When I’m not neutral, when I’m not just going through the motions, I’m angry. I hate it. The bile that curls up in my chest, that hardens me. These days I’m either too busy to be sad, or I’m angry, upset. I’ve started having these waves of emotion. Intense. I feel like I can’t breathe, I’m scared and I curl up. I feel like I can’t go on, even though that is irrational, even though that is pathetic and defeatist.

I don’t want to be that person who lives life full of hate. I don’t want to think the worst of people, I don’t want to hold on to the feeling of betrayal. I just don’t know how to get rid of it. I feel like there is some scarlet letter burned into my heart and it wreaks havock on my humanity.

At a really low point this last year, I remember all my friends crowding around and telling me all the wrong things I’d done since I’d known them. They made a list. I sat down, with that sinking feeling you get when you know something awful is going to happen. I felt like that feeling was on repeat, each minute it’d start up again.

The things they said, they anger me know, because they seem like such slaps to the face, judgements from high above, like they were so perfect and I was so imperfect. I hate them for that, because even now the long list they made sticks to me. It marks me as a bad person. I have to go crawling back to them, next year, when I go back to school, away from home. They’re all I have, and I’ll have to crawl back to them, hug them, beg their forgivness, show I’ve changed. They’ll judge me. People say that a friend never has to explain, but everything I do and say requires an explination.

I hate it, at night I get so scared about going back, its getting closer soon summer will end. I used to think, for a little bit that I could pick things up and go back and be okay. Now I’m really worried. I still feel the letter burned into me, I don’t know how to tear it off, to not feel like a rejected outcast.