High school is described as the best 4 years of anyone’s life; it was the worst for me. Right off the bat a week before high school started my best friend past away. I didn’t know how to cope with it cause at 14 anyone being sad you end up being bullied because you were different than them. At least that’s how it was for me; no one knew that I was just diagnosed with depression 4 months before she passed away. And I still didn’t understand what it meant to be depressed but her passing didn’t help and to be very honest, it still affects me to this day. When I got into the high school I wanted I was excited, I’d be working my way to my dream. Broadway. Yes, I wanted to be the next Barabra Streisand. But then I started to get bullied for mistakes I had made in middle school, the worst part is that it started by one of the few people I considered to be my second family. I dealt with it for 3 years without help or any way to cope with it. It was something that took the biggest toll on my mental health and I still deal with the mental trauma today. At the start of my senior year, I started to find myself writing away from my emotions. My mom noticed that I hadn’t been myself at home, I started to lock myself up in the room for hours on end when I got home from school. I’d only leave my room whenever it was time to eat. Any chance that I was given to stay home I’d take it. One day my mom came home from work and she gave me a journal. “You don’t talk to anyone anymore so maybe you’d like to talk to yourself.” Those words have stood with me since. 

Maybe that was the problem while kicking everyone else out of my world, I ended up kicking myself out with them. When I got my first journal I wrote ‘Dear World’. I don’t know why but I think that I ended up wanting to tell the world how I felt about it. Then it started, the anonymous ‘Dear World’ took off and she wasn’t slowing down. I wrote down my ‘Dear World’ and printed it, my school had a bulletin board that had all the latest things going on for the week or even the month so I put it on the board. I wrote about the stereotypes we are all forced to follow even when we think we’re being different. As soon as someone who is different is seen as popular and interesting, others follow like a moth to alight. Everyone started writing on the paper saying “Exactly!” or “Thank you for saying it, someone had to.” It felt like I was finally apart of the crowd but I needed to see if it wasn’t just a one-time thing, I kept going at it for about 5 months. It became a hit, so much of a hit that the school started a magazine and their own ‘Dear World’ column. I wanted to come out as ‘Dear World’ so I kept my words to myself. But I knew if I did my reputation would tarnish the good ‘Dear World’ brought me, so I stood quiet. My last ‘Dear World’ was released in June 2019, the day before my graduation. The last thing I said was “Thank you for 5 months of joy, I graduate with my words and relatable ideas. I’m sorry I took too long to share my thoughts, ‘Dear World’ leaves with me. You can try to copy but you’ll never top the original.” 

The ‘Dear World’ column got taken off the magazine November of 2019 after a lot of kids found the relatable content I’d make became a cliche that the school tried to write. You can’t kill the queen that easily.