April 22, 2025
By Zoe L. Mitchell

I don’t really know if this will make sense to anyone, but there’s something I did years ago that still feels like a weird mix of relief and regret. It happened during my last year of high school, and I’m still not sure why I even did it. But here it is.

I hated that school. The teachers were always picking on me, and no matter what happened, I was never the one they sided with. I was always in trouble, always getting into fights, but the worst part was that they never helped when I was the victim. They just watched it happen, or worse, they’d always act like I was the problem.

After a while, I just couldn’t take it anymore. One day, I made a plan to do something drastic, something that would make me feel like I had a bit of control over all the unfairness. So, I did it. I took a cutter with me—hid it between my shirt and jacket, because it was winter, and no one would notice. I asked the teacher if I could go to the bathroom, played the part of the good student, and snuck away.

Once I was in the audio-visual room, I went to town. I scratched up the walls, wrote things like “fuck you” on the surfaces, scratched the curtains, messed with a power socket, and even cut a TV wire. I don’t know what came over me, but it felt like the only way to express everything I’d been holding in.

The worst part? A teacher saw me as I was leaving. But, for some reason, it didn’t go anywhere. No one really knew what had happened, and my class teacher actually backed me up, saying I hadn’t done anything. I don’t know how, but I got away with it.

Looking back, part of me still feels a weird sense of satisfaction. But then, there’s the other part that wonders if I could’ve handled things differently. I got what I wanted at the time—a release, some kind of revenge—but in the end, it didn’t solve anything