled with a self-loathing so prominent, so deeply rooted into the fabric of which I’d sown myself, that the world began to mutate. Made malleable by my fear, the distortion bled into every corner of my life. I was hated– hated by those who knew me, hated by those who didn’t. Everything had a consequence: every breath, every step, every thought, every word, everything. I could do nothing right, nothing was good enough, nothing would ever be good enough, I would never be good enough. Each day was a trial, each mistake a testament to my inability to be anything but worthless. Facing the mirror was the most agonizing part of each day because I never saw myself how I actually was. I know that now. I did not see me. My body was a ghastly thing, a monsters figure, a gremlins model. It was too large here, a tad spindly there, elongated where it shouldn’t have been. I was a reflection escaped from a funhouse mirror, wandering aimlessly through a maze of mockery. My mind was a mess, a plane with both engines shot out. 

Time and again I try to rationalize my reasoning for telling no one about these thoughts. At first I had the wild idea I may be locked up somewhere, forced to take medication. Then I began to think that I couldn’t tell anyone, because I would become more of a pariah than I already was, and I couldn’t let that happen. It was in those moments that I decided I wanted to be invisible. I didn’t want anyone to know what was going on in my head– I figured I’d save them the trouble of the worry. Looking back now, I regret this, more than I regret anything I have ever done. For those two years, I bottled these feelings and thoughts, buried them and chained them inside of a rotting artery to fester like an open wound. I had mastered the false smile in little more than a week, the isolation even quicker than that, and no one was ever the wiser. I told everyone what they wanted to hear, and it worked. I was simply the quiet girl who preferred sitting alone at lunch, the girl who didn’t talk, the girl you knew but didn’t know– and that was exactly how I wanted it. 

I withdrew into myself like a mollusk into a shell, readying for the approaching wave. Except, the wave never broke. I spent years waiting for the inevitable rush and roar of the water to drag me from my cracking, briny home, but this fear was never realized, it was never even close to being realized, this doomsday, this implausible scenario of social alienation because of how horrid I was, was never coming true. It was only then, when my misery had reached it’s peak, when I was finally feeling the effects of the solidarity without the blanket of fear, that I knew I needed to change. I was gaining nothing from this irrational fear, from this loathing. I was going to burst if I didn’t tell someone about what was happening, what had happened. I still refused to ask for help, so for the first time since that mess started, I picked up a journal and I began to write. I poured my soul into the words, every destructive thought that I’d had over the span of those two years covered those pages. 

I then shredded them, and placed them none too gently into the trash. 

It was extremely cathartic, to finally put words to the tempest that had been roiling inside of me, but, to be clear, I’m not saying everything was fixed with one journal entry. The recovery process was slow. Some days I’d lapse back into the darker regions of my mind, only to snap myself straight back to reality. You are not worthless. You are not horrid. You are not despicable. I physically needed to repeat these mantras, to solidify them within myself. I was never, and I am never, going to let those thoughts control me again. 

I have locked those thoughts away, back into the cavernous, hellish depths they escaped from, and no matter how many times they rise as one to overtake me, they never will. Everyday I grow stronger in my resolve; grow stronger as an individual. I am content with the place of peace my mind has reached- something I hadn't thought possible. I will never again be caught in the throes of self destruction. I have braved the muddy, treacherous base of what once seemed an unscalable mountain, and now, standing atop the snow capped peak, with this brand new world mine for the taking, I can finally say that I am no longer afraid.