After reading Jessica’s post today, I got all hopped up on the idea of submitting one of my own high-school journal entries to the Cringe Book. So I dug out the old spiral notebook and started flipping through it, trying to find something extra juicy and cringy. I assumed I would laugh and roll my eyes at my young stupid self and my idiotic high-school shenanigans, but instead I just ended up feeling sad. I did not have a goofy adolescence filled with friends and boys and pop quizzes. Instead I was fighting to make it through every day. My journal is filled with pledges to myself that I’ll stop cutting and start smiling more and maybe then people will like me. It has smudges of blood when I broke down and had to cut. There are heartbreaking poems filled with pain and loneliness. There are snippets of conversations I had with my parents, immortalizing the hate-filled, scarring words that were exchanged.

The entry I wrote 6 days after my fifteenth birthday pretty much sums up my life at the time:

February 8
This is a pain beyond sorrow. A pain beyond pain. Infecting my heart, my soul, my body… Immeasurable; an ocean too deep, a mountain too high. This hurts to the extent that I can barely think or write or cut. Here I sit, drowning in it. Being suffocated by it. I am dying inside.

Those words could be amusing if held in the context of the life of a regular teenage girl. Maybe she was jilted by the “love of her life”. Maybe she failed a math test. Maybe her mom told her she couldn’t go to her friend’s party until she did the dishes. Coming from a normal teenage girl, endlessly dramatic and self-righteous, an entry like that could almost make you smile. You would shake your head and think about how much better it is to be grown up. So what happened to me that day that inspired me to write such a heart-wrenching entry?

I woke up.

I woke up and I was still me and life was still the same and I was still depressed. I woke up and looked at the day and wanted to die. I was a walking tragedy.

What the hell am I supposed to do with a past like that? There are pages and pages of entries where I poured out my soul, trying to figure out who I was and why life hurt so much. In between that tattered cover, held together by a filthy, ragged ribbon, is the worst part of my life. Every fear, every awful thing I ever thought or did, every desperate wish to escape from everything. It’s all there.

What am I supposed to do about that.