I've Got the Guts to Say Anything

Everyone has a story. Some people’s stories will be better than others, some stories will make yours feel inadequate, there will be some stories that you don’t believe for a second and others that seem so unreal that you can just tell that they’re true. A person’s story is what makes them who they are; our stories outline the kind of person we become – usually those whose stories are one’s filled with pain and angst are usually the ones who set out to change the world. The people with the stories of love, nurture and complete happiness are usually the people who go on to live normal lives, settle down with a normal family and just live in the background where no-one really knows who you are.

People seem to always think that I’m normal and that I’m one of the people whose story is filled with the love of my Mother and Father who were happily married and are still living together in complete harmony. They seem to think that because I’m happy to sit back and watch my life speed before me, that I couldn’t have had a very traumatic start to my short, twenty year old life because I didn’t want to go out and make it better for myself – they thought that because I wasn’t out trying my hardest to do everything in the best way I possibly could to make a difference to the world, that I didn’t have a particularly interesting story to tell and that’s where they’re wrong.

It has always been standard practice to judge a book by its cover. I’m sure that as human beings, we’ve done it since we first walked the planet, but in this day and age, judging a book by its cover, judging someone for what there are like on the outside and not waiting to get to know what’s on the inside is seen as normal, it’s what we do and in doing so, we create prejudices against people we don’t even know because we make up their life stories in our heads instead of getting to know them as people before we make our judgement.

I’ve always been on the receiving end of these prejudices, people think they know me from what I show them from the outside, they rarely take into account that what I show on the outside could be far from what I keep hidden on the inside.

I don’t have friends; I’ve never really understood what a friend is supposed to be. I went through my entire school career with no friends, not even during primary school did I have a friend to run around with during lunchtimes and I suppose, I didn’t really need a friend. I’d always come to the conclusion every time I sat in my bedroom and thought that I needed a friend that they were always more trouble than they were worth. I’d constantly witnessed small, stupid squabbles between the girls in my year and had always found myself wondering why people would get so close to somewhere, just so they could argue and hurt themselves. This feeling didn’t go away over time either – when I moved onto secondary school, the girls in my year began changing and by year 8 the social groups had been decided – everyone had their own little group that they belonged too and I just didn’t seem to fit into any of them. Then, as the months went on, the girls in my year became bitchier, the squabbles and falling’s out got more severe – once or twice escalating into full on fights – I remember one girl had to go to hospital and have twelve stiches to her head where one of her so-called ‘friends’ had pulled her hair. I didn’t see the point in having friends, and from that day forward, I knew that I wouldn’t ever need a friend to make me happy – I would make myself happy on my own.

I suppose that because I don’t have friends, that makes me cynical? Well, I don’t believe in love either, but it seems that didn’t matter to anyone. I’d been forced into a relationship with a guy ten years older than myself when I was 18. I couldn’t really go into the details of how it happened, because I honestly had no idea – much like many things now-a-days. I have no idea about anything anymore really. It just happened, one day I was alone in my world and the next I was forced from my bubble and into the real world with a guy who treated me like I was still 12. He spoke to me like I was a baby, ordered me around and generally made me feel like something that should belong on the bottom of his shoe. Why have I stuck around so long? Because now I’m scared of being alone again. Now that I know what it feels like to have somewhere there with you, even if it may not seem like he cares, I just know I couldn’t go back to being on my own.

I’m pretty sure people look at me and wonder what me deep, dark secret is. It’s one that I’ve never had the guts to admit to anyone but my therapist that I meet every Thursday at 3:00pm. That woman knew everything about me, down to the extremely microscopic details that I’d never bothered to surface because they all seemed so minor. Minor to everyone but her. She had a knack for making me spill everything, I don’t know how she did it or whether she even meant to, but it felt like every time I sat down in that black, puffy chair, something new from my childhood would spring up that I would feel the need to share with her, which usually ended in my sat in tears wishing I would never have to step foot inside that room again. I always told myself every time I left her room that I would never set foot in it again because it always made me cry and crying was a weakness and I certainly wasn’t ready to admit to myself that maybe my childhood had taken its toll on me – maybe the endless days that I would spend in my room hearing my Father get mad and my Mother, hearing him throw anything he could reach at her, hearing him call her a ‘Stupid Cow’ if she did anything wrong – maybe it had taken its toll on me, but I wasn’t ready to admit that even if it had.

Another thing that my therapist seems obsessed with are my ‘dreams’ as she calls them. I would never call them dreams – dreams are meant to be peaceful, they’re meant to help lull you into security while you sleep and these ‘dreams’ that I had certainly didn’t do that. They were nothing more than nightmares, cold, hard, rotten nightmares. I never used to get them; it’s only recently that they’ve begun to occur every night without fail. A blonde haired girl always appears on the edge of a cliff face, looking back at the person that I am. Her lips move as if she asks for help, but nothing comes out. She holds her hand to her throat and looks at me with helpless eyes, like she’s begging me to help her, but I know I can’t. I always try to move my feet towards her, but I’m never quick enough. She always jumps and I can hear her screams all the way down to the ocean and it’s only then that I wake up, in cold sweats, trying to figure out what they’re about.

I’ve never wanted anything in my life more than to blend in with everyone else. To just wander through life aimlessly, without anyone caring about me, my family, my fiancé and my dead-end job. I didn’t do out of the ordinary, I was a safe player, I wanted nothing but normal – which is probably why I’d been stuck in my shit relationship for so long, because that’s what I thought was normal. I’d seen my Mother being treated like shit by my Father through my childhood and I just guessed that’s how love worked.

I wanted nothing more than to blend in, I wanted to be normal. I wanted to be someone that people didn’t care about, because I’ve learned the hard way that caring for someone is the way you get hurt and once you’re hurt, nothing ever feels the same. I distanced myself from society. Every Thursday after my therapy session, I went to a small coffee shop in the small city that I lived near, and sat on one of the large, comfy seats with a medium size caramel latte and watched the people walk past the window. I made lives up for them as they walked past. There always seemed to be the man in his three-piece linen suit, rushing home to his wife after spending a little too much time with his secretary at work. The young teenage girl with her head stuck in her phone talking to the boy that treated her like a princess. The old married couple, who had been through thick and thin together and the boy and girl best friend duo who would one day get married together and have children after vowing to themselves that they didn’t love each other.

I made their lives happy to replace my own happiness, if someone else can be happy in my mind then there was no need for me to be happy myself. I didn’t need to be happy if everyone else around me was happy. It’s a weird way to look at things I suppose, but I’m sure if you stepped into my shoes for a day, then you’d probably understand why I didn’t care for my own happiness. I’d lost hope of ever being anything else than miserable. I knew that I was always going to be miserable at best.