A letter to my childhood bullies

Dear childhood bullies,

Was it worth it? The daily ridicule, the constant teasing and the relentless names. Did you enjoy it? Watching my confidence dissolve as I wilted into a former figure of myself. Was it funny? Seeing me now too afraid to look you in the eye. I hope that by giving me my daily dose of torture, by ruining my day, yours was some how made. Maybe then what you put me through would some how make sense. Even years down the road I still can't figure it out, you did and still do have so much power over me. You found an easy target in a girl who is too afraid to use her voice.
There's a thin line between words and wounds, they say, but it's a line so many of you mockingly danced across every single day. The earliest I remember you coming into my life was before kindergarten and you stayed all the way through high school, you even stood in line with me on graduation day. To the girls that would tease me over the fence about being blonde and shy, then would turn around and use me for my pool, I remember you. To the boy who gave me the nickname of “hippo”, which caught on to everyone, I remember you. To the kids who all teased me about my weight and joined in on calling me smelly, I remember you and I remember the note, it stung. To the kids who would eat the food off my tray then throw it back at me telling me that “I don't need it anyway” I remember you. To the kids who would push me in the halls, call me derogatory names, throw things at me, sit on me and make crank calls, I remember you. To the boy who publicly humiliated me in front of the whole class, I remember you. To the boys who made being my friend seem like having the social plague, I remember you too. I remember each of you, your faces are forever burned into my memory and every time my self confidence took a knock because of you. My thin veil of defenses stood no chance against you and I hastily took your critical voices and directed them inward where they wreaked havoc on my insides.
You made me resent who I was to the point of not wanting to exist anymore. You shattered my self esteem and nearly my spirit. You made me think, even still to this day that there is something wrong with me or that I am some how “defective”. You’re the authors to the words that run rampant in my mind.
I wish I could say that after all these years I've learned to forgive and forget, that I've grown a thicker skin and your words have no effect on me anymore. But I didn't and they do. Your cruel comments still stick to me like burs and are embedded like thorns. Growing up and in my adolescence I had paper like skin and wore my heart on my sleeve, that mixed with my unhealthy home life made me ripe for the picking, I was practically groomed for the position. I longed to be met with kindness, to belong and to be accepted. Though that was never the case. You made sure of that. Every where I went you were there telling me that I didn't belong, that I would never belong. That who I was would never, in a million years be acceptable. Do you know what it's like to have it feel like a whole school has turned their backs on you or what its like to eat lunch alone in a bathroom stall? I sure do. You made it that way. I was drowning and no one saw my struggle. Even in a graduating class of over 1,000 you still had the capability to make me feel as if I didn't have a soul to call a friend. That I was just some insignificant little speck of lint on your Letterman jacket.
When you lose yourself it happens slowly, gradually at first...a piece here, a piece there, you slip, you stumble, you try to regain your footing as another piece falls. Until one day your caught off guard when you walk by a mirror and don't recognize yourself anymore. Before you latched on I was bright and curious about life. Though you had me feeling like nothing more than a burden or a disappointment. I hated myself almost as much as I felt you hated me. I was exhausted physically, mentally but most of all emotionally. I wanted to close my eyes and never open them back up.
Because of you, everything inside of me died. You hollowed me out like a Halloween pumpkin. I started cutting away at any threads that were still connected to the outside world. I quit everything I was doing, mentors, softball, volunteering, you name it. I was going to drop out of life. I didn't want to burden anyone with my presence.
I wanted nothing more than to actually be as invisible as I felt, to disappear. I tried to in fact. That year that my brother said I was living with my grandparents in Florida, I was actually in a residential treatment center after countless failed suicide attempts. See after after a while I got tired of gluing a smile to my face every day and started displaying my pain on my skin. I wanted to control it. That's when my powers of invisibility failed me and the school guidance counselor notified my parents, though that's a whole different story. They expected the self harming to stop even though the harassment hadn't. So I turned to something else and spent years eating nothing more than an apple a day. I wanted to shrink down, to be unnoticed to some how fly under your radar. It didn't work. The less I consumed the more you tormented me. If not about my weight it was about my hair, what I chose to wear, or my lack of friends. Whatever I did you always seemed to notice.
Because of you every shred of self worth, dignity or respect I had was demolished. Bulldozed into oblivion. Because of you I will have a hard time trusting anyone ever, always believing there will be strings attached. Because of you I believe to my core I will never be good enough for anything, because of you I look at myself as broken and get anxious any time someone laughs thinking it's surely at me and because of you I am filled with self doubt.
Though over the years as I've begun to pick up and dust off some of those broken pieces I've noticed quite a few of them aren't as bad as you made me feel they were. With some super glue and a lot of TLC I'm beginning to rebuild what you tore down. I am here to tell you, and to tell myself. You may have won the battle, but you have not won the war.