Bloody Mary: Anxiety

Imagine you’re about to take a test that will determine if you pass or fail a class. How do you feel? This feeling is called anxiety. Now, imagine having this feeling all the time, even when you don’t know why. This is an anxiety disorder. I have suffered on and off from an anxiety disorder since I was 12 years old.

It started when my younger sister was a little girl in second grade. Her and her friends had just heard of a scary story about "Bloody Mary." The story about "Bloody Mary" was that a little girl and her mother went into the school bathroom and died. The legend was that if you said "Bloody Mary" three times in the mirror, a ghost would come and kill you. So, being the little kids they were, they decided to try it. When they did try it, my little sister and one of her friends hid in the stall while another chanted "Bloody Mary, bloody Mary, bloody Marry". While they were in the stall, my little sisters' friend took a led pencil and wrote on the wall "I'll kill you! -Bloody Mary."

She decided that a reasonable punishment would be to suspend my little sister for 3 days, then put on their permanent record that she was a terrorist and a vandalistic threat. This, to my parents, was unacceptable. They tried to reason with the counselor to not put it on her permanent record, but she would not even consider it. So, they took me and her both out of the school and threw us into another. This was really upsetting to me as a shy 12-year-old