This one is for us, the ones that made it through the hallways of people laughing at us and never with us; the ones whose classroom experience consisted of spitballs and clueless instructors; the ones that were left alone since all friends were taken and were now our enemies.

This one is for you.

School was a battleground, we never felt it as a welcoming place. We knew not who we could talk to but who we should avoid. We became masters at finding alternate routes to avoid the populated ones to keep us safe. Everyday we tried to find shelter in the library or in the classroom because we knew that being alone was better than being alone in a crowded building.

We wanted to be completely alone.

The name calling was always the worse. We were never to tall, too fat, too skinny or too ugly to ourselves until we met the self-proclaimed judges that were our classmates. Every school day was a competition of who could crack the cruelest joke at someone. Win and you'd be awarded with one minute of laughter and tears from a lonely kid that cries alone in his room everyday for the remainder of each school year.

When we called for help, we were told we were "too sensitive" and that "we shouldn't let it get to us" as if it were our fault for feeling pain, resentment and sheer emptiness. One does not choose what they feel, similarly to how one does not choose who they love. It took us weeks to learn how to empty ourselves so that we'd feel absolutely nothing and it took months of soul searching for us to feel something again.

We made it through.

Still, our journeys were different. You cannot label each of our stories the same because they are unique in its own sense. Each of us that survived had different influences, different scenarios and different ways of handling things. Some of us found a group of outcasts that welcomed us, while others weren't so lucky and fought through on their own.

You cannot deem our experiences as a "sob story." It is not sad that we nearly drowned in a sea of cruelty and were able to make it out alive, it is inspirational.

The many times we found ourselves in the library looking for a safe place served us as a way to learn. The empty vessels we had made of ourselves became filled with knowledge given to us by the wise through paper. We once wished that our non-fictional lives was that of the fictional hero that makes it through against all odds. It took us a while to realize that we had manifested the main character in the book speaking of resilience as ourselves and we would one day make the cut as the hero of the story in the book we would write of our own lives.

We became unstoppable.

What our bullies never learned is that they became our reason to fight. They became the catalyst that was needed in our recipe for success. Being the freak was out of the ordinary, which only meant that it made us extraordinary. As freaks we learned how to mature. As freaks we learned how to feel compassion. As freaks we learned empathy. As freaks we learned how to love not only those close to us but ourselves as well.

Everyone is a freak.....or at least everyone should be