The Daily Weight

The thing she carries on a day-to-day basis, from the tangible to the intangible. On certain days certain things have a heavier weight than others. On certain days, she sometimes cannot handle all the weight and pressure. These days she just wants to lay down and not do anything. However, there are times when she can do anything. She feels weightless and open to anything that comes her way. With this energy, she feels like she can do everything and more. The weights come differently as the days do. 

She has many things to carry her items in. She has her pockets, her tote bag, and her backpack. In her pockets, she only has a few items. Her left has chapstick and random pieces of paper. Her right has her headphones for the hallways during the passing periods. Her back left pocket carries her phone. Her phone is very important to her because it has everything on it that she may need. It has the photos and memories with her friends, family, and her boyfriend, the music that she listens to in the hallways, the people she texts every day to say hello, and the apps to help her be a better person and successful. 

Her tote bag carries a lot of the items that she uses throughout the day. She carries her makeup. Eye shadow, lipstick, mascara, and lip gloss. She carries these to feel better about how she looks, she wants to be the center of the attention with subtle norices. She has hair ties for her hair to keep it out of her face even though she knows she’s going to take her hair down again and again. She has her charger in her bag so she can charge her phone because sometimes she forgets. She carries her keys in her bag as well, she brags about driving and swings her keys around but in reality, she is still scared to drive because she does not want to get hurt. She carries a small little bag of SD cards that hold memories of her family, friends, and boyfriend.  She carries her wallet, there are many things in the wallet, her debit cards, her and her boyfriend’s ID. She also carries in her wallet a picture of her and her boyfriend in the car trying to be funny and making a funny face. She has had the photo for a while, she has plenty of other ones but this one sticks out to her the most, maybe it’s the faces or maybe the situation around it but it is one of her favorite photos of them together.  

Out of all the bags she carries her book bag is the heaviest (physically). She carries two binders in her bag. One is just for stats, it is thicker than the other binder, which is for the other four classes she has, and stats is one of the classes that she gets so easily but stresses her out the most. In her bag, she also has some books and random papers from the club that she runs. She has an assortment of pens, pencils, markers, and highlighters. She carries them all just in case someone needs something to write with or just in case she wants to be creative and express how she is feeling at the moment. She has a random notebook full of notes, plans, schedules, and ideas for certain things. In the notebook she also has a bunch of random to-do lists so she can feel a little organized, she writes what she needs to do down but she never actually does the things on the list. She feels that if she seems organized somehow that she will be organized. 

All of the things she carries throughout the week do not compare to the mental weight she carries in her heart and mind. She has to carry the thought that she is the first to graduate out of her siblings. She is the eldest girl in the family so the stress of her getting good grades and always trying to be her best hurts her sometimes because she has to be the example for her younger siblings. With the stress of being the first to graduate she also has the stress that her major won’t be successful for her and that she is going to work and work so hard but it is going to fail. She carries the thought that she can’t be good at anything else if that fails, she tries to make a backup plan but she is scared to think of a plan b because she wants to plan a to work with no consequences. She has to carry the small thought of having skin cancer and that she has to be extra careful outside, she wears sunblock and covers up but she just wants the stress off of her back. She hates that she has to carry the stress of worrying about if she has enough cover to go outside. 

These mental objects add lots of weight to her but not as much weight as the two things that make her upset each day. She has to carry the weight of having ADHD. People overlook it as just getting distracted, well it’s something like that. It’s a struggle to want to do stuff sometimes. Getting distracted by important things like school, work, sports, and family is stressful for a senior in high school. She cannot multitask, plan, focus, or manage anything to save her life. She carries it every day and tries to brush it off when she or someone else notices it. She gets those little comments of “bad planner”, “someone is jittery today”, “you are talking way too much”, and so much more, but she just brushes it off. 

The heaviest thing on her that she has to live with is that she has been hurt so much by one person from her past that still haunts her. She had a bad boyfriend her sophomore year and she got so mentally and physically hurt by him that she almost hurt herself. She carries the weight that she could have stopped him from doing all that to her. She carries the burden that someone could do the things he did. She carries the scars and bruises from this asshole. She wakes up some days feeling sick to her stomach because she was reminded that her body was used. She spilled the emotion and trauma to her present boyfriend that for a time it gave him trauma. She thinks that is why she and her boyfriend are so close because he felt the pain that she felt in a way. She felt so much relief and guilt for dumping all the pain she felt on her boyfriend but it made her feel so at ease and relaxed. She spilled it on her best friend too because she felt as if she was lying to her if she didn’t say anything to her about it. She needed it off her chest or she was going to explode. She carries less and less of it every day, but on some of those days, she sees little things that remind her of what happened and she completely changes. This is the heaviest thing she carries, but with the people in her life, she makes it through. 

The things she carries have a different toll on her depending on the day and time. Some days she feels as if she can climb mountains and on others, she feels that she wants to be at the bottom of the sea. She is doing the best she has ever done though, and she is so proud that the things she carries are so light compared to her past. The things she carries are getting lighter and lighter each with some heavy days in the mix of it.