One moment you are someone everyone knew for a good reason. The next you are someone everyone knows for the wrong reason. No matter what you do, you try to make that bad reason good. But no good comes from it. I would sit in front of the mirror for hours and hours at a time, trying to change something that I cannot change. All because of the things people have said. You can change your hair, the things you wear, and your makeup. But you can not change this. This is unchangeable. This is irreversible. This is unmodifiable.

One moment you are living your life like a regular person. The next some person is making a joke. This one joke. Again and again. How can this one joke be so funny to one person yet be another person's worst nightmare? It turns grins into knives, smiles into guns, giggles into grenades, and laughs into death. How can one joke turn into something so poisonous to another person? But the jokes, they keep coming, one after another. Then another. And another.

These people, they are committing a crime. They are committing a first degree felony. They don’t know this though. They will never know this. So they keep going. With the jokes.

“You are so lucky.”

“Lucky, you get to leave class early.”

“Lucky, you are eating in class.”

But am I lucky? I don’t feel lucky. Yeah, the doctors say I’m a miracle. It’s a miracle I made it that long. A miracle that I survived. But am I lucky? Is it lucky that I’m stuck with a disease that can kill me? Lucky that I have this disease that affects me everyday? I don’t feel lucky. Other people say I have luck. But they don’t know. They have no clue. They are lost.

If they only knew. If they only knew my life, or only knew what I do everyday. It is not pretty, no.  

“You are different.”

“You are strange.”

“You are weird.”

“Don’t touch my baby, you are gonna give it Diabetes.”

That one single word. How can this single word change my life? How can it shatter everything? How could it change my life so much? How could it make me hate myself so much, all because of what people say?

“Did you get diabetes from eating too much?”

“Only fat people have diabetes.”

“I’m gonna get diabetes from eating all this candy.”

“Oh my friend, he is fat, So he is gonna get diabetes.”

The teasing, jokes, comments, puns, humor. They will all kill me before this disease ever will. That’s a fact. They dig in likes knives, penetrating my pancreas. Like guns shooting my head. Like a grenade blowing me up.  Like my own thoughts drowning me. Even I, Myself, Me, turned on my own self. I believe the things they say. I let them in and I let them drill so far down into my brain, that they reach my heart. They attack my heart. Leaving it bruised and weak. Leaving, ready to give up. To stop pumping blood.

But eventually you just stop caring. Your body goes numb. Like you have been damaged so much that you can not be damaged anymore. You have been beaten, stabbed, shot, tripped,  hit, slammed, anything and everything. You have jumped into the deep end of the pool even though you don’t know how to swim. You know that you can’t swim, but you can’t help it. You fall farther, and farther down into the cold deep water. Knowing that no one is going to come to help.

Until you see that ray of sunlight coming through. Even though you have been down in the dark for way too long. You see that glimpse of hope. You try your hardest to reach out and grab that glimpse, because who know when another glimpse of hope will come around. And when you find that glimpse of hope, don't ever let go. Never. Never let go.

From now on if you look in the mirror and you can't see anything beautiful about yourself, then get a better mirror. Look a little closer, or stare a little longer. Because despite what everyone has told you, something inside you never gave up. So never give up.