I Want To Feel Powerful Again.

I want to feel powerful again.

I used to be a powerful girl. A hot girl. A confident girl.

Someone people looked up to and envied my confidence.

Now I’m just like the quintessential girl– anxious, meek, visibly insecure.

And now I’m even more like any other girl– I finally have an eating disorder. I wonder if every girl is just waiting for the time they’ll be sexually assaulted or get a legitimate eating disorder (not a weak half-eating disorder where you just kind of don’t eat enough or kind of eat too much).

It seems like a rite of passage into womanhood. Are you even a woman if you’re not insecure, have an eating disorder, are currently or previously in an abusive relationship, or have been sexually assaulted?

Or are you a mystical non-woman who actually, seriously, truly (not lying) is comfortable with herself and food is easy for her?

You’ll be admired but also kind of despised, because you’re so foreign and difficult to relate to and understand.

So far I’m still half-unicorn: I haven’t had any full-on sexual assaults. Semi-close calls, obviously. I mean come on. I’m a girl.

I always took morsels from men & treasured them like flecks of pure gold. They filled me up with the glittery golden liquid joy of being special, being wanted, being loved. I felt like a princess being bestowed with an effervescent tiara, perched on his lap.

I felt like I was temporarily lifted out of the gray, choppy waters of constant fear that something was wrong with me, the murky haze of sadness that didn't seem to have a beginning or an end. I felt sparkly and beautiful when I was blessed with morsels.

When he’d look at me under the moonlight, pressed up against his worn-out, faded blue car, & ask me “how are you so pretty?” I’d forget every hour he’s left my messages unresponded to. I was his special girl again. Nothing could ever be wrong. I know it sounds pathetic. But at that moment I had more than enough.

I wish I could get back the me I was before you 

i've always felt like there was something wrong with me but now i wonder if i'm truly really broken if something separates me from the gleeful, easy laughs of strangers those that can get along with most anyone while my tongue slows to a halt and a stutter and stop i wonder if everything that’s happened has shattered everything easy about me and now i'm just hard. difficult and unyielding, too stiff to touch i wonder if this is what it means losing my innocence and if there’s any way i can get it back or i'm just mutilated, maimed from somebody’s else’s words

rage

I want the dad back who picked me up from the school talent show and took me straight to Big Bear, pampering me with coloring books and hot baths.

Making me feel special inside, like I was in a different, more magical, sparkly world. Like everything was fun and tasted differently, because I was with him, and we were in the snow, in a little cabin.

Even just in his car on the way there I was the most special girl alive, the luckiest girl alive. He loved me. He liked me.

Enough to scoop me up and take me straight to fun.

Now my dad is dead, he’s full of gray, he’s never the same. He’s bitter where he used to be sweet. There’s dead ends where there used to be endless paths, escapades.

I don’t know if it’s my fault or his makeup. If it can’t be changed or if it’s because I changed, because I sullied it by growing up.

Where did I go wrong? Where did he start to change? When did he leave me, and become who he is now?

A cruel stranger, one who changes like the wind, one who I could never trust.