Too Kind
 

So many of us are too nice, too sweet. We are too kind and too welcoming. We are too trusting and too willing to believe what others tell us. We are in short, too good of people. And thus, for some reason, God finds it okay to weed those people out first.
They say the best people die the youngest, and live the shortest. I am one of those people, and I am writing this from up here, up in heaven, with the angels and others like me.
You see; I was too nice. All my life, I gave all I had to the ones who needed it least. I never took care of myself; instead I always took care of others. I never did what I wanted, instead what others wanted and what I thought others expected from me.
And because of this, I began to fall apart. I began to give pieces of myself away, until I was broken inside. And eventually, there was nothing left to give. But people still wanted more. People always want more. Once you start giving, you cannot stop.
So I kept giving until I died. I was only twenty-two, living in my own apartment in New York. I got sick three times a year usually, and that year I had gotten sick ten times. I should have been worried about my health, but I was sure to never worry about myself. Because, after all, what did I matter? When there were so many others, how much did I, one person, really matter?
You see; this is what killed me. This lack of care for myself. So now I tell others that it is not selfish to care about yourself, but rather extremely intelligent to do so. Others will figure it out. You do not need to give all you have away. There are some things that are rightfully yours.
The last thing I gave away was my own self worth. It had been draining for a while, but finally I let someone trample all over it, changing me forever. I no longer cared what I looked like, because I believed no one would want to look at me. In high school, I was pretty, and many told me I was beautiful.
See, I never believed in myself. And that was my biggest flaw. That is what killed me in the end.
Everyone told me I had so much potential, if I just believed in myself. But I did not. I did not believe in myself, which was a self-committed crime. I was a stupid, stupid girl.
I thought that if I cared enough about others, this would fill the void that I could never care for myself. But it didn’t help. No – nothing helped. Therapy didn’t. Medication didn’t. Family didn’t. Friends didn’t. I didn’t. No one helped.
So I began to believe I was a lost cause. No one would ever care for me as much as I cared about others. But this was false. There was one. One person. Her name was Kathy, mine Emily. She loved me, fully and more than I had ever loved myself. She loved my curly blonde hair and the way I laughed in springtime. She made me believe I was invincible. Kathy was perfect. She had long brown hair, and the most gorgeous big green eyes. We were best friends, and many thought we were more, which was false.
They say that you it is best to die on the way back from a great place, so that you have all the memories of your trip stored inside of you. So that your last memories are good ones. Well by this standard, I did it wrong. I died on the way there. On the way to happiness and self-acceptance. In some ways, this is the most tragic part of my death: that I really never got to where I was going.