Who I Became (7th and 8th Grade)

I feel like my life has been divided into three parts: preparing for junior high, junior high, and recovering from junior high. Junior high was just that awful to me. 7th and 8th grade were the worst years of my life - no contest.

Maybe it was hormones. Maybe I just couldn't stand my crazy schedule anymore. Maybe my family was getting to me. I don't know what it was, but it changed me from my normal dorky self into this:

Does that look like a happy person to you? I didn't think so.

The major source of my sadness at this point was my lack of a boyfriend. In the 7th grade, most people didn't actually have boyfriends. Although  knew and understood this, it still got under my skin. What bothered me even more was that I felt as though guys looked straight through me. I felt unattractive and unwanted.

On the plus side, I made my first close female friend during this year. I'll just call her "Athens". Athens and I were completely inseparable. We would call each other every night and talk for hours on end. We ended up hand-writing a 300 page book we fully intended to get published. We went everywhere together, had every class together and spent every weekend together. That might have been part of my problem.

Athens was skinny even though she ate anything she wanted. She was pretty without any makeup on. She was fashionable and hardly spent any money on clothing. In short, Athens was everything I felt I wasn't at the time. While walking down a busy street, it was she that was hit on and not me. I believe that this was the start of my depression as well as the point where I started questioning my sexuality. I wondered if I'd be better off dating girls if I couldn't get a guy and actually developed a bit of a crush on Athens, a future and short lived fourth evil ex. It didn't last long and was nothing serious, but it still happened and caused a lot of questions for me.

However, all good things must come to an end, and this friendship was no exception. Athens decided to break into my MySpace account and found some incriminating messages from my first Evil Ex, Momento. Rather than come to me, she took it to our circle of friends. I understand that they were concerned for my well-being. They didn't want me dating an online weirdo and ending up dead. Regardless, when they threatened to tell my parents about my secret relationship, I wasn't pleased. I didn't really talk to anyone in that circle of friends afterward.

In fact, I didn't do much after meeting Momento. I stayed at home so I could talk to him. We'd stay up for hours on end so I barely had any sleep for school. My grades suffered, upsetting me, but this also made me a very cranky person to be around. I had almost no friends for a while. My depression became nearly unbearable and I have several journals filled with depressing and suicidal lyrics and poems to show for it. When I felt that I couldn't take it anymore, I cut for the first time.

It was a strange experience. I had been alone in my room, listening to some sort of depressing music, staring at a computer screen and waiting for Momento to contact me. It had been an entire month since our last conversation and he had stopped responding for no reason. I felt cold on the inside. Any expression of emotion I tried to make felt fake. My emotional numbness became so overbearing that my body translated it into physical numbness. I could pinch or scratch at my skin, but I couldn't feel anything. I created some sort of connection between my brain and my body. I felt that if I could make my body feel pain, I could emotionally begin to feel again. So, with a pin in hand from Hot Topic, I carved the words "I Love You" into my calf. I cut only until I saw the first drops of blood and then I stopped. I started to feel a little better.

I haven't allowed myself to cut ever since because of the dangers associated, but every once in a while my hand drifts towards a pair of scissors and I can feel something tugging at me, urging me to try just one more time.