"You're so spastic."
"Why are you like this?"
"You talk too much."
Imagine someone telling you these things as a teenage girl. Being a young adult is hard enough with all the changes you face, but having people say things to you can affect you in a way that most people wouldn't really understand. These words don't have faces to me. They are words that have seeped into the essence of who I am. Being bullied as a kid can have profound consequences on anyone.
When I was in high school, I always felt like I was the second choice to everyone, but my family. My friends teased me. There was never a moment of being with friends where my self-esteem wasn't being attacked.
"It's just a joke!"
"I'm just kidding, really."
Behind every joke, there is some truth. They thought I was weird and annoying. They thought I talked too much. Despite their efforts to tell me it was all just a game, I knew how they really felt about me. At least, that's what I told myself.
If my 'friends' could pick someone to do something with them, I was invited after the first person rejected them; I was always the Plan B. I never fully felt like I was wanted anywhere. They never told me that someone else couldn't come until later. I enjoyed myself while hanging out with my friends, but then I would get home and think about how I was the butt of their jokes the entire time. I've always been the one who put more into a relationship than the other person. Feeling left out was just a part of being with friends to me. I thought that was normal.
What did they really think of me? Did they really care about me at all?
The Bible tells us that we are "fearfully and wonderfully made." That doesn't stop others from feeding us lies, though. As I would cry to my mom, Satan would force the lies into my head about how I wasn't good enough, how no one liked me, or how weird I was.
I am almost a completely different person from who I was in high school. I have different goals, different dreams, and I am over-all a more confident human being. I've come a long way from the shy insecure girl who let people she called her 'friends' walk all over her.
However, just because I can be myself now, doesn't mean I don't still get attacked. Every day, I struggle with the insecurity that I felt never left my side when I was a kid. I don't take jokes lightly, despite how many jokes I make about myself; because at least if I make them them about myself someone else can't, right?
I am trying not let Satan deceive me, but some days, I feel like he won't get off my back. My heart is heavy on those days and I just have to take it one moment and one lie at a time before I can fully accept myself for who and what I am.
