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Hi, my name is Liam.  I’m 15 years old and I have a dog named Ginger.  He’s a golden retriever and I love him to bits.  I have a brother and a sister.  My sister’s name is Lilly and she’s 10.  My brother is actually Lilly’s twin so he’s also 10, he’s only older by about 10 minutes and it’s always so funny to hear them argue over it.  My brother’s name is Lawrence.  He usually goes by the name “Lance” because it makes him sound tougher.  He’s hilarious.  I’m 5 years older than them, which means I’m supposed to be their role model.  I’m the older brother so it makes sense, right?  Our parents’ names are Greg and Lisa.  All of us have more of our mom’s features than our dad’s so that’s why everyone’s name starts with an “L”.  We love to make fun of our dad because his name doesn’t start with L.  Life isn’t exactly what you would call “easy” for us.  Mom is always sad and dad doesn’t talk as much as he used to.  It’s painful for me to watch because my siblings are being affected by them.  I’ve heard that neighbors have been concerned about everyone and their thinking of reporting my parents.  Life wasn’t always like this though, we used to be a big happy family. 

            Lilly loves to sing.  She has the prettiest voice in the house.  She sings better than mom which is funny because mom took voice lessons in college and she’s even a music teacher.  Though it explains where Lilly got her talent from.  Lance is also very talented.  He loves to dance.  Many people think it’s a bit odd for a boy to be a dancer, but he is great.  Whatever kind of modern dance you can think of, he does it.  His favorite is tap dancing.  We discovered his love for dancing when he and Lilly were both 5.  Lilly would be singing a song and Lance would always come up right behind her and just start dancing.  I remember when they’d lock themselves in their room for hours, and when they came out, they had a song and a dance routine to show us.  There was never a dull moment during those times.  Dad isn’t a dancer, he’s a builder.  Dad used to teach me about different tools and what they do and even helped me put things together.  I miss those times.  Since my brother and sister were into the arts, dad never really had someone he could “tool talk” with besides me.  While mom would be busy thinking of new songs for Lilly to sing to and Lance to dance to, me and dad would be back in the old tool shed thinking of ways to make the best dog house for Ginger.  You’re probably wondering what happened to the good times that our family had.  Well, everything started when I was 14.

            Dad had found a new job out of state, all the way in Kentucky.  The whole family packed up and moved down south.  It was definitely a new experience due to the fact that we were used to up north in Connecticut rather than down south in Kentucky.  I was slightly a bit luckier due to the fact that I didn’t really have to switch schools because I was going to be a freshman in high school while my 9 year old siblings were going to be 5^th graders in a whole new elementary school.  It took a while for all of us to get used to the move and to get used to a whole new situation, but lucky for all of us, it was during summer break, which means we had a whole summer to get used to our surroundings.  We lived near a park, so many days we would go out to the park and do things like walk Ginger around or just get out to enjoy the breeze after we had worked so hard unpacking.  Lucky for the whole family, Lilly and Lance still had their musical spirit, so on days when mom would be worn out from unpacking, Lilly and Lance would cheer her up with a small concert for some of her favorite songs.  I would usually help do chores around the house just to make things a little easier on them.  The high school I went to was called Greenwood High School and the elementary school my siblings went to was called Lost River Elementary School.  The only issue was, it wasn’t as close to home as we’d like it to be, but it was only for a year.  Every school has their bullies.  My siblings would sometimes come home upset because people picked on them for being newcomers and because they didn’t fit in with all the southerners.  My siblings mainly just liked to be with each other rather than the other students.  My parents and I did the best we could to get them to try and make other friends.  It took a couple of months, but pretty soon Lilly joined chorus and Lance became the only boy in his afterschool dance class which he definitely enjoyed.  I was a freshman in high school, which means fresh meat.  I spent my first day getting books knocked out of my hand and having all sorts of profanity shouted at me.  It didn’t bother me too much because it was just what I expected from being a new kid AND a freshman.  It didn’t last very long though, what happened next was people became physical.  I would always come home with bruises and scratches from being hit and knocked down.  I did the very best I could to hide it from my parents, because if my siblings saw, then I wouldn’t look like the big brother I was supposed to look like.  Things would’ve gone better if I had said something about it sooner.  It was because I didn’t want to ask for help which led me to taking matters into my own hands.  I went into my dad’s toolshed and found a wrench.  It was small enough to put in my pocket, but it was big enough to intimidate people with.  I would bring it to school and when people started approaching me, I would pull out the wrench and they would immediately back up.  No one messed with me again after that, and because it was high school, nobody wanted to tell any adult that I was carrying a weapon through the school.  I felt a whole lot better carrying my wrench with me.  But soon, people started getting scared of me.  There were days when I didn’t carry the wrench and people still avoided me.  One time, one of the main guys who messed with me, had noticed that I wasn’t carrying my wrench with me, but when he came up to me when I was at my locker, a screwdriver that I had borrowed from shop class fell out and he immediately backed up because he figured that no matter what, I always came prepared.  That wasn’t exactly true.  Eventually, I had rumors being spread about me which led me to having a pretty bad reputation at school, and it hadn’t even been a semester yet! 

            Eventually, by second semester I had turned 15 and the rumors had begun to die down a bit which made life easier on me.  It was around this time when I was introduced to social media by a few friends that I had made during shop class.  I won’t name them for the sake of privacy, but they saw through all the rumors about me being the toughest kid in school and they became my first friends.  I wasn’t on all the time, but I was pretty active on days that I was online.  One day while I was surfing the web, I noticed that there was someone up there with the same name as me, they also went to the same school as me.  I began looking at the profile thinking that I could maybe meet this guy.  The more I looked at his account, the more I began to recognize some of its features.  I began to suspect that this guy was actually me!  When I began searching more, I had more and more proof to support the fact that someone had created a fake account, posing as me.  I couldn’t believe that someone could even stoop that low.  I looked through this guy’s account some more and they were putting up posts about how much “cooler I was than everyone else” or how much “tougher I was” or how I like to have sex with “multiple girls”.  It made me look really bad.  I could’ve had this person reported, but instead, I got stupid and began taking matters into my own hands again.  I commented on his posts and began standing up for myself.  But this guy must’ve been doing some massive research on me because he began convincing a few of my friends that he was me.  Despite how much I tried to argue, I just couldn’t win.  Though the worst part was when they started leaking out personal information.  It was because of something stupid I said.  I asked them to “prove that they were really me”.  It was because of that stupid request that my actual address ended up getting leaked.  I didn’t think he’d actually answer my request.  It was a couple weeks later when I realized that my address had been leaked.  People began coming to my house and doing stupid pranks like egging our car or throwing toilet paper all over my front yard.  I didn’t like what was happening.  I tried covering things up so that my parents wouldn’t notice and get suspicious.  It took so much out of me, when my dad tried to “tool talk” with me some more, I would only be half listening and I felt bad for not listening to him.  I sometimes think that my parents knew that something was going on, but they never said anything because they knew how I tried to be a role model for my siblings.  If I could go back in time, I would stop myself from doing all the stupid things I did and ask for help.  One day in shop class when we were all working on individual projects, I could hear my best friend behind me talking with other people and I overheard him talking about the guy posing as me on social media.  Turns out he was behind it the whole time!  I didn’t tell him that I overheard his conversation because I was way too upset to even bring it up.  I was so angry when I got home, I marched up to my room and just sat on my bed, with my mind racing.  I couldn’t believe he would do something like that!  I had trusted him and he stabbed me in the back.  Eventually things got worse.  My sister was in the bathroom taking a shower and she started screaming.  When we got there to see what was going on, we could see a shadowy figure running away from the window.  I was so angry when I recognized it as one of the guys from my school.  Everything that was going on in my life began to affect my family.  Someone had to sit outside by the bathroom window to keep watch while someone was taking a shower.  The whole time, I didn’t say anything.  I began thinking that their life would be better if I didn’t exist.  We had tried calling the cops after the incident but the cops couldn’t figure out who it was because it was dark and they never left any sort of clue as to who it could’ve been.  I had decided to put an end to the madness once and for all. 

            I made a video and posted it to my social media page.  I had shared my anger and frustration at the people who were making everyone’s life a living hell.  I showed pictures of the house with graffiti on it, I showed the pictures of the car that had been egged.  I talked about how upset I was and how we had gone to the police and how the police didn’t help.  In the video, I said something that I probably shouldn’t have said.  I said, “If the police won’t do anything, then I will, and you won’t like it when I’m finished with you”.  After posting that video, I got a few good comments encouraging me and I had a good friend at the time who I really should’ve listened to more.  His name was Ethan and he was the most helpful person to me during this time.  I should’ve paid more attention to the things he was doing to help me.  I was so concerned with trying to fix my life that I didn’t even realize that Ethan was trying to help me, which led to him getting bullied too.  Some of the other comments weren’t so encouraging and nice.  I had people blaming me and I had many people from the school telling me that I should go back to where I came from.  I was so upset from this and to make matters worse, someone had a more colorful way to comment on my video, by making a statement.  I got home one day, unaware of what day it was, and saw that my father’s toolshed had been burned down, and there was a brick laying by the door with the words “F*** YOU” painted on it.  I saw this, and I can’t remember how I felt.  I felt nothing, absolutely nothing.  There was only one thing I felt like I could do, and I regret it more than anything.  I went up to my parent’s room and into the closet.  There was a shoebox in there and inside it was my father’s handgun and you can already guess what happened after that.  Right as I pulled the trigger, it occurred to me that it was my sibling’s birthday and they had just turned 10, but it was too late, I was gone.  When they came home that day, excited to celebrate their birthday, my parents were sitting in the living room looking lifeless as they had explained to my siblings what had happened.  All the excitement in my siblings’ faces had immediately drained as they heard the news.

 I hate everything that happened, I hate how I wasn’t even thinking of them.  I hate how I felt like no one cared and that nobody would mind if I was gone.  My siblings are going to be separated from my parents because of my decision.  My best friend Ethan transferred to another school because the bullying got too bad.  I have so many regrets.  I regret my parents having to walk home to find my body lying on the floor in their room.  I regret not noticing that Ethan was being bullied also and just leaving him to fight his battles alone.  I regret leaving Ginger to be adopted again.  I regret my siblings having to think about my death every year on their birthday when they should be celebrating.  I regret my siblings going into foster care and possibly being separated.  But most of all, I regret not going to somebody when things got too hard for me to handle.  I can’t go back in time and change what I did, but as long as I can prevent someone from having the same regrets as me, I can be at peace.  I may not be as relatable to some other people because I had more people on my side than I thought, but in reality, I have a lot more in common with them than I thought.  We all had the same feeling of wanting to escape from everything just to improve someone else’s life, but when in reality, even if you didn’t have someone who gave you over-the-top attention, I promise you, they’d still care if you died.   I left so many things behind, and I don’t want you to do the same.  If you’re thinking about doing something like this to yourself because you feel that no one understands, then think again.  You feel worthless, you feel like nobody would care if you were gone, you feel like life would be easier if you didn’t exist, you feel like the world would still keep turning even if you were gone.  Well literally speaking, yes, the world would still keep turning even if you died.  But think about it from a different perspective, think of a celebrity that you love A LOT and then think of how you’d feel if that celebrity died.  To other people in the world, that celebrity dying is a shock, but they’re going to move on with life.  But to you, that person was your whole world, and it’ll be harder for you to move on.  That’s exactly how some people are going to feel if you were to remove yourself from their life.  If you ever feel like you haven’t done anything to make people care about you, then go back and think, think very hard about someone who made your life even remotely bearable, don’t just think that they did it because they had to.  They did it because they wanted to.  I’m telling you this because I want to, because I know that somewhere deep down inside you, you really don’t want to go through with this.  And if you are feeling that way, it doesn’t make you a coward just because you’re afraid to follow through, it means you’re strong enough to resist the urge that I couldn’t.  I don’t know you personally, but I know that there’s at least one person in your life who would absolutely hate it if you were to pass away.  If you need help, get it.  I needed help, and I didn’t get it because I didn’t ask for it, which led to this.  There are people in my life, who are struggling all because I was too busy thinking of myself instead of them.  Don’t do what I did.  It may be too late, but it’s not too late for you to just put down your tool, and walk away from it.

Author's Note

I copied and pasted this form my word document. If there are any errors let me know.