Ten years ago, I was 18-years-old and a senior in high school. It was the year 2012, also deemed as one of my worst years to date.
Dear, guys – welcome back to Letters From Liz!
Every year, I always reflect back on who I was and where I was a decade ago. Ten years ago, it was 2012, which in case you haven’t been here since the beginning, you would know that 2012 was an interesting year for me. Although it has been ten years, I finally feel like I am now in a place where it doesn’t affect me in the way it does, so writing this doesn’t leave me in any weird state of mind or in a bad place. But anyway! Let’s talk about the Liz that was in 2012!
I was a teenager that lived in beanies and scarves throughout my senior year. I also wasn’t a major makeup wearer, but this was the year that I got into liquid eyeliner! I mean, it wasn’t really great at it, but it did the job for a teenager that really didn’t care about appearance that much. I very much still wore a lot of older-looking clothes, meaning I wore outfits that would date me much older than an eighteen-year-old. My hair was constantly straightened, or at least a part of it was straightened, like my damn bangs. I was also the girl with two nose piercings; to come and think of it, I don’t know how the hell I rocked two nostril piercings and it didn’t bother me. Like, if I had them to this day, I would’ve been surprised, but I actually don’t! I upgraded to a septum ring! ;D
I was a vocal major in high school and was a member of the Performing Choir since my sophomore year. This particular school year, we were able to go to a lot of interesting places! For example, a part of our choir was invited to go to the 125th Birthday Celebration of the Statue of Liberty and performed for the major and some celebrities! We were also featured on “Good Morning America” earlier that morning! It was surreal; I had to meet up with my vocal teacher and my other choir members at like 4:30 in the morning to make it to Ellis Island by 7:30ish. It was definitely a fun and cool experience to be on National television. We also performed “Carmina Burana” with other high-school choirs at Carnegie Hall! It was my second time performing on the stage of Carnegie Hall, but this time was definitely so much fun and I got to meet so many new people who participated in the show! My family got to see me perform, and the rehearsals were so much much to attend! Plus, hearing a live orchestra perform with us was ethereal. For me, my time in Performing Choir was what kept me together during my senior year of high school. It was my escape when life was getting complicated for me and things were getting dark for me; dangerously dark.
Senior year of high school was the year that tested my mental abilities, in all honesty. Prior to this year, life wasn’t as chaotic or hard, to say the least, but senior year taught me a lot about life and make me realize that I wasn’t this innocent, perfect girl I wanted to be. I made mistakes, I made selfish decisions, I did things that weren’t in my character that everyone portrayed me as. To be quite honest, I wanted attention. I felt under-appreciated and invisible, and all I wanted was for people to see me and like me more than just another person in the school.
I got myself involved in a situation that at the time I didn’t want to see as bad and stupid. I started to experiment with girls to the point of falling in love with one that was already taken. Again, it was the attention I liked. It was feeling something that I didn’t feel before, and it was the thrill. I felt like I was living two lives. It was starting to interfere with the relationships I had in my life, and instead of getting myself out of it, I was falling deeper into the rabbit hole of self-destruction. It may be dramatic to say, but it really felt like every decision I made to try to get out of it, it was just another thing that made things worse. If you want to read more about this time, I wrote a lot about it in this post, as well as this post.
One of the ways I gained attention from others was that I went completely blonde for the first time ever. I wanted to not be me anymore; I wanted to be someone else in the midst of everything that was happening in my life. To some degree, it actually wokred. I was getting the attention from people that I wanted; people began to think of me as attractive. It was the attention I thought I wanted when in reality, it began to really tarnish the image I wanted to keep. Instead, I was just this homewrecking, easy chick that allowed anyone to walk all over her. If it was in school or in my after-school activities, I really couldn’t escape the sadness and depression I was going through.
2012 was the year that started my poor mental health. I was in this state of mind that I was severely depressed, I was making impulsive decisions, and I eventually became suicidal. I would walk in the streets, sometimes just standing in the middle of the street wondering how would it feel if I allowed a car hit me. Sometimes, I would cry on my bathroom floor at night, cutting my arms, wanting to gain back control of my own life. It got to the point where I had to go spend the day at the guidance counselor’s office because I was depressed and my arms were cut up. It was definitely the lowest point of my life.
I graduated high school that year and thought life was going to be okay once I got out of school. I still dealt with a lot of anxiety and depression, which seeped into my first semster as a college student. I was failing half of my classes miserably, and I wanted to do nothing but drop out of college. I really didn’t think I was going to live past 18; that’s how bad things got. The year ended and then 2013 came, which also was a tough year to go through, but we’ll wait until 2023 to talk about that!
In a nutshell, 2012 left a lot of emotional scars and trauma that I had to talk about years later in order to conquer most of it. A lot of my social anxiety stems from the events that happened during those years, and it took tons of therapy sessions to work out some of the darkest thoughts I had during that time. It’s crazy all of that happened 10 years ago. It’s crazy that I graduated high school ten years ago and started college ten years ago. Like, where did all the time go? Maybe it went from all the healing, the challenges, and growing up I had done within the last decade.
Here’s to 2022, the better year ending in 2!
Letters From Liz. 