Seventeen

You wash your face, you use your fancy face products and moisturize like it'll prevent the apocalypse, but say hi to that new break-out on your forehead. You miss one workout and eat one cupcake and the world might as well stop because you feel like an empty pen has more use than you.
You want to go everywhere and anywhere but don't know where to start. You also need money for a ticket, but you can't get a part time job because your grades will go down and well that might be worse than being pregnant at fifteen.
Your friends are all captains of sports teams and heads of every club, they get nineties on the test you took that Ritalin you stole to stay up and study for only to get a sixty.
You want your license so you can have an inch of freedom and maybe help out with grocery shopping or school runs. It's distracting you though, you're not working hard enough at school.
Not working hard enough at school, still too fat, not helpful and you only care about yourself. That's what you think. What about how you feel?
A white burning heat consumes you when you take a test, you did the work for the test and your brain shuts down, frustration doesn't even make a dent in this emotion. "It's just an excuse" they say, "do some actual work" they say.
You're down to nine hundred calories, this seems to be your only achievement in the last year. You workout at two in the morning because if you go to gym for too long you get the look. Your thighs will never be firm enough and your hip bones aren't quite showing enough.
You cook a lot, so that you contribute something, make drinks and smile, help as much as you can. It's never enough though, you could've cooked something better, carried more groceries, unpacked faster, made more tea...
You only care about yourself. You care about yourself so much that you grimace whenever you see yourself, you care so much that anything they could say would be a compliment compared to the words hurled at you by the voices in your head.
You're drowning how much you hate yourself, in how useless you feel in how you want something but don't know what it is, in how nothing lights you up anymore, in how your laughter is hollow and smile broken, in how you think you're whiny and entitled, you're drowning in being seventeen even though seventeen was meant to be your savior from sixteen.
Here's to seventeen, worse than sixteen, but eighteen will be better.