I can’t remember being carefree and happy, and I can’t picture my life going forward as anything other than the hellhole I’m in. I’m graduating this year, and I fear becoming an adult and realizing I wasted my childhood feeling like this.

I can’t remember when I started to hate myself. Some of my earliest memories about myself are of staring at myself in the mirror and analyzing what I see. Of sitting in class and thinking that everyone around me thought i was as unlikable and ugly as I thought I was. I don’t remember what it was like to be a happy kid, unburdened by the world. I can only remember the parts of my childhood of crying and asking to be homeschooled, sitting alone in the library, hiding from anyone that could see me. I remember thinking that I was ignorable, unnoticeable to everyone around me. I remember thinking that it was good I was being ignored, because otherwise everyone would find out what I already knew; that I’m not worthy of their attention. At the same time, I never could figure out why. When I was in elementary school I hated myself because of my body, but also because I was unlikeable. But I had no idea why other kids didn’t want to be friends, I only knew that there was something wrong with me. So I hated me.

I was so afraid to go to middle school, because I was scared I would have no friends, and no one, not even the teachers, would ever take the time to get to know me. The only people I talked to in 6th grade stopped talking to me over the summer, and I didn’t realize that meant we weren’t friends anymore. I went up to them in the hallway, and they looked at me as if they didn’t know who I was.

There are days I wish I could tell that little girl that it wasn’t her fault, that she didn’t deserve that, or anything that she told herself. But most of my days are still like that, laying in bed staring at the ceiling, wondering if anything has really changed. Days when I see myself in the mirror and don’t recognize the eyes meeting mine. Days when I feel as if I’m not really a person, just something inhabiting a body. Days where I look back on my life and realize I’ve always felt like this, and questioning whether or not I want to continue like this.

I can see it in my eyes in pictures, when I started to talk myself down in my head, when I thought pictures were a plague, and that I was a black mark on the happy pictures people actually wanted. I tried my best to disappear from the world, to avoid evidence that would be left behind of me. I didn’t want to be seen, and I didn’t want to see myself.