Young Writers Society

Everybody asks why I started at the end and worked my way back to the beginning. The reason is simple; I couldn’t understand the beginning until I had reached the end. It felt like being alive in and of it-self could be so overwhelming sometimes. There’s really no way to escape it either. I mean, you can try to run away, but once you stop and feel like you’ve gotten away, you’re still with yourself. Instead I would sometimes lie on my bedroom floor and stare at the ceiling, wondering about what I was going to do next. Watching my ceiling fan spin like my life made me dizzy.

I was waiting for someone to wake me up from my constant nightmare and tell me it was nothing but a bad dream. All I wanted to hear was that I was going to be fine in the end, but as each day went by, it felt like the chances of that happening became less and less. This nightmare I was having was becoming more and more of a reality each day. I got to the point where I was afraid to close my eyes, yet afraid to open them. I just didn’t know how to express that being with someone so dangerous was the last time I felt safe.

I can now look back on how things used to be for me. I didn’t feel like a human being, I felt like a zombie walking around. I felt numb inside 85% of the time, almost like my soul had lifted and left me with nothing but my body. Most of the time, I felt as if I was standing in the middle of a crowd, screaming as loud as I could and no one would notice me.

I believe there is a big difference between living and existing. As for me, I didn’t know what living was. I was only existing in the world of the living. I never truly learned what it meant to live. Life to me was full of drugs, sex, alcohol, partying, lying, manipulating and deceiving people.

It was almost as if I was living in a completely different world than everybody else around me. I thought I had it all, it was the kinds of people you were happy with themselves and their lives that were missing out. I believed they were the ones who were living in another world, completely out of touch with reality, when I was really the one who was out of touch with reality.

People tried to help me, people around me truly cared, but what the hell did they know? They were the ones who needed the help, not me. I didn’t have the problems, everyone else just liked to blame me. Numerous people tried to help me to see what reality was, but I was self-indulged in denial. What I was, was an addict, complete with the addict thinking, the addict behavior and the addict lifestyle.

When reality hit me, my world crumbled. I felt like my whole life I had been living was a bunch of lies. The person I thought I was; was only a twisted distortion. I didn’t know who I was anymore. Neither did I know who my family was, who my friends were, what places were safe, what places weren’t. It was the scariest feeling I had ever experienced in the seventeen years I had been breathing and walking on this earth. Not only was it scary, it was lonely. The friends I thought I had, I didn’t know. The people in my family I thought I was close to me, really weren’t. The boy I thought I loved, was nothing but unhealthy. The place I called home was really a living hell.