As I walked up the stairs of my school on my way to the fifth class of the day, I bumped and almost fell face-forward. This is normal and par for the course for me. Every day, I walk up, down, and will invariably and almost always end up almost falling or bumping on the stairs. Be it morning, noon, rain or shine, it will happen. 

It has been happening for quite a long time, and it shouldn't bother me nor should it even be something mentionable at this short point in my wee little life. 

No one even laughs at me. Well, not anymore, at least. Still, whenever I bump, fall, or crash, I immediately feel embarrased and ashamed. 

"What will they think of me? They are all staring at me! Oh no, they're making fun of me, aren't they?"

These thoughts race through my mind as I walk along the halls, as I carry my binder and my notebook. As I run towards the lunch line, and as I take my seat in class. 

Each accident triggers a Pavlovian effect and I can't help but go through this process. Why it it, just two years after I supposedly vanquished my demons and ran away, that I still feel the simmering heat of shame and embarrasment?

I am unfazed when talking about violence, about war, about a host of topics, but when I begin to even recall my most deep and hurtful memories, I begin to cry uncontrollably?

Three years later, I still struggle with being myself. Sometimes I feel like I overcame the shame, the bullying, the loneliness, and the humiliation that I suffered, but then I am constantly reminded that I don't have any people that I can truly call my best friends and that I push people away because of my attitude and the physical blemish that graces my face. 

Sometimes I wish that I could be normal like all the other kids, to have friends, to be able to relate to them as a peer, as a fellow, but I remember that I am an outcast in somebody's eyes no matter what, and that my eye is not enough to grasp the whole situation that I face daily. 

Sometimes I wish that I could live in a new neighborhood, a new city, a new state or a new country just so I could do people a favor and not harm them anymore. They don't want to see such an ugly eyesore. They don't want to talk the lonely excuse of a human being. 

As a small infant I began to understand a singular idea that the world was cruel and that you needed to be alone in order to survive. As a child the book and the pencil were my shield and sword against the rapidly encroaching mass of nightmarish monsters that constantly threatened to push me off the cliff of sanity into a sea of insanity from which I could never return.

And they did. For years, I began to climb out of that sea of insanity back towards the land of the normal, the sane, and the society. However, even now, my mind is now threatening to throw itself back into the comfortable sea of insanity from which I tried to escape.

I have internalized all of this for my entire life and I fear the day in which the people who believed that I came back from the sea find out that all they saw was a pathetic copy and find that their efforts to help me have been in almost complete vain. I have never told any of this to anyone else because I am deeply afraid that they may look at me as a freak or as an overemotional teen without a spine who dwells too long on the past. However much that I fight to vanquish these demons, they seem to once again rise from the dead stronger than before.

However, I am still looking forward towards the day when I climb back from the sea of insanity and when I have defeated my demons for the last time.