Dear world,

She looked in the mirror in the morning and realized that the person that she had seen in pictures was not the same person she was seeing in the reflection. Somehow, within the course of a lifetime, she had transformed into a mixed recipe of three parts toxic relationships, two parts self-destruction.

She had suffered in silence for months while telling counselors, mentors, and trusted friends that it was just a "tough time" and that everything was difficult because of school. The black and white journal she clutched onto was full of nothing but deep, dark thoughts and realities that she felt no one could help her with.

It took week after week of self-talk before she even wrote about what she wanted; what she needed. She reached out for help many times to everyone she felt like even MIGHT be able to help her: college advisors, support within her college, old friends, best friends, scholarship advisors, mentors, old teachers...anyone.

Somehow, after every conversation, she felt like a piece of her own being was leaving with every word. She felt even more broken than she did coming into the conversation because the one thing she wanted to talk about was something her mouth had been forced shut about. She had no choice.

She felt stuck. In between the place of having people to tell but having no words to explain it with. Nothing encompassed her thoughts other than the overwhelming realization that with these experiences, she was slowly losing herself. She had no reason to contemplate suicide any longer because those around her were killing her.

Nevertheless, she stayed silent. She skipped classes, engaged in self-harm, and began failing classes when, before, she was a solid student. Nothing mattered anymore. She still held it in. She prefaced the idea that something was bothering her with the hope that someone would ask at just the right time, "Are you ok? What's going on?". People asked but something, someone, IT...held her back.

She was suffocated by the thoughts that all men hated her. Only few men were to come into her life thus far to prove that this was false, and yet the simple thought brought migraines into her head that fluctuated between the hours of 2 and 4 in the morning, when no one else would be awake to hear her silent screams of pure loneliness. She told herself to keep her information to herself. No one could help.

After so long, she sat at the end of every day with the same black and white journal clutched in clammy hands full of nothing but dried blood and lost hope. She didn't know how long she had left to fight for herself; clearly that was all she had left.

She waited for a text, an email, a phone call. She waited and waited for something that would probably never come. So she picked up the blade again, dripped red drops of abuse down on her blank journal pages. That was all she had to journal for the day.

Sincerely,

Her