As a Sixteen-Year-Old, I Carried a Knife With Me to School Every Day
Would I have used it? Yes! But I wasn’t always like that. I wasn’t always so angry.
TW: murder, blood, violence
In my early teens, I was what my friends at the time referred to as a “nerd.” I would tie a bedsheet around my neck like a cape, and jump from sofa to sofa. If wasn’t risking my life, I would be glued to the television watching Beyblade. I was the kid who believed in Santa longer than I should have and slept with the light on.
By sixteen-year-old, the only change was that I had moved to a less affluent part of the city after my parents divorced. Maybe there was some residual anger from that, but at the time, it wasn’t significant enough to make me change who I was.
Then I witnessed my first stabbing. I held my cousin in my arms as he choked out his final words while drowning in his blood.
There had been a spike in knife crime in the UK.
Everyone was on high alert because the in the next town over, a teenager was stabbed 24 times on his way home from…
