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I walked into the classroom to find pink heart shaped Post it’s around my bench, but they’re carelessly painted black. On top of my chair there’s a thumbtack with its tine turned upwards. I was about 8 or 9 years old. I don’t recall telling the teacher about it.

I heard several times that people were talking shit about me behind my back, and I guess it’s been going on since the second grade, and it’s still going on. People were making fun of me and I ended up in fights incredibly often, both verbally and physically.

Desperate for friendship, I started asking people to be my best friend, as you kinda do when you’re 9, but I was rejected every time.

In fourth grade I found myself standing without a pen box in class, found it later in a toilet. The very same year I suppose my cellphone was stolen, since it suddenly disappeared and I never saw it again. I still have some emails from a particular guy that liked to scream at me with caps lock haha.

Whenever someone called me to hang out, I cried happy tears. It made me feel like I actually had friends, but it didn’t happen very often.

In fifth grade, I was hit by some shoulders in the corridors, and I saw how people looked at me, giggling and pointing. I also got a lot of critique about how I was dressed, what I did with my hair, how I talked and what I said. Saying things like “okey” instead of “okay” was apparently something that made me an incredibly annoying person. I often became defensive, trying to keep my chin up when everyone was putting me down, but that, too, was a faulty move according to my closest “friends”.

Seventh grade – new classmates. Classmates that weren’t found of anything I did or believed in. I used to hear that I had a “heart of ice”, and when I said something I would hear things like “go pray, you child of God” or simply just “shut up”.  Sometimes a guy would open the door to my classroom just to shout “God doesn’t exist” at me. In the ninth grade I got to hear, from the guys that told me my heart was of ice, that they had planned to kill me just because I was Christian. Still got to hear I was annoying, not only directly from my so called friends – I also heard it from basically strangers that claimed they had heard my friends say it behind my back.

Eight grade and I had never felt so left out before. The two friends I used to relay on told me to go get other friends and leave them alone. I used to always sit alone during math lessons. I never sat beside someone without being invited, and I often cried on the school toilet. I had great grades, but I suppose people got jealous, because every time I answered something wrong, I would hear loud laughters in the classroom.  I became extremely depressed and sort of suicidal, pacing around in the kitchen at night, wondering what would happen if I just stabbed myself with a kitchen knife.

A year later I thought I would get a break, but eventually it all came back as a guy was talking shit behind my back, just because I was Christian. I often felt ignored and left out, but crying was a sign of weakness, so every time I was about to cry, I did it on the toilet. This was when the eating disorders came. I would go days without eating a proper meal, and always say no if I was offered food somewhere.  I got to hear about how weak I was, both mentally and physically, and I hated the word “weak”.

The problem was that no one ever noticed how ill I was. I was actually given the title “happiest person in class”. It was so ironic.

When I moved from that city a year later, I thought everything would be better, and it was better for a while. Then everything got worse than ever before. I received threats from one of moms’ clients, who was about my age. She called me a slut, whore and a bitch, and she told me she would crush my face if she saw me. This made me incredibly scared, and at the same time my eating disorders took a whole new turn. I used to binge and then throw it all up by pushing a toothbrush down my throat after most meals. After a while, things started to clear up, and I got back on my feet. That’s when I wrote "that status" which happened to bring me down again. Got to hear things like “you should’ve killed yourself” and just mean things. It was hard to live a normal life with all the attention. People talked more about me than ever before, and I hated it. The status was only posted to encourage others in my previous situation to keep going, but instead people thought it was all about me, and they didn’t like it. People from my old city started getting in my business, apparently calling me a bitch for nothing. At the same time I lost most of my friends in my new city, and I drifted away from my comfort zone.

I still haven’t returned to my comfort zone.  I’m still out here, and I’ll probably never return. I’m not scared after receiving the threat, just cautious, always keeping track of my shadow from the streetlights at night. Working out for the sake of self-defense, but also to prevent being called “weak” again. But at least I’m fine now. Healthy and strong. Over it all, and done with depression.

I know now, that wounds heal, but scars remain. These things above have wounded me, shaped me, but they’re all just scars now.

People make mistakes all the time, and some people become living targets for these mistakes. I was a target, but not anymore.

No hard feelings against anyone in this story. <3