It feels like I’m moving in slow motion but everyone around me is moving so fast and I can’t slow them down. I want to go back to when I was nine and I was normal. I was just a little girl with golden ringlets in her hair. I want to go back to before I became this mess who hides in corners and claws at her skin. Before the abuse happened. But I can’t. I’m not normal. Yet I feel so much pressure because I am no longer alone in my bedsit. I’m here on this unit filled with people of whom my actions affect. I feel like they are all waiting for me to do something. Overdose. Flip out and cry some more. To react. But I am happy to try to be this normal person that the community around me needs and I’ll say the right lines and act the right way. But I don’t know how to do this. I don’t know who I am anymore. At least in my flat I was the girl who sat on the floor with those pills, the alcohol, and that rusty knife. That was me until those two psychiatrists and a social worker visited me.
I can manage. I can manage it all. This grief consumes me but instead of feeling the pain I run from it. I run off and it’s not healthy or normal. We are supposed to feel love and hate and pain. Feeling is part of being alive; it’s human. It’s the point. But I want to feel nothing. I don’t want to feel at all. It hurts so bad I can’t breathe. I want my mum back and every night I clutch my blanket that still smells like her and I sleep close to it to absorb her. I miss the way she used to brush her fingers across my forehead when I was poorly. I miss her smile and her laugh. Losing someone and them being alive leaves no room for closure. I cry myself to sleep every single night because I want her. I want her to put her arms around me. I absolutely love you. I absolutely love you, okay? And maybe she won’t see this and maybe she is hurting still from my voice when I chose to speak out about my childhood. I chose to live in a refuge and I chose to sit and tell that detective everything. Maybe she hates me. Maybe she wants me to suffer. That’s fine. I’m fine. I can take that. I’m good at suffering.
I’ve become a mess. A mess of the trauma from my past and a mess of the trauma of my present. But I’m fine and I just wish everyone would stop asking. Stop talking. I managed. It was managed. A year ago I put a knife to my wrist and I swallowed over sixty tablets with a bottle of red wine and I died inside. I lost. I lost the very moment my family chose him and it doesn’t matter what a court of law says or what happens next. Because I lost him and them. Guilty or not guilty I was the person who lost everything. Life carries on, endlessly. Even after loss. It has to. It has to because the people left are still breathing and living even if they don’t want to. Their minds are still producing thoughts and emotions felt deep within their body. My family broke my heart the moment they decided to abandon me. I want to feel nothing. They decided to stand beside the man who abused my body and treated me like a doll from my toy box for 13 years. The moment I told the truth was the moment they vanished and all the memories faded into black and white photographs ripped at the edges. I lost. And so the chain of events started and from the outside you may think I handled it badly. I fell onto the train tracks. But I did the best I could with what I had. I did my best without them.
As far as they are concerned I was and am absolutely fine. Promise.
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