Before the facility, I’d at least had tumbling. Every afternoon and weekend were spent on the mats under harsh lights, chalk dust in the air, blisters on my palms, the sound of my breath syncing with each run and flip. The repetition, the rhythm…It used to be the one thing that could drown everything else out.
It helped me not to think. Not about what I’d done. Not about who I wasn’t supposed to want.
I’d lived for that kind of forgetting, for the ache in my muscles, for the quiet that came when the music stopped and my head finally went still.
But when I came home, I didn’t go back. The idea of mirrors and eyes on me made my stomach turn. The gym sent an email saying they missed me. I never replied.
While everyone else was building a life in high school, I’d been relearning how to eat lunch in a cafeteria without flinching. How to sit in a desk chair and not feel like I was beingmonitored. How to exist in a hallway full of people without breaking down from the noise.
I couldn’t even fake it. There was nothing to write.
No “interests” that didn’t feel like someone else’s life.
After a long pause, I typedNone.
Then I erased it and typedIndependent reading. Occasional drawing.
Lies.
Sort of.
I read. But mostly articles about attachment theory or trauma recovery blogs I never commented on. I drew sometimes. Faces I’d never show anyone. Most of them looked like ghosts. Or boys I wished I’d never met.
I stared at what I’d written for another few seconds, then hit next.
INTENDED AREA OF STUDY
I’d been dreading this part too.
My fingers hesitated over the drop-down menu as rows of majors scrolled by—Biology, Business, Communications, Criminal Justice...
Each one felt like a dare.
Pick something. Pretend you’re someone.
But how do you choose a future when you’ve spent the last two years trying not to be a person?
There were days I couldn’t even decide what to eat, when I couldn’t choose between brushing my hair or curling into bed and pretending I didn’t exist.
A major?
That felt like planning for a version of me that didn’t exist yet.
That maybe never would.
I selectedUndecidedand moved on before I could think too hard about it.
I stared at the next section of the form, but the words started to blur.
Letters lost their shapes. My chest felt too tight.
I pushed back from the desk and stood, barefoot on the cold hardwood floor of my room, stretching like that would somehow knock something loose. Shake the numb off.
It didn’t.
Nothing could.
I sat back down and let my fingers rest on the edge of the keyboard, not typing, not moving, just watching the little blinking cursor flash in and out of existence like it couldn’t decide if it belonged, either.
