Manacled to “Friendship”  

Seated on the floor of the bathroom with the shower running in the background, my eyes had finally dried 
and I wearily stared at the wall in front of me, a hollow shell of the girl I used to be. I eventually forced myself up and 
into the shower to quickly rinse off. I robotically ate my dinner and went to bed, falling into a blissfully dreamless 
slumber, praying to get sick before school the next day. The following morning, I blearily I got ready in a blur; one 
minute I was brushing my teeth, the next I was in my desk at school. Sitting alone, I watched as my best friend 
Mona* walked into class with t​ hem​: Natalie*, the funny, popular girl that all the boys in my class had crushes on, and 
Monica* the outgoing athlete. I had thought introducing them would be a good idea. Man was I wrong. 
Natalie and Monica seemed to have a personal vendetta against me, but I didn’t have anyone else I 
considered friends, so I stuck with them. They mocked me- I came back. They ignored me- I came back. They taunted, 
derided, and publicly humiliated me for their own pleasure- yet I still came crawling back. I hated it, and they hated 
me, but I still found myself being dragged back to them by some invisible force.  
Naive, I rationalized their treatment of me. Natalie wasn’t actually being mean; I was just weak and couldn’t 
handle a little teasing. Her constant comments about my grades, appearance, and irrelevance were all in good fun. 
Monica never meant to hurt my feelings, she just wanted to play around. When she snapped at me or yelled over me 
when I talked, getting up in my face to make herself and others laugh, she was just pretending. Mona, the girl I’d 
known since the first day of kindergarten, didn’t see me as less than Natalie and Monica. She didn’t pretend not to 
notice when they belittled me nor did she laugh when they could tell it was working. She wouldn’t. None of them 
would. 
I got used to the heavy chains that seemed to weigh down my shoulders and the sparse air that never 
seemed to quite reach my lungs. My grades started slipping and I felt myself spiraling. I normalized being ganged up 
on and openly shamed for who I was as a person. I justified the things that even my naive-little-mind realized weren’t 
normal by siding with them. They weren’t in the wrong- I was. 
I was the stupid one with the bad grades, so of course they would call me out on it. I was the one who 
managed to make the uniform that everyone wore look bad, so of course that meant I was just ugly. And pathetic. And 
a try-hard. And just plain not worth it. 
I eventually realized that what they were doing was cruel and that their actions weren’t born of friendship, 
but rather, of hate. But at that point it didn’t matter anymore. 
Because now I hated me too.