by Cassie Howard | Aug 22, 2017 | Blogging |
I USED TO BE AFRAID TO SHOW UP AND BE MYSELF. You too? I would hide myself. My true self. My life has been all kinds of crazy, something I used to be embarassed of, but now embrace fully. In grade school, I took up smoking to be cool. It didn’t work. I was always lame. I flirted with boys I didn’t like because I didn’t want to be called a prude. I hung out with people who were evil fucking humans because they were popular. I bit my tongue when I heard other people talking smack about someone else, instead of defending them. I saw people being taken advantage of and said nothing. I didn’t want to be a “rat”. I said and did things that make me sick to my stomach. I was a total fucking hyprocrite for years, saying I was SO against the things I was secretly doing behind closed doors. I drank Peach Schnapps straight from the bottle in the basement of someone’s house I didn’t know. I walked the streets all night with a friend nightly, often barefoot, hiding in ditches when we saw car lights headed our way, to avoid being snatched and assaulted. I met strange men in person that I’d only ever talked to online, a lot of the time I’d only ever spoken to them once. One time I ended up at someone’s apartment and found a gun under the pillow on their bed. I kept visiting him. I went to a news reporter’s home, by myself, with his camera man, and he filmed me in his living room. He thankfully didn’t...
