I have always written down about my life...but I never thought I would ever get the chance to do something life changing through writing.
I don't even know where to start...I guess it all started when I was in first grade.
I think that's really when our real lives begin. When we start to develop our own personalities, aside from what our parents had wanted us to be.
We inherit traits from our family. We pick up certain habits from them, we embody our parents in a strange way... at least I did.
From the very beginning I was the spitting image of my mother. I still am today. When we go walking around people comment on how we look like twins!
But I never got anything else from my mother besides my outside features...I got everything else I have from my dad's side.
My weird and extremely loud way of talking... my drive and ambition to go up and beyond what's expected...and the tendency to go a little insane at times.
I really used to be like my Grandmother though...My grandma is the loudest person I know and she is never afraid to say what's on her mind.
She came her from France at the end of World War II. She was European model.
She still walks around as if she is! She used to teach me how to put on makeup, and walk in heels. By the time I was four all I wanted was a prom dress and a man to drape over my arm as my favorite accessory.
But there was also another quality I had taken from my Grandma. My grandma had a beauty obsession. She would refuse to eat in front of anyone, and would always comment on my looks. She would tell me that I need more cover-up to cover up my facial features that were not "beautiful" to the eye.
I have never questioned her because some part of me knew that she was right deep down inside.
My grandma and my mom were popular in school.
I guess I was up until first grade when everything began to change. I would only wear the prettiest dresses, and I would only have play-dates with the select few. So, in a way I was popular.
I had skipped kindergarten because I was smarter than everyone else in my class. My problem was, that I had no problem expressing the fact that I was! I guess you can say that's when things began to go down hill...but I can still argue with some other dark moments in my life.
another thing that I was before 1st grade, was the cutest little girl you'd ever seen.
I have tapes of me when I was little, giving an Oscar speech, and talking about why I think everyone should be like me and be afraid of nothing.
But then there came the day I became afraid of everything.
By the age of 6 I was diagnosed with Trichatillamania.
Trichatillamania is a brain disease that makes your hair fall out.
That’s always what I told everyone so they wouldn't make too much fun of me. But really its a fancy term for saying your hair falls out so you begin to pull it out of your body because of unnatural desires of beauty and pain.
Luckily, for me it was only my eyelashes. I know people...or well, I have read and seen pictures of people...that had pulled out all the hair in their scalp, eyes, and eyebrows.
I used to have the longest lashes. Everyone use to tell me that I was the girl with the pretty brown eyes. That I would bat an eye and houses in Thai-land would blow away....
But then I lost that. After everyone began to know about it, I began to lose not only friends, but self-confidence. I became very....externally internal.
I would spend most of my days sitting under a tree singing to myself all alone, because no one wanted to play with me..a freak. A Trichatillamaniac. They used to say the meanest things about me...
I remember one day when I was at SACC (an after school program that no longer exists because the board of education loves to suck the life out of everything, RIP SACC)...I remember that my friends and I were playing on the sea-saw outside.
I did have a few select friends...but they had all grown up and changed into people that used my secrets as weapons on me... its always the one's you think you'll love forever...
But that is a memory for a different time.
We were playing on the sea-saws...or better to say..they were playing on the sea-saws. One of the girls who I used to call a "friend" Had told me I couldn’t because I was too big, and the sea-saw couldn't hold my weight. And then one of her friends said that I was still lighter than before...you know "without the eyelashes".
I just remember crying that day. Most of my memories of school are about me crying...Isn't that sad? To have most of your childhood memories be about crying?
I guess it could have been worse, you know? But it was pretty bad, looking back at it all.
Pretty people are made out of ugly experiences. And the true beauty in them, is the strength they had to over come the ugliness of life and keeping going.
I’m still trying to break through to the other side. I'm still stuck in the ugly...fighting my way to get out.
But I will become a pretty person one day.
Someday.
But not today.
Hayley Michelle, 14 years old. September 19, 2011.
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