No one should go through this.

At the age of sixteen I went through something, no one that age should go through. This is what caused me to go from a smart, caring, outgoing, and all around happy girl, to a girl who barely wanted to get out of bed, stopped going to classes, started failing every class, and was getting into trouble. I had evidently put my love and trust into someone who I shouldnt have and I learned the hard way. When I was 15 I had started dating this guy and it was great in the beginning. We were always together and we had a perfect relationship. At least that’s what I had thought. Around 7 months into the relationship I had started to see a difference in him. He was getting mad easily, he would accuse me of cheating on him, he was barely going to school and when he did he was getting into fights. I thought that maybe it was just a faze but I was wrong. It soon turned into him taking all his aggression out on me. He was my first actual boyfriend so I didn’t really understand what a toxic relationship was. People tried warning me saying it was unhealthy but I didn’t listen to them because I loved him and I thought he loved me. It was now a year into our relationship and this is when he had finally broken. (I was now 16 years old) He had gotten suspended from school because he pushed me into a table one day because he had gotten mad at me(take into note I was used to this by now) a teacher had seen this happen and reported it to the office. That night he got into a major fight with his dad and he decided to run away. Fast forward three weeks later I was at home watching tv and i remember getting a call from an anonymous number and had a strange gut feeling so I answered. When I realized it was him my heart stopped I hadn’t talked to him in three weeks I didn’t know where he was or if he was even okay. He had started explaining the story to me and had asked me to run away with him. Now, I am a 16 year old girl who didn’t know the difference between real love and manipulation I didn’t know any different then how he would treat me due to the fact that in my head he was my first love. He was a manipulative narcissistic person he knew exactly what to say in order to get me to do whatever he wanted me to do. Getting back to the story I had agreed to run away with him and that night I packed my bag and left my house getting into an Uber he had ordered me not even knowing where I was headed. Once I was there he had taken my phone from me (remember this for later) and smashed my sd card and deleted all messages and calls. The room we stayed in was in the basement, meaning there was no windows so no sunlight was able to come through and there was no way of getting any fresh air because I wasn’t allowed to go outside. The reason for that was because my parents had posted a missing poster on Facebook and it had already gotten over five thousand shares so everyone in my city now knew that I was a missing juvenile and what I looked like. The first day I was there it wasn’t to bad I felt happy and safe knowing I was with him. But that would soon change. Now remember when I said he had taken my phone, that meant I had no way to tell anyone I was safe and okay. All anyone knew was that I had suddenly disappeared and that they believed I was with him because he was also missing and he was known as a dangerous unstable person so people were thinking the worst. Everyone saw how poorly he was treating me except for me myself. Well around the third day he had gone out for about an hour and when he came back he didn’t look or sound like himself. His eyes were barely open but you could see they were bright red, he was talking about random things, and he could barely walk straight. I had asked him if he was okay and that’s when jumped on me. He started attacking me and whenever I tried to push him away it got worse. After what felt like hours of torture he had left the room leaving me curled up in a ball with marks all over me. This is when I realized that this isn’t love at all. The next few days it got worse and worse. He had forced me to drink so much alcohol that I had passed out. When I was passed out that is when he sexually assaulted me and he had taken a video. He had showed me the video the next day and told me if I tell anyone about what happened there that he would send it to everyone. I thought this was rock bottom I thought this was the worst it would get. I was wrong. The rest of the time he beat me one time to the point I went unconscious. I was done, I finally told him that I want to leave and I pushed him out of the way grabbed my phone and ran. He didn’t chase me he just watched. I had ran to a gas station to connect to Wi-Fi and I got an Uber back home. When I got home my parents saw the state I was in, they brought me straight to the hospital and I refused to speak about what had happened to me. Even after months of trying to recover I still was changing into a person I never wanted to see myself become. I believed that I had fallen so far down that I wouldnt be able to stop myself from falling even further. It took me a year to finally realize how low I was. That’s when I decided to finally open up and ask for help. And to my surprise I got so much love and support, yeah some people judged me asking why I stayed but they just didn’t understand. But so many people were on my side and helped me find my way back up to where I used to be. Speaking up can be scary but that is what was able to save me from even scarier things. I am now able to be free and be myself again and I’m proud of who I am today.