Dear Me,

You have never felt a moment of peace. Your therapist told you this fact about yourself way too early on and suggested that your mental health issues might stem from there. Every person I have known and loved has let me down, and my first real heartbreak was not because of a man, but because of my best friend. I know this about you because I lived through your family reading your journal entries, which I know is the reason you have never kept a journal since. The words that you desperately seek to place somewhere cannot be held by paper, so your brain keeps them, and they weigh you down.

You have always been told you are smart, but you have always felt less smart than your brother, and occasionally, the boy who was considered the smartest in our high school years. I desperately sought control, because nothing in my life made sense, and I felt so neglected, unwanted, and hard to love. So I took it out on what I knew — food, exercise, school, social media. Nothing was ever neutral. Everything became an escape from reality or a way to self-sabotage. Everything was a flicker of joy or a weapon of destruction. Because I hated myself for so long, I did not know how to interact with people and yet every single person knew exactly how to target me. Somehow it was always me that people hated, and somehow, I never understood why.

I am left wondering whether being the loudest person in the class was actually because of a cognitive malfunction or if it was to drown out the noise in my head by being louder than it. I do not know if the younger me just wanted to draw some attention to herself, to feel special. To feel wanted. I have never felt a moment of safety, so I became hypervigilant of my surroundings, I restricted myself to a few friends, I deleted all of my social media, and apart from my best friend in high school, I was all alone. I trusted no one. I built so many layers around myself that I refused to allow myself to show any kind of weakness. I was seen as hostile, cold, and defensive. I do not let people touch me. People’s touch stings, and allowing them to see or feel any part of me makes me both angry and physically sick. And yet nobody noticed.

During my first few days at university, people just told me I was intimidating, slightly mean, and definitely very defensive. They did not understand why. I am so glad, that was the point. I wrote my personal essay about trauma. How everyone around me has trauma. I wrote my high school essay about how people with traumas decide to become good or bad. No one knows how. It is like walking on a tightrope. And yet no one picked up on it. I was giving it to them on a silver platter, and no one noticed a pattern.

I have never known what it feels like to be fully considered. There have been moments when I felt considered, but never as much as I craved though. My dietary restrictions have made me a burden when I expected it to be a moment of care and love. I am always made to feel like it is simply an added burden for people to think about before picking a restaurant or committing to an activity. Booking trips always end up being a nightmare. I was always too shy of a kid to ask for the things I wanted, so I remained silent, and when asked, I said everything was fine with me. I remained unable to confide in people about my struggles, and my high school Psychology teacher called me “hyper-independent.” I dealt with it the way I knew, by brushing it off and acting like it is not a big deal, it never has been. I forgive people too easily because at least then I have control. I can control how hurt they make me feel, and I control the fact that I no longer think about what they have done negatively, so we can all move on. This is how I also developed control problems.

While all of this was happening, your mental disorder was interpreted as laziness and inflexibility, and your control issues were seen as being proactive and in charge, and no one questioned your hyper-independence because why would they be in an individualistic, capitalist society? You just wanted to be loved, and you wanted to experience a moment of safety. You wanted to lie down and not feel on edge. You wanted to feel like you were not drowning or being suffocated every day. So you stayed in your room, you isolated yourself; you love being alone more than you love most things in the world. Because at least then, you do not have to construct yourself of broken pieces and unrecognized trauma to fit society’s standards of “normal.” In your bed, you can just exist. Hey, at the end of it, at least you are still seen as normal, because guess what, now you are just an introvert, and sometimes shy. You just do not like to interact with people, and that they can understand. I am still waiting for my moments of peace.

I do not know why I wrote you this letter. Probably as an attempt to understand you better, or maybe because I cannot keep a journal, so a letter to myself was the closest thing I could get to it. However, I am rooting for you to find your moment of peace, and I hope that through my attempts to understand everyone around me, I can one day say that I understand myself.

With love,

Yourself.