My name is Brianna I am 16 and my English teacher told me to write an essay about a word that describes me. I’ve been playing with words for a few days now; fun, crazy, shy, and so on and so on. All of those words fit but none of them describe how I feel from the moment I get up to the moment I go to bed. I wake up at two am and take medicine go back to bed, wake up at six and get ready for school. Minute by minute bell by bell I go to school until I’m free. But only one word describes how I feel every moment during the day, whether I am at school or with my friends. My name is Brianna I am 16 years old and I am in pain.

Waking up is never fun the dream world never wants to let you go and you never want to let it go. And for me it’s a little more than that. My morning I have to wake up at two in morning so I can take pain medicine just so I can be well enough to go to school. I barely sleep through the night waking up constantly throughout the night and even though I’m on several pain medications and sleep medications it still doesn’t stop the pain from leaking through. By the time I’m ready to wake up for a real day my head is already pounding and I have to push through it and get ready. After breakfast which does usually involve some sort of chocolate and getting changed I drive in because the bus is two loud and the breaks on the bus are too high pitched and I wouldn’t be able to make it to first period. That’s how I have to wake up every morning to go to school; what do you do?

The bell rings class starts you don’t see the girl in the back flinch every time. Everyone talks and talks over another to be heard no one notices the girl in the back silent, never talking. They call her shy, they call her afraid but they don’t know the truth. They don’t see the pain in her eyes that she hides so well. They don’t want to see the truth so they just see a shy girl. She can be social when she has to; when I have to. When im around my friends I can talk about anything I can be loud and social they don’t notice my eyes don’t shine they don’t notice that my smile is fake and my laughter if forced. They don’t want to. They see what they want to see because that how people are they don’t see the pain behind the mask the horrors of my mind they only see the fake smiles and cheerful laugh.

They say the eyes are the window to the soul I wonder why that is. I’ve heard many times that you can read a person by their eyes on a good day my eyes are dark brown on a bad day my eyes are black as night. I don’t try in life very much. I go to school I do my homework I don’t go above and beyond I live and I barely do that. I try and live around the pain but the pain is the only constant thing in my life these days. School is iffy because I can’t make it every day my friends are here and there my family members have a life to live and I can’t blame them for that but I sit by myself in pain with pain always in pain. So the eyes are the window to my soul? Does that mean my soul is black as night?

My room is colorful and cheerful and it’s the only part of me that is these days. It helps me remember the times when I didn’t wake up to pain in the morning when pain was just for a night or two not a month or two. It helps me remember how to live and why I get up every morning. I don’t know why but it gives me my last hope the hope to survive this ongoing pain the pain that I can’t seem to overcome. Maybe one day my whole life will be like my room; maybe the pain will end and be nothing but a horrid memory.

You asked me to write a paper on a word about me. I did just as you asked. Though I hope you didn’t get more then you bargained for. For I know that sometimes we ask questions of ourselves and of others that we truly did not wish to know. Im sure you hoped I passed in the essay I wrote about being crazy then this one in fact I might just delete this file as it is but remember whenever you ask a question sometimes you get an answer you just didn’t bargain for.