Good Enough

I had plenty of hate.

Not that bumbling, stagnating, putrefying hate that other people have.

My hate is a fire, and I concentrated it and pointed it inwards, using it to burn away everything about myself that wasn’t good enough.

It started in year seven, before Feisal Withers asked me out.

My friends hated me, and the feeling was mutual. We stuck together so that we would not have to be alone.

That’s the fact of the matter.

But nothing changed until after Feisal.

Then I felt my hate magnify.

Then I was not happy with my four, awful, ugly friends.

The day after he had dumped me, I stood in front of the mirror in my bedroom, eyeing everything he had never complemented about me.

My hair, my clothes, the music I listened to… everything he’d never said he liked had to go.

I let the hatred well up in my hands and then I went to work with a pair of scissors and some dye.



The problem with prettiness is that it doesn’t last long.

It changes with the fashion, season by season.

If I were beautiful, that would not have been a problem. But I wasn’t, so I had to anticipate every change, be the first and the prettiest.



Jack Whitfield was my favourite of all the boyfriends.

Our relationship had lasted four impressive years. We were practically married.

Our breakup was horribly messy- ‘but I’m sure I bought this CD’, ‘this film was a gift, dammit’ and –with hindsight- my personal favourite: ‘but you hate this hamster! You tried to kill it!’

I did hate the hamster, it was true.

We worked it out though. Now we are friends.

Those were our worst arguments, but not one of those breakup arguments was the one that had the biggest effect on us.

That was left to another argument, the cause of which I forget.

All I remember of that argument, really, was me storming out of his parents’ house, swearing at him, saying I hated him, and not meaning a single word of it.

I had gone home, sure that I’d ruined us, and allowed the hate to build up in my hands.

I’d snatched up a pair of scissors and hacked away at my hair and clothes, and created havoc all over; when the hate took over, I had always needed to destroy what I was before I could recreate.

But that, for the first time, had not been enough.

I’d never hated myself as much.

I forgot that I was attractive.

I forgot that it would not be hard to make myself perfect.

I hated everything about myself, I hated the skin I was in and the very fact that I was alive.

I pressed the scissors’ blade against my wrist and drew two quick lines of blood with it.

The hate faded away.

I spent a few minutes admiring the way the blood looked against my skin before tying a tourniquet around my forearm and cleaning the blood up.



Jack had known the next day what it was that I had done.

He’d seen it in my hair, which had been long-ish and a deep mahogany but which I’d fashioned into an orange-ish pixie bob. He’d seen it in the dress I’d been wearing, one of my mother’s because most of my clothes were no longer fit for purpose.

And he’d seen it in the white bandage on my left wrist with the two red ribbons tied over them.

I’d told everyone that it was to show my support for those suffering depression, those driven to self-harm, and it was amazing how quickly they bought it.

But Jack… jack had stayed silent the whole day, until we’d gotten to his room and then he’d cried. Cried, and apologised, and cried.

That night, we’d made love.

I’d had sex before, I was by no means a virgin, but that was the first time I’d ever made love.