Walls

When I entered high school, putting up walls to protect myself seemed to be the thing to do. I didn't know many people, and I didn't really fit in with my friends. I was the black sheep of the group, please excuse the cliche. I had a rough childhood. I was bullied a lot, and pushed around. I had been abused in a few different ways. I didn't trust very many people, and it took a while for someone to earn my trust. In order to avoid more abuse when I entered high school, I put up many walls around myself. No body got throught them. Some people think they didn't, but they really didn't.

Those walls worked for me for a while, but after a time it seemed that I was only making things worse for me. I had no real friends, and I needed someone. Because of this I fell into a bad depression, where I suffered for a long time, and struggled with the addiction of self harm. I've been clean from self harm for about a year now, but it doesn't make it any easier sometimes. Lately, with the stress of going back to school, and dealing with my monster of a brother, I've found old feelings are resurfacing. I've begun to think how I used to, and I don't know how to change it. I feel like I'm hanging off the edge of a cliff, but there's no one around to help me.

Most of my friends and family have no idea that this is going on. Heck, most of my family didn't see it the first time it was happening. They knew I was depressed, but they figured it was just teenage angst. I suppose for a time it could've been. But not the whole time. During the darkest part of my depression, I was possessed by a demon. Not like in the movies, where someone would talk in a creepy voice and bend over backwards, or spin their head around. But there was something evil controlling my, because I had let it into my life. Somehow, whether it be through the cutting, the insecurity, or something else, this thing managed to find its way through my maze of walls. I struggled with this things for probably a year. It was miserable. I had made some new friends, and they, along with some of my older friends, managed to help me get rid of the thing.

For the first time in my life, I felt free, like I didn't need the walls. But that didn't last long. Once school started up again, and life got back into its "normal" routine, the walls went right up again. And I've been struggling to knock them down ever since. Not many people have met the real me, and most of who have, haven't met the real me the first time they've met me. Most people have just seen the mask, and not the girl behind the mask. At this particular moment in time, I think there only may be one person who has seen beyond the mask in recent months, but sometimes I wonder if they really see me at all.

I managed to take down my walls for about a week this summer, but soon after that, they started to go back up. I feel like I'm trapped in a prison I built around myself, and there's no way out. These walls that started out as such a good idea have just screwed me over in the end. I'm still working on pulling them down, but it seems like everytime I get one down, another goes up, and it's out of my control.