It starts like this. You wake up in the mornings, you put on your makeup, you get dressed, and you go to work. Mornings are the same as every one else’s, except they’re not. In reality, it’s more like this: you wake up and begin to search through your Instagram and Facebook feed, noticing everything. You notice your group of friends who went out without you and your head begins to fill with a number of self-reminders. It takes far too much of your morning for you to convince yourself of anything other than the worst.

By the time you roll yourself out of bed and are in front of the mirror, you’re attempting to run positive thoughts through your head. “Today is going to be a good day,” is what you tell yourself, but let’s be honest, that won’t last long. Your hair refuses to work with you in any way that make’s you feel even slightly okay with it and your makeup just isn’t going as planned. Again, you try to remind yourself of the best. These are small things to the bigger picture of the entire day.

Work is work and you pull yourself through it by attempting to make sure that other people are happy. You’ve come to notice that no one really sees this and you’re stuck with the lingering feeling that you’re not doing your best, as much as you may be trying. Six to eight hours pass and you’re free to go home but you find yourself at a group outing that you’ve somehow gotten invited to. Probably by accident, you remind yourself.

Here you are surrounded by laughter because you’ve conveniently placed yourself in the center of the table. You would think this would help but people are still successfully ignoring almost every word you say. You’re used to it but there’s still that tiny jab of pain that hits in your core. The boy you like is sat at the other end of the table and silently you’re begging that he looks your way but when he does it’s only to look at the girl to your left. Immediately you feel unwelcome even more so than before so you begin to shut down. This is what you do. Your head goes silent along with your voice. You sit and observe for the rest of the dinner because the last thing you want to do is intrude any more than you already have.

You go through days of feeling empty because you're forced to have far too many lunches alone and sometimes you wonder if anyone is ever actually curious about how life is going for you. The only valid conclusion you can come to is probably not. You wonder what it's like to be one of those people who everyone wants to be around and then there's the persistent fear that you are so easily replaceable, and I think that's the worst of all.

There are nights when days like this hurt more than others. Most nights you’re able to push it away with distractions and reminders that life goes on because it does. However, there are some nights when you come home and you cry because of the overwhelming fear that every single person you love will eventually get tired of you. These are the worst nights. These are the nights when you would give anything to have someone to tell you the opposite and that’s the worst part; the part when you begin to fall even deeper because there is no one there to hold you and remind you that everything is okay.

For this, I am so sorry.