Everyone has flaws, but yours matter the most. Dig deep, remember every mistake you’ve ever made, every bad decision, every imperfection. Think back on every negative interaction you have ever had and figure out why it was your fault, rationalization doesn’t exist. Tear yourself apart, look in the mirror for an hour and find every issue with your outward appearance. Your face, your weight, your hair, anything could be the reason why you aren’t right. Convince yourself you’re fundamentally wrong, every single part of you.

So you’re bad, deplorable, irredeemable, inhuman, what do you deserve for that? Start to isolate, you don’t deserve happiness, you deserve to be alone. Stop eating, food is for people, you aren’t a person, you’re something less. Besides, you could stand to lose all that weight, isn’t that part of what makes you wrong? Indulge in every substance you can get your hands on. Not for the high or the rush, but because it starts destroying your body and your mind. Drink yourself numb every weekend, maybe alcoholism will be good for you. Start cutting again, hell, maybe go the extra mile and bang your arms on furniture, bruise yourself silly. Expose yourself to every thing that could make you feel bad bout yourself, that’s what you need to do. You can’t ignore it anymore, this is what you are, you deserve to suffer because of it.

i pick scabs
i’ve picked since i was little
every scrape and scratch
i’ve picked and bled and hurt but
i kept picking
i still pick scabs
i pick bigger things to
i pick my head
and my mind
it starts to heal and i flick off the growth
i know i’ll feel better if it’s left to repair
but i know i’ll feel better if get it off
i pick scabs but
i think there’s nothing left to pick

I like you now, but there was a time when I loved you, and that relationship did a lot of things to my life. Its hard to not remember that.

i don’t know who i am. i’ve lost all sense of being a person, my life isn’t about me anymore, it feels like it never has been even though i know it was before. it feels like i’m just watching everything happen and i’m just going. i don’t feel like i have any purpose or place to go. i’m tired. all i’m doing is drifting and hurting so bad and it feels like for absolutely nothing. i just want to stop going.

This is the only essay I still have from the sixth grade. The prompt was to chose a historical or famous building or structure and write in its point of view. I got wonderful feedback from my teacher and I'm genuinely suprised I produced this at the age I was then.

The horrible scent of smoke stains the air. Blood lays dried at my feet. Disgusting. Not the blood or the scent but the acts the horrible soldiers commit. Every day I see a new body drop. Near or far I can see it all. The cracks of a skull hitting the ground have become a sound long heard for me. How children stand so bare, so thin, withering away from lack of food. The smog fills up the sky overhead. Made up of the burned bodies, the smoke covers the camp, filling innocent lungs with death. And all because of a race, a religion? The worst part hasn't even come. When I turn, I can sometimes catch a glimpse of happy soldiers. Laughing, as they head into camp. They don't even care to help, or at least be compassionate. If I could help I certainly would, but I can't. The thoughts nag at me every day to help them, to save them. But I am nothing to them. Just the barrier between death and freedom. A still, unmoving object. I am the fence at Auschwitz.

It haunts me every day here. How that taunting sign lies above the camp. Arbiet Macht Frei. Work sets you free. No one is ever set free here. Always sent to the gas ovens once they are too weak to work. How they gain some hope as they walk through the treacherous gates and see the sign. They never see it coming. Always coming on a train to the camp and never leaving, save for the fortunate survivors that are able to flee. They might think they know what horros await but it is worse than thinkable. They might spend their days building more barracks for prisoners or digging their own graves after being sent to the right side of the line, as they are put in lines when they first arrive. The right is for workers. Or they could barely even see most of the camp on the left side and be sent to their death. People will walk around one morning, then I wouldn't see them the next, or the next, or the next. A horrible thing is to see the children. Wide eyes full of sorrow would stare right past me longing to be free. So skinny, so pale, how all the innocent people would make me want to die myself. I see so much here. I see too much here.

The outside of the camp is even worse. Happy Nazis heading to work, just laughing. Adult Germans walking along as if nothing is happening inside the walls of the barracks and crematory. Inside the gas ovens and the workplaces. Inside of me. Acting as if they never had known Jews would be sent here every day. But they do know, and that is the worst part. Knowing they are believing that these people here deserve to die makes me so angry. How could one ever think of that? No one deserves to die or suffer like they do in this camp. But their minds are just poisoned by this belief through Hitler's army. Mostly by Hitler. That terrible man made this camp exist. He made me to watch it all. It is horrible to watch the outside.

The worst part hasn't even come. It is horrible to watch the suffering and those ignoring it, but things are even worse because I can't help. I can't help end the suffering, the death, the torture and brutality of life in this camp. Sometimes, I wish I were a Jew, someone inside the camp. Then maybe I could do something instead of just watch. Watch it all happen as people are killed and worked to death. One million people will die at this camp and I can do nothing, nothing! Kids will be shot in front of my eyes as I just sit and keep people from freedom. If only I could just move, move myself to make a hole in the fence just big enough for a person to sneak out. But no. Fences cannot move. They cannot stop a murder or help a child or set someone free. They can only sit, watch, and keep things enclosed. All I can ever do is let them die.

I hear the sound of a gunshot as I look to see a body lying beside me. A woman. It can be hard to tell with their hair. Screams echo around the walls of the barracks as I see a soldier drag the pale, lifeless figure to the crematory. Her head has been shaved and I see a number smeared in a deep blue along her arm. Tears flood the eyes of a nearby child too small to be healthy. Her son, most likely. I wish I could shut my eyes and look away, but I never can. I try to stare at the sky overhead as comfort but all I can see is the smokestack of burned bodies towering above me. A guard spots the small child not working and I know too well what will happen. It seems the child knows too when the soldier starts to march towards him. As the boots inch closer and closer the glossy eyed child squeezes another tear out of his eye as he grips his fist around me. The stomp of the boots grows louder and louder when the child lets out a large sob and closes his eyes. He whispers unsteadily what sounds like a prayer over and over. Suddenly the boy's hand is snatched up tightly by the Nazi and I stare him down as he is dragged to the gas ovens. Auschwitz is a land of pure evil.