“Do I Really Ever Think of Me?” by Anonymous Teen

Maybe my mother was right. No, she never directly called me selfless, but her eyes always seemed to say it. I often disregarded my own feelings to please others, and though I didn’t recognize it at the time, I was teaching people how to treat me. I was allowing them to treat me as if I were beneath them. I allowed him to. In doing so, I began to lose myself. She was right about him from the beginning. The red flags were there, but I was too passionate, too hopeful, to walk away. It’s hard giving up on someone when you believe you can help them heal, when you think your love can fix what’s broken, but I learned the hard way that you can’t fix someone who doesn’t want to be fixed. I allowed him to turn me against my mother, to convince me that she didn’t want to see me happy. In reality, she saw me lowering myself for someone who couldn’t even love himself.

All of this happened during the beginning of my sophomore year in high school, when I should’ve been worried about my classes, school dances, or making new friends. Instead, I was battling a life-threatening illness and a silent war within my mind. I contracted COVID-19, which then led to pneumonia. I was bedridden for weeks. Every breath burned. I missed two full months of school, and when I returned, no one even noticed. My teachers didn’t check in. My classmates didn’t ask where I’d been. One of my teachers didn’t even realize I was back until the following week, despite seeing me in his class three times. Still, I kept going back to the boy who emotionally abused me. He manipulated me, lied to me, and called me names that no one should ever hear, especially from someone who claimed to love them. He told me I deserved to die. And I believed him.

At night, I would sneak downstairs, into the bathroom, and cry on the cold, hard floor. One night, I picked up a pair of heavy, black fabric scissors and pressed them against my arm. I thought that physical pain might hurt less than the emotional torment. The sharpness of the blades felt more honest than the words he said to me. I drew lines of red on my skin, believing that maybe this would finally quiet the noise in my head. While I was sick and fighting for my life, all I could think about was a friend I had lost to mental illness. I kept replaying our last conversations, and the haunting thought echoed: why wasn’t it me instead? I didn’t want to wake up. I wanted the sickness to consume me. I wanted my suffering to end. I wanted to take the easy way out. I wanted my mom to have one less person to worry about, one less financial burden. I wanted my older brother to feel the same heartbreak I felt when he slapped me and said I should have never existed. I wanted my grandmother to cry the way I did when she called me worthless because I didn’t run to my mom’s side when she purposely drank herself into numbness. I wanted him, the boy who said he loved me, to feel scared to lose me for once.

Before I could follow through with anything, my mom found me. She caught me holding the scissors, curled up and broken. And instead of scolding me, she held me. She held me through the silence, through the sobs, through the shaking. In that moment, I realized she didn’t just want better for me, she needed me to want better for myself. She took me to see my doctor, and that’s when everything finally came into focus. I was diagnosed with major depressive disorder and anxiety. For so long, I had convinced myself that this was just how life was supposed to feel, but the truth was, I had been carrying a weight that wasn’t mine to carry alone. Now that it had a name, I could finally begin to heal.

Therapy became a lifeline. Slowly, I began to rebuild the parts of myself I thought I had lost. I learned that my selflessness wasn’t always a strength. Sometimes, it was a way to avoid setting boundaries or facing abandonment. I had confused love with pain, sacrifice with survival. I wasn’t just being kind, I was being consumed. Through this healing process, I realized I couldn’t keep my story to myself forever, but I also didn’t have to share the deepest parts of my pain to make a difference. I could advocate without exposing every scar. I became more involved in my community. I served as an advisor for a local Teen Summit Convention dedicated to strengthening teen mental health and professional development. I connected with other youth who were struggling and supported them by creating empowering, open environments. Later, I joined a committee at my university that advocates for mental health awareness, mind and body positivity, and uplifting young women. I turned my pain into purpose.

This experience nearly ended me, but it also awakened me. I now know how to honor my emotions, protect my peace, and recognize my worth. I stopped waiting for others to validate me. I stopped needing to be seen by everyone else just to feel seen. Because now, I see me. And for the first time in a long time, I finally think of me.