letting go.

i want to let go. its that simple, isnt it? i let go. i let them go. they leave me. but i can't. gosh i sound insane. i'm typing into a bloody anonymous essay publisher cause i need someone to hear me even when i can't scream.

i was eleven when i started to get bullied. some of them had been my friends before then. a lot of them actually. but the longer the bullying lasted, the less i remembered the before, and the more i remembered every single piece of pain they caused me. i'm eighteen now. i'm fucking eighteen, and i can't forget. i can't let what they did go. a lot of the time part of me still hurts, still aches at the person i was before they did that. before they tore me apart, and each time i tried to pick up the pieces they would start to rip me to bits again.

am i melodramatic? maybe. but i don't think so. i spent four years being bullied. in contrast with some that's not long. i got off easy.

but i also tried to commit suicide three times during those years. i also had a box filled with my suicide notes. i also self harmed almost every day. i also spent every single day wishing i would not wake up on the next. i also couldn't remember my life before it, i couldn't remember my life during it. each day i had forgotten the previous. all i remembered was pain. and anger. anger at them, for pulling me down and pulling me apart. anger at myself for taking it. anger at my friends for being too weak to stand by me. anger at my parents for dismissing me every time i tried to tell them. anger at my siblings for claiming their problems were worse. each time i tried to tell someone what was wrong, i got pushed away.

and then i got out. i got out of my toxic household. i got out of the cycle of bullying. and yet, it didn't end. i was fifteen the first time my suicide attempt almost succeeded. it was the worst day of my life, and at that point in time it was the worst day because i failed.

after i left my highschool, and switched to another school in a foreign country, things got weird. i had spent four years in survival mode. to survive i would quite literally erase or blur things in my mind. and when i left, that bubble, that wall that had been protecting me, it shattered. and i had no defense system to protect me from the stupidest of things, my memories.

i turned to pills in the summer before my sixteenth birthday. it was an accident, a coincidence at first. my grandmother told me i could take two per hour until a headache left. i often had bad headaches. they were a result of the stress, the anxiety, the hallucinations. because, the thing is, after i left that school, i started to experience all forms of hallucinations. at first it was voices. i hadn't heard the voices since i was thirteen, when they had been screaming in my head. the voices would scream at their loudest, shattering every moment of peace that i thought i had. then the actual hallucinations. sometimes i would see them. my bullies. in the street, just for a second, a blonde girl would look like my ex best friend as she laughed and jeered at me. and then i'd blink and she was gone. sometimes i'd wake up sweating from nightmares of things that i couldn't tell if they were real or fake. that was the problem, i stopped being able to distinguish reality from my imagination. so, one day, when i had a bad headache, i took the pills, the painkillers, like my grandmother told me. and then an hour later, i took two more. two too many. everything went a bit hazy, and that night, for the first night in months, i didn't hear the voices. and it was fucking heaven.

and i don't know what it was, but something possessed me to do it again. it wasn't illegal, but it was wrong. day after day went by, and instead of taking painkillers twice a week, i ended up taking them every day. and each time i upped the dosage. each time i took a little more. one day, after i'd moved to my new school, i took too much. i stopped, stopped taking them, and it got bad again. i became really depressed, and one month before my sixteenth birthday, i tried to kill myself. i failed. i shall not say more.

but after i failed, everything went downhill. i couldn't hide behind my facade anymore. i couldn't pretend i was okay. so i did what i had always done best. i lied and i made up things and i got out of it.

i spent a year in intensive therapy. they came to me in nightmares, sometimes with screams and sometimes with soft voices that stayed even longer in my mind. sometimes they smiled, sometimes they grimaced. sometimes i looked out the window as i climbed to the attic in my residence, and i considered jumping. more than once. i wanted to smile and say i was okay, but i wasn't.

nowadays they're gone. sometimes. and other times they come back. other times i'm reminded of the fact that i was made to feel like i was worthless for years, and that noone told me i was actually worth something. other times i'm reminded that they got to continue to live their lives without consequence.

last year i found out that one of my bullies got into a motorbike crash. he lost his leg as a result of the accident. when i found out, i smiled. i was so fucking glad. so fucking glad that at least one of them had felt some semblance of the pain i felt. and that was horrible of me. but to be quite brutally honest, he deserved it. he fucking deserved worse than to lose his leg because he was a bully and a fucking assaulter and he deserved the shittiest things in the world.

maybe some day i will be able to let go. knowing the permanent damage that was caused, i highly doubt it. but one can hope.