To the people who watched me fall,

I don’t know if you remember me, but I most certainly remember you. It’s been a while, maybe a few years, but I still think about you often. More often than I’d like in fact. I bet you thought I’d forgotten all about you, I bet you never spare me a thought anymore. I bet you thought your words and actions would never end up doing what they did.

To your credit, I’m sure you never accounted for the fact that alienating a girl from her entire peer group would still be hurting her so badly 13 years after the fact. I’m sure you didn’t know that the venom being spewed from your mouth in the form of insults would bury itself so far underneath her skin to drive her to try and cut them out herself. I’m sure you thought that your loud, obnoxious laughs, which were always obviously pointed at her, wouldn’t still echo through her head every now and again. I’m sure you never thought that making other people laugh would cost someone else so many tears.

I bet you also may have thought that by sitting on the sidelines and keeping your mouth shut, you weren’t doing anything wrong. I guess you thought that by not adding to the problem, you were free of any blame or guilt. Was it interesting sitting by and watching me cry? How many times did you ask yourself if you should offer any help before you decided it would be better for you if you just kept your mouth shut?

How many hours a night did you sit back and think of all the things you’d done to her? How many days did you spend mortified by the fact that you were sucking the life and happiness out of someone? How many times did you consider stopping? Did you ever?

Did you just wake up every morning and think about how fun and funny it would be to push her farther and farther down the hole?

Well I have some news for you. She grew up.

I am writing to you now at the age of 18 years old. I know you were never very good with math so allow me to tell you that it has been 13 years since you started pushing me, since you decided with a look that you despised me.

In those 13 years you destroyed me. You took the person I was and batted her around so badly, that by the time you suddenly decided that “Amanda Linn is cool and awesome,” I didn’t know who you were talking about. I couldn’t even recognize the person looking back at me in the mirror. It took me all of high school to find out who you were talking about, and in that time I found that even you really don’t know her very well. So, I want to introduce you to her.

Her name is Amanda Linn. She is five feet and three inches tall. She was born on February 26^th, 1998 under a new moon. She has medium length brown hair that is extremely wavy and curled at the ends. She has eyes that look gray or green or blue depending on what light you see her in. She isn’t the skinniest person you’ll see, her hips are wide, her wit cinches in, and her arms are bigger than you’d assume, but still people call her beautiful.

She believes in love more than anything. She still wishes on stars. She loves reading books, watching shows on Netflix, and playing video games. Her favorite movies are “Star Wars: Empire Strikes Back”, “Singing in the Rain”, and “The Princess Bride”. She loves all the traveling she does and she keeps dreaming of one day doing it with someone romantic and endearing.

You hurt her. You threw her down a pit and waited until you decided she was good enough for you to help her out. You didn’t immediately realize it and you still may not realize it now, but she is broken. There are pieces of herself that she feels are missing. There are pieces that you out right stole from her yourself. There are things about herself that she can’t remember because she doesn’t want to remember the pain. You told her she wasn’t good enough, you showed her she wasn’t good enough, and now that she openly believes and states that she isn’t good enough, you take it upon yourself to swoop in as the hero of the story and tell her that what she is saying. What you made her believe is a lie.

You let her destroy herself and burn in the flames of self-hatred and loathing that you ignited yourself.

But, like a phoenix, she rose from the ashes better and stronger than you could have ever imagined.

There are still days when I look at myself in the mirror and don’t like what I see but most times I’m quite pleased. I graduated from high school as one of five valedictorians. I got my NOCTI certification which states that I am eligible for an entry level job in the Information Technology field. I got accepted to every single college I applied to. I have ties to one of the fastest growing companies in Pittsburgh, ABG Capital, and on August 29^th I begin my journey through college at Robert Morris University.

In a way, I have you to thank for all of this. Without your cruel comments, the limitations you decided were right for me, and your overall despicable and deplorable behavior towards me I don’t know that I would be the person I am today.

Of course, you may take this to mean that you can take credit for my achievements and who I am in general but let me remind you that if I myself had not decided to prove all of you wrong, you would be responsible for my death. You still are responsible for the years of emotional, mental, and even physical traumas that you inflicted on me.

I am not writing to you to tell you how terrible you are, though. I want you to go on in life and treat people better than you have treated me, to teach your kids not to act as you had, and to know that if people also treat you so horribly that it is possible to overcome it.

So, remember me. Start thinking about me, about the person that I have become, and remember that we could have had something wonderful, if only you had been a little bit nicer to me. Remember to be nicer to the people that you will meet. So, once again I say:

Dear People Who Hurled Me To The Ground, I do not hate you. I made over 10 new friends at college all by myself because of the person I am today. So thank you for that. But next time, don’t be such a dick about all of it.

Sincerely,

The Broken Girl Who Learned To Fly