What If

Growing up is hard to do. It is, and I've had to do a lot of it this year, particularly in the past few months.

Moving out was the hardest part. Ever since I moved to that horrible town when I was younger, I hated it. All I ever wanted was to move home, back to the city where I belong, back to where I came from. But I couldn't. I had to stay in that dead-end town until I finished school, until I got my shit together. But then the day came - the day where I could finally go home, and it was so hard. It's not the town I found hard to leave, but it was my mother. The woman who single-handedly raised me and my younger brother while dealing with my father, my drama-filled family, and being unemployed. And we weren't easy kids to raise, either. My brother, he had anger management issues, and had to undergo therapy and treatment that she couldn't afford. Me, I hit a rebellious stage so intense that she thought she'd never get her daughter back. But when she did, we discovered that I had acute social anxiety and wouldn't leave the house for four whole months. I was always sick, with anaemia shooting down my immune system, and then came the depression that held me down for over a year. I have no idea how she did it, but she did. And I turned out alright in the end because of her. So, leaving her alone with my fourteen year old brother, in a town two hours away, really sucked. Leaving my best friend was equally as hard - we seen each other every day, told each other everything. If it wasn't for her, I wouldn't have been able to battle my anxiety half as successfully. But I couldn't complain, really. Because I was going home, and that was all I ever wanted.

Then came moving in with my dad. That wasn't terribly easy, seeing as we're not very close, nor do we know that much about each other. But once he went back to work, things settled down. This was probably because I only ever seen him for three hours in the evening when he came home from work, and some weekends when I decided to stay in Dublin. I still have issues with him, and I'm sure he has many with me, but I've kept quiet, I've dealt with it as I should.

University came next. I had been so excited and ecstatic for lectures to begin, because the university is situated in my hometown, and I couldn't wait for the feeling of seeing Santry almost every day. And it's been good, I mean it, it has. Making friends is never easy, but I think I'm doing okay with the ones I have right now. It's different, really different from school, and me having the attention span of a goldfish doesn't do me any favours, nor does my lack of self-discipline. But I'm trying. I don't go to every lecture like I should, which is something I desperately have to work on, but I'm trying.

The hardest part of it all, though, has been being by myself. I'm almost always on my own, seeing as I have an eight hour university week (my course has it's benefits) and my friends all have much longer days. So, I go home, and I'm left to my own devices. Because of this, I think. Too much, obviously, because I went from being so optimistic two days ago, from having so much hope and excitement for the future, to being miserable. And in the space of two days! All because I nitpick at every little thing. Something happens, or something is said, and I think about it all night and all day, until I've blown it completely out of proportion and created a problem that never existed. Or, maybe I haven't blown it out of proportion at all. Maybe I'm just right. Maybe I just know, because such is typical for me, that because I had a few weeks of happiness, that I'm bound to find misery around the corner. Because that's the norm for me. Whenever I'm even remotely happy for a little while, the universe comes knocking and pulls me down again, tries to drown me. One of these days, it's going to succeed. I'm not sure how much more of this I can take. My one wish in life, the one thing I want out of my years on this planet, is happiness and love. And I can't take this, this misery and this upset. Because what if I never find it? What if it's just not in the cards for me - like it wasn't in the cards for my mother or father? What if I inherit their ridiculously bad luck, and end up unhappy and miserable? God knows, I'm sick of seeing everyone else around me so content with their lives and the people in it, and seeing that feeling last for them. Because that feeling has never once lasted more than a month for me. And I don't think it ever will.