Whoever said that teenage years are something that we should cherish is a total liar. Everyone expects a teenager to live there best life, have fun, try new things, and have multiple friends. That wasn’t my experience at all. My teenage years were some of my darkest days in my 26 years in this life. Especially when I was 17. I was in junior year of high school at the illustrious Alpharetta High School, and I was already pretty much broken from previous years, but I thought to myself “Hey, I’m another year older and I’m gonna make the best of this year!”. Well, that didn’t happen. During the summer, I began to have a huge connection with this girl and I started to have feelings for her. Like I would sacrifice sleep just to talk to her until 5am on oovoo, but turns out that she liked someone else, which crushed me. Oh the irony, but we remained good friends until we just slowly moved on with our lives. I tried to move on from her, and tried to talk to this other girl who was messing around with me when I was at Publix working, she invited me to her pool at like 9pm and I thought too much of it I guess and came on a a little too strong and I kinda ruined that chance. Not the end of the world.
Onto the school year. Now I’m not the most popular guy, because I was kind of an introvert and I didn’t like to associate myself with everything that everyone else was doing, like party, drink, smoke, have sex at any given opportunity, and all that jazz. I would just walk around campus until school started just listening to music because I didn’t really have any friends or anyone to hangout with. I would constantly get verbally assaulted by a lot of people. My favorite was when someone gave me the name EFG (Epic Fail Guy) or when a few particular people would just terrorize me just to get reactions from the rest of the class. They would call me gay, try to insult my intelligence, call me ugly, anything that would make them feel better about themselves. The only friends I had was girl #1, some people at the Y, and 3 neighborhood friends that were slowly making their way out of my life. I only saw those people a few times a week so I felt very alone, that is until girl number 3 came into my life. Now girl number 3 was someone I thought I was actually going to have a relationship with. I liked her, she liked me, and we would spend the mornings together. Only issue is she said her parents didn’t allow her to date at the time, but I didn’t care. I kept trying to make it happen but she just wouldn’t budge and it became too much for her. I just wanted to be in a relationship so bad and she just didn’t want to. I thought I would back off a bit, and just be a friend, until one day she started dating this dude and completely destroyed me. To top it off, she lied and completely denied her past feelings for me. At this point she, her friends, and her new boyfriend started to attack me on Facebook and told me to leave her alone, and my emotions got the best of me and I basically wished damnation on one of them. They took it as a threat for some reason and told my school caseworker and he basically had to talk to me about it in front of them.
Now because of all this going on in my life. Being bullied, 3 failed relationship attempts, getting called ugly, my friends abandoning me, about to move to Florida where I didn’t know anyone, I did the only thing I thought would stop the emotional pain for at least a second. I took a paperclip, put it in a lighter flame, and put it on my skin. I also made light but visible cuts all over my arms. Did anyone see? Yes. Did anyone care? No. In fact some people made jokes. They didn’t stop to think that maybe they’re classmate, someone they see 5 times a week, is hurt. Not hurt from the obvious marks on their body, but hurt enough to intentionally hurt themself. You have no idea how alone that made me feel. I was alone, singled out, broken, and literally scarred and no one bat an eye. Life at 17 wasn’t so sweet.
Wake By night 