Understand?

I could never in a million years sit here and type this and tell you that I know how you feel. That I know what you are going through. Because quite frankly, I don't. I don't know how how you as an individual react when someone has hurt you. I don't know whether you cry, you cry later, or you brush it of as nothing. I don't know that every time you hear something you shake and quiver with fear. I don't know your life story, and you do not know mine. I could never explain my sympathy to you, nor explain my understanding of what you have had to overcome in your life, and how quickly you had to grow up to accomplish that.

I know that some people are not happy. No one is happy all of the time. It is simply impossible. I also know that some people are not even labeled as people right now. And I, dear ones, happen to be one of them. I am a lesbian. Everyone but my family knows, and for spirit day I want to understand where everyone is coming from. So I wrote some of the names I have been called in eyeliner on my face.

When I was done I looked at myself. I stared and stared. Reading every word as they had been said to me. The voices flooded my head. I couldn't breathe. I had never felt so ugly and disgusting as I had just then. I couldn't take it any more!

So I wiped them off. Mind you, I used the salt of my tears to bid the horrid words a safe passage anywhere but here. My pain and tears washed away everything. They washed away the names, the backstabbing, the plotting, the jealousy, the rage. But I noticed that even though they were wiped clean with my emotions. They were still there.

Black smudges were smeared across my face as the last remaining symbols of these words. These... sounds put together and loaded out of the cannon that is the human mouth. The words and hurt were still there. Like scars on my very person, and that's when I realized something.

I WILL wear all of the names I have been called PROUDLY. I WILL NOT let any of these words and names get to me. Because that is exactly what they are and exactly what they will stay. WORDS.

I know that words hurt. I will never know how much they hurt you. But... before you do something rash... know the people you could hurt too.