Darkness. All you see, all you feel when you’ve dug yourself a grave so deep nothing can pull you out. When the lonesome and fear fills you up like a water balloon ready to burst. No one’s there for you. It’s only yourself trying to tell you that it’s going to be okay, but deep down you know it’s not. This is the reality for hundreds and hundreds of teens and young people in our society today.It was the reality for me for a good 3 years of my life.

The sorrow that I felt for those years were a combination of my self-hatred and the way others made me feel as well. People would tell me on a daily basis that I was too confident with my body. That I shouldn’t be proud of it at all. So I listened to them. I let myself believe that my  body wasn’t good enough, that I wasn’t good enough. It left me in a state that was unbearably painful and isolating. I would never eat I would stay in my room curled up in my bed and just cry. To even think of food or eating made me feel sick inside. And this feeling didn’t go away for a month. In fact, the most I would eat would be a bowl of soup every few days.

In school, I was a loner. Not because other people didn’t like me but because I didn’t want to hang out with anybody. So to pass time, I would read and write next to the swings in the shady areas of the green fields surrounding the playground. The novels and journals that I called my dearest possessions were my friends. I could go to them and just spill my heart out into their pages. I was able to get all of my despair out of my heart and finally be able to just let go. It told a story of the fight that I was in with myself. How the only battle there was to fight wasn’t with another person, but with my thoughts. The dripping wet pages within the covers were my saviors. They were the ones keeping me sane.

The tear stained pages revealed a deep truth about myself to me. That the only people who are trying to put you down are going through the same struggles as you are. And that the only thing you can and need to do to get rid of those demons, is to see that somewhere within them, they’re angels too.