This girl refuses to spend
anymore of her life
kneeling in the dirt,

tending to others needs
before my own.

My spine will not be bent
so others can stand tall.

I am worth so much more than that.

I could not outrun my name

nor the expectations that came with it.

You wore it as a badge

I wore it as a curse.

I didn’t mean to be so harsh
to turn my own tongue into a silver blade,
each word spewing from my mouth coated in blood,
but now I am choking on the metallic taste

I didn’t mean to be so cruel,
to break my bones over and over again
reopening old wounds with blunt scissors
attempting to crawl out of my own skin.

But now I resemble a wild animal,
clawing at the very fibres of my being
destroying everything in my path

yet still believing I can sew myself back together
no matter the damage I cause...

There are holes in my memory,
missing pieces of time
claimed by malnutrition.

It is a bitter pill to swallow,
knowing that my own actions
had such severe consequences.
Knowing that I so wholeheartedly believed
that what I was doing was right,
that it was what I deserved.

Losing pieces of myself
to an identity that did not belong to me.
A girl is not supposed to be a disorder
becoming nothing more than an illness personified.

I naively believed
that surely
there was a limit
to how much loss
one person could suffer
before adulthood.