It’s hard to think of a time in school where I didn’t feel like an outsider. From an early age I was picked on or made fun of by my peers. As I look back part of me wishes it was psychical acts because you can recover from that, cuts heal, black eyes fade, and bones can mended. My bullying was always verbal and those can cut you so deep they never heal, fade, or mended. The pain that was caused me from those verbal and no verbal attacks I carried around the rest of my life. It made me feel like I was never good enough or worth anything to myself or anyone else. Having to deal with this constant feeling from time it began in elementary school till the day I dropped out of high school, was a personal hell. When it started no one believed bullying was a problem, it was just something kids did and had no lasting effect on a kid. How I wish that was true, that I could just ignore it and pretend it didn’t mean anything. But it did to feel everyday judge by those people around me, and never measuring up to what they thought I should be. I know here in America we have this false image of what the perfect person should look like. They should be thin and tan perfect hair, perfect teeth, and no glasses, rich and if you don’t fit that you are wrong. I was an overweight kid and have always been heavy or fat if you like. And some others had no problem reminding me of the fact I was fat and they enjoyed pointing it out to me. How do you ignore something like that knowing they enjoyed making me feel bad or less of a person? Being left back a grade did not help either, making feel like I was stupider then my other classmates and not like they didn’t know I was left back either. After hearing comments and jokes at your expense what are you supposed to do? I didn’t have the mental tools to handle it I couldn’t process the information, and know I shouldn’t let it get to me. It did get to me every joke like a knife cut deep inside, every comment as black and blue that never healed. Each day, week, month, and year the pain grew more and more. I had no escape from it; even away from school I could still hear it in my head. The more you’re made to feel worthless you start to believe it as fact. So I became worthless and didn’t care how I did in school. They created a role for me and I started playing it, figuring it would make it stop hurting. But all it did was keep this vicious cycle to go on and on. I could have had a lot of hope and promise for the future was destroyed because someone else shaped how I saw myself. I wish I could say that now I see better and don’t feel the effects from many years ago, but I’d be wrong. I allowed my bully’s to shape my outlook on myself and to live every day in fear of what people thought of me. All of this just kept adding to the pain I carried around inside me to grow and grow. I remember being around 15 or 16 and asking to be committed, because I couldn’t face another school year. When being committed seems like a better option to me than having to go school another day says a lot about my situation. After that I got into drugs to help quiet the pain, and for those short moments it did. Every time I would get high on something I could escape the pain even for just a few moments. Yet every time I came down from the high the pain was still there and is laughing at me, knowing I couldn’t escape it. This lead to my suicide attempts, I tried on serval occasions. I had convinced myself that I would never live to see 18, and was very close to that goal. Yet somehow I went on every day the pain leading to depression and bi-polar disorder. After so many years of holding onto such great pain I had gotten use to hiding it from everyone.