I am more than what meets the eye

My name is not important.

My story begins at a young age. I have always hated myself. At first, it was the little things. I hated my boring brown hair and yearned to be the beautiful blonde or the vivacious red head. I wished I could be shorter, I despised being a sky scraper among my peers. I wished my legs weren’t so hairy, I wished my hair wouldn’t curl at the ends. But these were minor things. I spent my time as an only child traipsing through the halls of my home while my neglectful parents tended to other things, more important than I. And as I was waltzing among the dust bunnies of my ominous home, I let my imagination take the wheel and I pretended that I was a ravishing honey-haired princess, with an abundance of siblings and parents who doted on me constantly. These imaginary friends were the closest I had to actually friends, since the neighborhood kids constantly hazed me and bullied me, and I was quite shy on the matter of making new friends. So I lost myself to this perfect world in which I was the epitome of grace and perfection, and where people actually enjoyed my company. This ideal of perfection is what planted the seeds of future malice into my heart.

A few yeas later I was in the early years of elementary school and acquired a good amount of friends. They were for all intents and purposes quite friendly towards me, save the fact that I was always treated as the subordinate. They would constantly put me down and remind me how unintelligent I was compared to them, and how terrible my handwriting and arts and crafts skills were. I do not regard those skills in high regard now, but back then those were things that were important, and those blows to my ego left me scarred. This attitude towards utilizing me as a doormat, which to step all over and verbally beat up was continued all the way up until I moved in the 6th grade. And then it was adopted by the new children and my new so called “friends”, and in some regards still continues to this very day 8 years later. Something about my personality must give off the aura that I am submissive and weak.

This, I blame on my father, who for as long as I can remember criticized me and corrected my every move and gesture. This along with the random fits of anger directed to my minor indiscretions such as accidentally spilling milk or dropping a crumb resulted in a many shed tear, and a lot of fights in which to curve my obviously heinous behavior between my two parents. This on top the situation going on at school amounted to my very, very fragile ego. Mix that in with the fact that I was exposed to social media at a young age and became entranced by the idea of someday being able to be as skinny and as flawless as the models in the magazines and the gorgeous girls who post pictures of themselves with unrelated book quotes and you have one concoction of a very depressed young girl who felt as though she was  a pile of flaws stitched together with silent tears.

This year I have acquired a group of friends who seem to understand my trust issues and my strange sense of humor, but don’t understand why I am self conscious. When they see that I am disappointed by an 87 as a test score they scoff and say that that grade is impeccable and not to be such a whiner. They won’t hear the words of scorn my dad will bequeath on to me when he realizes he daughter he sends to school got a B on her math test; they won’t hear the haunting words of my elementary school friends teasing me for not being accepted into advanced math for missing a few points on a test. When I look in the mirror and comment on how grossly fat I see myself to be and wish for a gap between my thighs, my friends tell me I am fishing for compliments and that thigh gaps are overrate. They do not hear the words of the girls from my dance class drawing attention to the fact that my stomach protruded my hip bones and that my thighs were always touching; they do no hear the silent tears that fell down my face as I saw people comment on anorexic girls’ photos how beautiful they were, and to look in the mirror and realize that I will never look that way or be called those words. When I become anxious when my friends exclude me or refrain from talking to me, they call me a worry wart. They don’t hear the cruel silence my father would give me when I would act out in order to try to get his attention; they don’t hear the giggles of my elementary school friends as they hand out invitations to birthday parties but conveniently don’t have enough for me.

My friends do not see the scars from my past, but jump to conclusions on the inferences of how they go there. I am more than what meets the eye.