when she was younger
when she was younger she was deeply unhappy, so she pretended to be someone else with an even worse life, so that by comparison she might feel better. it didn't work: she just wanted to be that other girl even more. ultimately she spent a lot of time sitting in the park on her own, writing really awful poetry and practising signing her other name.
when she was alone in her room she often thought about pain. she hadn't yet discovered the usefulness of sharp objects, so for now it was all in her mind. she thought about a boy she loved and thought about rejection. she couldn't imagine acceptance (receiving so little of it at home) so being hurt came naturally. there was a twinge somewhere in her chest, and tears pricking behind her eyes, and sometimes she would cry... but it was a relief, and then she could sleep.
if she fell asleep in the afternoon she would wake to cooking smells and sometimes snatches of conversation. she learnt to relish those moments, before someone came barging in to call her to dinner, before she had to push the pain back down where it couldn't be seen and go and sit with Them and be "normal" for a while. she hated who she was but she didn't know who to be instead, so she kept trying personas one after the other like a compulsive shopper kidding herself that the plastic wasn't quite maxed out yet...
and for a while she thought those "others" could protect her, that wearing them like a mask would get her through each day, but she became addicted, found it harder and harder to Just Be Herself.
the nightly ritual of imagining rejection became less and less satisfying, and she began to add elements of cruelty. a year later she'd built a whole 'nother world in her head, where everyone in her class had been forced to participate in some kind of behavioural study that ultimately resulted in her being left out of everything, and quite often literally left out (the doors slammed in her face, or maybe slyly shut when she wasn't looking), and having to survive on her own. "it's all good material," she'd write in her diary, carefully encoding the pseudonyms she'd given everyone.