Dear Anyone and Everyone

This is a Letter I wrote to myself in sophmore year

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I am stressed. That is simple to understand to anyone, but not to me. Those words have no effect on me, even though they are the truest and simplest statement I can think of. It’s probably because it’s overused, probably because every other kid can agree with me when I say this.

It makes me sick to my god damn stomach.

If I have to hear one more person say they have it worse than me, if I have to hear one more person only to tell me “same”, if I have to hear one more tell me I have no reason to stress; I am going to kick someone’s ass.

I just want to get it off of me.

Every day it’s like a football hit me in the face, and the football has popped and was filled with the ocean and now I just can’t stop drowning and I’m so sick of it. It has made me Atlas, making me serve punishment for God knows what.

It is not just my own weight, no, it is my family’s weight. Fingers all pointed toward me, waiting to see what I’ll do but I don’t know what it is. Those fingers have pointed at me since I was born, and I am the only one. Why don’t they point to my cousins, who are just as smart as me? Why does favoritism run rampant; claiming me and only me?

The vivid moment when I was six years old and my grandpa told me I was his number one, when I was not even the oldest. His finger was pointing toward the sky but it was pointing right at my heart.

Is it because I can keep my mouth shut? Is it because I can sit down, put my head in a book and memorize enough to get an A? Is it because my family is nuclear?

Where is the love my cousins have deserved since the moment they were born?

All because they’re not born in wedlock that puts them in second place for a race they were not aware of?

Some part of me wants to think that the only reason I demand to not be first is that I want my cousins to be loved unconditionally; and I suppose it is. But some part deep in me wants to just shake this stress off. Give it to someone for just a minute like a game of hot potato.

I just want to give this stress to someone for a minute so they know what it’s like.

I just want someone to understand.

The moments before, during, and after a test when all I can do is shake and cry. The days where everything looks inedible and leaves a stone in my stomach. The hours every night where I just toss and turn. Hour after hour where I just keep checking until I get an A. I could recite the exact percentage of my grades since winter break finished.

Nothing will shake this stress of me but, God, that’s all I want.

Nothing seems real with this stress; it’s all just fake. Love is fake, happiness is fake, goals are fake. Fabricated for people to sell on the streets for cheap.

Stress cannot be bought, it is thrust upon you from the moment you were born. It latches on to you like a disease and the people who do not feel it will never know what it feels to carry it.

It’s not wanted, it is a virus that weighs like the world on my shoulders and it is all I’ve ever seen. I am Atlas and the heavens fight back. It’s all teeth and blood and I’m forever stuck at the moment right before I am in the maw.

And in the corner of that moment, there is a light. A light I didn’t even realize was there until I started writing this letter. That in four years, or ten, or twenty I won’t have to worry anymore. That I’m allowed to kick up my feet, not as a break but as a signal.

That I can finally whisper to myself that I am done, the world needs nothing from me anymore.

The heavens cannot stop me from moving to that ray of light.

Love,

Atlas