Catfish: The Other Side of the Screen

Chapter 10

After the whole Rachel situation went down, I went into hiding for a couple of months. I became paranoid. I thought I would see her somewhere. Every time I would go to the mall with my mom I would be overly anxious and being 100% aware of my surroundings at ALL times. The embarrassment, shame and humiliation haunted me. I just couldn't stop thinking about it. Matt and Rachel were probably laughing at me every time they could.

So, naturally, I turned to food once again. My weight climbed up the highest it has ever been. I felt like a monster and I started to act like one too. I didn't want anyone to look at me, talk to me, or even talk about me. I took food with me and built a barrier so no one would bother us. I was there for my food and she was there for me too. Food was there when I felt like shit and also when I was feeling good. It became my closest companion. I had no one. Never in my life had I felt so lonely and so damn misunderstood. I didn't know what to turn to anymore.

I just couldn't see my life getting any better after what I had done. After all of this went down, there were a couple of questions that came up in my mind very frequently.

Where is my life headed?

Would people even care or notice if I decided to take matters into my own hands and just quit?

Are people around me aware that I'm in an ongoing battle with myself?

Who do I talk to?

Am I the only one who feels this way?

Am I worthy?

Am I pretty?

Why do I have to be fat?

Why wasn't I born like every other girl I had graduated with?

Why aren't I happy?

Will I ever be happy?

I didn't know how I could ever be happy. I felt messed up. I felt undeniably ugly and fat.

Those questions repeated themselves daily. I had trouble sleeping and my anxiety was through the roof. I would be lying to you if I told you that I never had suicidal thoughts.

Suicidal.

How would my mom feel if she even began to read what I'm letting you guys in on?

It's even hard to write these words down. To think about suicide means also thinking about how many people I would hurt if I did. My family, my so-called ¨friends¨. For heaven's sake, if they weren't present, I would have probably done it by then.

I looked at myself in the mirror and all I could see was failure. I was failing at losing weight; which was the most important thing in my life at the moment. I was also failing in school because naturally, I was too busy with the fake profile that I forgot that real life was happening. I left everything. It's one of the things I regret the most even now.

Days turned into weeks, weeks into months. One day out of the blue I get a text message from Emily. After graduating, we had pretty much drifted apart. Both of us were enrolled in different universities so it was only natural. Before I even opened it, I could see from the notifications that I had that she had sent a picture. She had sent a screenshot.

I opened up the screenshot and it was a newspaper article.

Rachel Maine meets the man of her dreams because of someone who used her pictures to catfish. New couple alert.

Okay. Wait. WHAT THE FUCK. WHAT. THE. ACTUAL. FUCK. Guys, you read that right. YOU READ THAT RIGHT.

I read and re read the article and the more I read it the less my eyes could believe what they were seeing. Not only had this bitch humiliated me like no one before ever had and she told me she would need to hire security because of this Matt guy, but now she's DATING HIM? She was FUCKING him? What? No. That couldn't be possible. He was in another country!

I kept scrolling down to find or make out a summary of what the fuck was going on. Matt had come to VISIT Rachel. I HATED HER. I was her fucking cupid. I got her a boyfriend. A wave of hate overtook me. I had never been repulsed, and so infuriated because of another human being in my entire life. Now she's FUCKING the guy she was supposedly so scared of!?

I wished I had never seen that fucking article. It broke my heart into a million tiny little pieces. It broke me as a whole. It overtook my confidence and my self-esteem and completely shattered them. I felt embarrassed, mocked. My body was a mixture of every single bad emotion you can come up with.

I gave her a boyfriend. I made her happy.

STUPID RACHEL. I hated myself for it. I absolutely despised what I had done. Out of the many ways this story could have turned out, it just turned out to be the most fucked up, I think. I wanted everything to be over. I felt completely miserable and out of place. I felt lost.

A combination of the humiliation I was experiencing because of that article and my weight going exponentially up, I dropped out of school. I couldn't handle it anymore. Teachers were demanding a certain level of commitment and responsibility that my head was not able to give at that point. All I could ever think so was about how fat I was and how much I hated Rachel.