I
DESERVE Isabella
Burgos
IT
It’s happened to me before. So I guess you could say I’m used to it. I’m used to being betrayed—or, I guess, feeling like I am being betrayed. There was that time in the fourth grade when my best friend decided that she didn’t like me anymore because her new friends hated me. Or that time when my boyfriend of almost a year switched schools and cheated on me a month later. Yeah. The best part about that one, though, was when I realized that everyone I trusted already knew and just didn’t tell me. I lost ten friends in three days because of that. I was in the 8th grade. And the list goes on. Truly, it does. I could sit here and tell you about them, but that’s embarrassing, and though my tolerance for embarrassment has skyrocketed over the years, I’d really rather not. I felt the same way in all these situations, that’s one thing I can say for certain. No matter how much I’d grown up in the time periods between these instances, I still felt that pit in my stomach every single time. A pit that was packed to the brim with self-doubt and self-pity. I felt bad for myself. And inevitably, those feelings escalated into that of self-loathing. I hated who I was because I somehow tricked myself into believing that I was at fault for the way other people treated me. I’d simply convinced myself that I deserved it. I deserve every bad thing that happens to me ever is something that I’d grown accustomed to reminding myself every chance that I got. I hated a lot of things about me. I hated myself for hating myself, but I also hated when I’d constantly make excuses for myself simultaneously. It was very very hypocritical of me, and I hated that too. The only thing that I seemed to actually like was sleeping, when I slept I became Switzerland in a total war. For this reason, I slept a lot, definitely too much to be considered healthy. My mom had woken me up a few minutes after 4:00 PM. The summer sun was beating through the folding gate that blocked the fire escape. The metal is definitely warm, at least, is the first
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