As a young girl, your life unspools before you like a thread from a bobbin

but as you grow up you realize that life isn’t so easy. 

Life is terrifying and depressing. 

You learn that life isn’t what you thought it was.

It scares you. 

You feel alone and the world is determined to break you down. 

Commercials and movies shout to you that you aren’t pretty. 

They highlight your flaws and features. They tell you:

your hair is too curly, your thighs too big, your stomach too fat, your skin too uneven.

You learn to see what you hadn’t seen all those blissful years ago.

As you grow up, eyes become scary–they are weapons. 

These eyes, they are always following you, eyes you don’t want

creepy, ugly gray eyes. Eyes that belong to men three times your age, 

eyes that are frenzied and ravenous, they bulge and wet with desire. 

These eyes scare you, 

they stare at you in places you don’t want to be looked at;

up close and intimate places. 

You realize maybe the world won’t be as nice to you as you thought. 

Your friends aren’t your friends anymore. 

They are busy dealing with their problems, the eyes following them.

Those scrutinizing and stalking eyes. 

The bright faces of your used-to-be friends are blank and dim

their eyes longing and hurting.

You feel alone, and scared, you can’t breathe. 

You see that the world doesn’t fit into your palm, 

it is so much more expansive. 

But even though the planet is now larger, your personal world shrinks 

narrower and narrower. 

You’re not free like you once were, nobody tells you, but you see it. 

You see it on faces, you see it on the news.

You will never be free because there are predators out there,

hungry for you, for your body. 

Your world closes, in order for you to take care of yourself because

no one else will. 

Instead, others mock you and laugh at you. They snap at your bra straps and ask you questions that make you blush and cry. 

Your skin lives a life on fire, and your mind can’t take it anymore.

It can’t take all the pain and fear, the eyes and names. 

Your story is one of pain and fear, laughter and headaches, bleeding hearts, and cramping stomachs. 

You don’t recognize your body, anymore, you don’t like what it does. 

It isn’t you, but at the same time, you aren’t familiar with who you are. 

You don’t understand the blood that flows out of you and the thoughts that circulate through your head.

Nothing feels right. 

Your life feels made-up, fake. 

This isn’t me, you wish to scream, but no one cares. 

While you roll and wriggle on the floor in pain,

clutching your stomach and leaking blood, others laugh. 

They don’t offer to help you, they call you weak, they say the pain doesn’t even hurt, it doesn’t exist… it's just in your head. 

Their mocks slither into your head and spit poison at you, 

their fingers, fat and twisted, point and prod at you, 

they look like outstretched tongues. 

They arise goosebumps on your arms 

They look at you and label you dirty and ugly.

You are a disease. 

They shout all the thoughts you recite to yourself while 

alone, in the dark, late at night, staring at the ceiling. 

They breathe into existence all the insecurities and thoughts that you hoped weren’t true, that you secretly believed weren’t true.

Your skin buzzes with pain and your blazing eyes, look for others, 

but there is no one.

You live life alone. You are free-falling and everything hurts.

You don’t understand what happened to that old world. 

What happened to the bobbin and the life that was supposed to unfold?

Where did it all go?