Blatantly Ignored

An eating disorder indulged in, and self harm blatantly ignored, it is no wonder that my depression was scorned as me being an overdramatic hormonal teenager. My journals pawed through when I was out babysitting, and my secrets never written down in real fear that they would be discovered, I withdrew, hiding my feelings from everyone. Writing my thoughts on my leg and washing it off became a normal occurrence. Penning my feelings on toilet paper and flushing them so they would never be read became a daily habit. As did hiding my blades and band-aids. The outdoors became my refuge, away from the oppression of my parents.
At thirteen I began doing sex chats online, which led to webcamming. I've never been able to figure out exactly why I did this, as it never once 'turned me on'. Perhaps I did it because I was isolated and lonely; maybe I did it to rebel against my parents. However, in those early days, I can only pin down one thing that feels the most probable. Coercion. I didn't really want to do it; in fact, I didn't even know what I was in for.
If you have never been in this particular situation before, I'll lay it out for you.
Imagine that you are a sheltered, isolated thirteen year old, with almost no knowledge of the Internet or of sex. You go online. You want to make some new friends because...well, you don't have any. And friends are the most important thing in the world to you right now (or the fact that you feel like a freak because you DON'T have friends). You google 'teen chat rooms', or some variation on that.
You click.
It asks for a username. You're at THAT age, so something cutsie goes in the box. You want people to like you, of course!
You enter the chat room.
Identifying yourself as a thirteen year old female, you suddenly get flooded with dozens and dozens of incoming messages. Perhaps a fifty. Maybe a hundred.
You feel popular.
People ask you for your 'ASL', and you figure out that that means your age, sex, and location. And you feel like you have learned the whole Internet.
Suddenly you realize that out of all these messages, almost all of them are asking for sexual favors.
And almost all of them are thirty years old or older.
Wait!
The chat room said no one older than eighteen!
And then you realize too late that you have been in a sexual discourse, making 'friends' with sexual predators.
Why did I continue? Did I become addicted to the attention I got? Or was it something bigger than that?
I had hope in the back of my mind that one day, out of all these predators I ran into, that one of them would rescue me from my parents. I would let someone just take me away? In a heartbeat.
All the times that my mother saw my cuts, that my doctors told her what I was doing, she covered her eyes, believed my shaky lies, and may as well have put the blade in my hand herself.
Someday I would be saved. But not before I tried to save myself. And failed so horribly that never again would I be written off as overdramatic or hormonal. Unfortunatenately, my parents would see first hand that I was not faking to get attention; they had waited too long to get help.