Before I start I should warn you, this is not a story of redemption or a young girl finding confidence or love or herself. This is a story of how one broken person begins to heal only to realize there is no such thing as pieces too small.
You’re a meek girl smarter than you let on but you like being underestimated what you hate is when people tell you that you can’t do something, this infuriates you and drives you twice as fast to achieve said thing. Now I’m not talking about your parents forbidding you to date some boy or go to some party I’m talking about the other kind of you-can’t-do-this, the one that makes your blood boil.
You finish school with the friends you’ve had since sixth grade and now you’re standing face first against the big bad world. You all split up into different colleges, different cities, hell different continents and now you have to face it all alone. Your confidence issues grab your trust issues and they both bob up to the surface swarming your gut with so much self-doubt it could sink the titanic.
You sail by two years of college isolating yourself in the library with books because who needs a friend when you have a book, right? You disappear even when you oh so desperately want to shine, you are invisible; a chameleon. And really, you don’t care. You just want to make it through, counting down the days, hours and minutes.
And then you come to university. This dreaded moment is what you have not been looking forward to. Ever! You are terrified of not making friends, of failing, of not achieving enough, of disappointing people, of being invisible all over again, so much fear that I am surprised you make it out of the bed in the morning. And truly, these are all rational fears; your tack record proves it.
University begins and in some courses you do fine but in others you soar, you take time but you find people. People you are glad to call your people. People you laugh with, people who understand you and people who you can really see being friends with for a very long time. Alas, never admit to life that you’re actually happy. You look forward to everyday even though it means sacrificing precious sleep but life is good and maybe today you can be less broken than yesterday, less of a disaster. And you are.
Until life decides this has gone on for too long it’s time to split open and pull any form of solid ground from under this girls feet. You come home from class one day and your parents tell you that they’ve decided what you’re studying is not good and they don’t like it, they go so far as to say it doesn’t suit you. Suit you? How they hell you do get to decide what does and does not suit you? And about that, maybe they just don’t like that you’re happy, maybe happiness doesn’t suit you. Yeah, I’m thinking that’s it. They just can see you smile for no reason for a change. You hate them, so much you swear to do whatever the fuck, make money and get so far they can’t get a whiff of you. But ultimately, you hate them.
You’re so angry you rip apart your life the very next day and tell them here, this make you happy? And who knows, maybe it does. In this manic fury you go to your program manager at university to tell him you want out and he talks to you and something inside you calms down. Maybe it’s not that bad. Maybe you’ll find someone nice there, fall in love, that sort of thing. Maybe it’ll be fine. Ha-Ha. But anyway, you tell him you’ll take some time think about it and you do and you decide you’ve already lost the battle no point in losing the dignity you have left, if any.
This time you don’t go back to the blade. You did that when you were happy, you were convinced that if you just bled out the bad you could stay happy. Joke’s on you! But you don’t touch the blade again. Maybe you’re afraid that if you do you won’t be able to come back or stop yourself. Maybe you just want to die and if you hold that piece of metal again you will kill yourself. But you stood inches from the ledge and you felt the cold wind whipping your skin and you imagined what plummeting would feel like and you almost do. But you don’t. You never will.
You, my friend, are a masochist and I wonder, maybe you like it.
Life Insects and Nothings 