When Ally Del Monte was in eighth grade she opened up her personal blog. On it she saw 172 comments telling her to kill herself. This wasn't anything new, just a culmination of an old trend.
Since she was in second grade, Ally had been viciously bullied by her peers because of her weight.
"It's what I lived with every day," Ally told USA Today. "I've been told every disgusting thing you can imagine."
Bullying is a serious problem on and offline. Motivational speaker Lizzie Velasquez was subjected to similar tormenting when someone posted a video of her called the "world's ugliest woman."
On the night Ally read all of those hateful comments, she decided to kill herself. She grabbed her father's heart medication and began to shake with sadness as she contemplated going through with it.
Then she dropped the bottle. Her mom happened to hear the thud; thinking it was one of the cats, she walked into Ally's room.
"The world just stopped," her mom, Wendy recounted. "She said, 'Mom, I don't think I want to live anymore.'"
It was with those words that what so easily could have been a tragic ending became the beginning of a wonderful new day.
See the rest of Ally's incredible story below.
h/t: People/USA Today/Courant/Losergurl.com
Since second grade Ally Del Monte has been bullied because of her body. Due to a chronic illness, Ally began taking medication that caused her to gain weight. After putting on 60 pounds the bullying became relentless.
"I would get spit on and kicked and pushed down stairs and shoved into lockers," Ally told PEOPLE.
"I cried. I cried because I was too fat to be a princess," she wrote on her blog. "I was heartbroken because I thought I would never be good enough, pretty enough or skinny enough to be the person, the princess that I wanted to be. I could never be a princess."
When she was in the eighth grade, Ally went on her blog and saw 172 comments from her classmates telling her to kill herself.
"That night I tried to commit suicide," she said. "It was all those things kind of coming together at once, and feeling like no one really cared if I were gone, because I was being told that over and over and over again."
Fortunately, her mother was there and intervened.
With her mother's support and therapy, Ally began to thrive. She started to see her blog as a way to help other teens like her.
"I didn't want anyone to ever feel the way I did, and I wanted to do something about it," she says about her new website. "I started writing about some of my experiences, and I started talking to people from all over the world. I would get messages from them, and I would help them by either actually talking them out of killing themselves, or sending them resources, like the suicide hotline for the area they were in, or tips on what to do when you're getting bullied."
Ally also began taking her music seriously as well and penned the songs "Maybe," and "Be Brave," about her experiences.
"People say that music saves lives and it really does because it saved mine," she said.
Four years after trying to end her life, Ally is thriving and spreading her anti-bullying message around the country. She visits schools to educate students on how their words really do affect others.
Hear Ally's beautiful song about surviving bullying and see her full story in the video below!
It is no small feat to turn a personal tragedy into so much hope and positivity. Thankfully, Ally is resilient and has a mom who appears to be an angel.
Please SHARE Ally Del Monte's story to take a stance against bullying and to show others her beautiful message, voice and heroism.
