“I’m sitting here in my room, fantasizing that tomorrow will be a better day. Will my mind be clear and away from the darkness? Sometimes, I’m afraid to leave the house because it seems everywhere is full of people waiting to throw ugly words at me. Death terrifies me, yet in the midst of all this pain and fear…I wonder if only then I will be free? I want to reach out to everyone and tell them what’s happening, but the words just wont come out. I feel guilty and ashamed for being me, weak and afraid. I look into my future and see nothing and yet that feels almost comforting because then my pain would be gone.“
These are the words of a fourteen year old me. I found them scribbled on the inside back of an old school notebook. Bullied so often and severely, I feared leaving the safety of my room. No child should write those words…
To this day, I suffer anxiety when I leave my house and enter the world outside and I am forty-nine years old. . . it is the lasting effect of being bullied each time I had to walk past a group of my tormentors. There was no escape because they were in school, at the mall, in the grocery store, at the county fair and no matter when, where or how. . . one of them would find a way to cast a verbal stone at me.
