The Forgotten Girl

I have full length windows in the front room of my new flat, this time of year when it’s raining & dull there is something almost comforting about sitting here looking out of the windows and down to the world below me – I’m in the town so it seems to be constantly alive. My little pug is asleep in the crook of my elbow and I’m feet up on my oversized sofas contemplating the words I want to share. It’s times like this when I understand that the simplest things in life are the most meaningful. These still moments are the happiest for me.

As 2014 is drawing closer to its final month I feel both still utterly lost, but also deeply changed and clear sighted – this year has been a year of battles, with myself and with the uncompromising and unchangeable rifts of life. I spent last New Year’s alone – right now I cannot remember my reasons but I know it just felt right at the time – maybe subconsciously I knew that I was going to have to prepare for a year of challenge and change.

In the early months I met someone by chance, we shared more than I have ever done with anyone previously – I believed in home whole heartedly and embraced his children in my heart as quickly as I accepted him into every pore of my being. Months later I find out it was all a lie, that the person I opened up too and thought wasn’t judging or writing me off because of my past hated the very sight of me – he has told me many times since everything I done wrong – during our time together I became deeply depressed, it’s a place I have never been before, even if the darkest times of my life I never let myself stay there in that dark and lonely place where your feelings become numb, but this time I couldn’t get out of it, I was trying …trying so hard to fight it for him and his family so I could be there for them but it was difficult. Everytime I closed my eyes I saw flashbacks of being raped all those years ago, I saw Andrew hitting me, my real parents abandoning me, I felt unwanted, unloved and disgusting and all of the things that I had blocked out and tried to not make important in my make-up came crashing down on me. I hated the very sight of me – then when he showed me how much he hated me too I couldn’t deal with it.

I turned into one of those crazy women, the ones that you have all laughed at with your mates – the batshit ex who won’t let things go and wants to explain and go over the past, crack open the very foundations and torture themselves with every tiny little comment and mistake.
I think I just couldn’t accept that after all the years of keeping my secrets, the person I finally let them out too would use every one of them against me and continue to hate and torture me emotionally.

At the same time I found a lump in my breast – my grandmother had breast cancer 3 years ago so I am not unfamiliar with the consequences, and as the test referral’s starting coming through to me I was convinced it was happening to me – it’s a long drawn out story that finally ended in October, but they couldn’t give me a final diagnosis on the biopsies and I eventually had to have an operation to remove it. The day I got my all clear was an intense relief but during the months when it was going on I just wanted to die already – my depression already had me in its grip, but this was the ultimate internal war, the main part of me thought that I deserved Cancer – that I was already a walking cancer and it was only right that the disease I bring to the lives of others should be the one that was growing inside of me.

During this time my adopted Dad had a fall at home, and then another in hospital and ended up losing the use of the right side of his body – a man who was the constant strength of our family became an invalid overnight, an angry invalid who cursed the bad luck of the world – the family around him instead of coming together fell out in petty squabbles when led to harsh words and now we stand as a family so fragmented that there is no way back together. I’ll always love the people who brought me up with more love that I would ever be capable of giving myself, but I no longer matter to them as much as I once did. We are like passing shadows full of grudges and unspoken words.

This is the first time in my life when I have truly stood completely alone, why I have felt alone in the past there has always been someone somewhere who would help me if needed, but not now – now I have nothing.
My work is also in turmoil, buy-outs and fear of job loss has made it an uncompromising and unfriendly place and I guess it’s time to leave.

So 2015 – the year is coming, and it looks like everything is changed … I just need to work out where I am going to go. What does someone who has nothing to lose do?

It’s Sunday again, my weekend has been relaxing, Friday night I went out with friends but apart from that I have been home alone. My phone has been mostly silent. No friends or family calling. My family is fractured right now, my Dad got Ill earlier this year and instead of bringing us together it has pushed us all further apart, never have I felt more adrift than I do now.

It’s weird how I always knew I wasn’t a ‘real’ part of the family but with my parents who brought me up I never thought that they would actually make me an outcast. I was wrong. Our conversations now are stilted, we are like strangers and I see no way back for us all now.

I tried to love someone this year but was rejected and now months on I find myself silently stalking his new life online — like a secret sleuth who only brings herself dissatisfaction with her spying, but can’t seem to stop. It’s like a compulsion that I don’t know how to cure. I still find it hard to accept that I wasn’t good enough, that he brought me into his life, into the life of his children and then turned me away and left me just as I needed someone most. I trusted him with my darkest secrets and still he didn’t think I deserved compassion or understanding when he saw my life collapse around me.

I’m at a crossroads and I realise that this time I really am all alone in the world, I’ve always had my adopted family to fall back on but now I have nothing, and no-one to run too, and nobody to care if I win or lose. I’m sure there should be a freedom in this but instead I feel empty.

Maybe it over simplifies my life to say (quite truthfully) that I have only ever had two desires – one was to write, and one was to know what it was like to love and be loved in return. As an unwanted and often bewildered child my imagination was my greatest playmate and every dream was a story waiting to be written and every tale ended in triumph, with love.

I stand here now as a 33 year old woman and I realise that I have not fulfilled either of my dreams – I am still incapable of loving in the right way or of being loved – it is not just romantic love that eludes me, but love of any kind. It is like a foreign land where I have often stood at the borders trying to gain entry but never been in possession of the right passport, the right qualities to be allowed to enter. Sometimes I wonder where the years have gone; sometimes I yearn for the freedom of my 20’s where even though I sometimes felt lost I still felt that my future was just around the corner, waiting patiently for me to embrace it with a full heart and clear vision.

I thought that fate would find me, that my own personal story was written in the stars and that one day I would understand the pain that I had experienced, that I would simply wake one day and the self-loathing and doubts would disappear and that I would feel complete, feel worthwhile. I realise now that serendipity – while a fabulous word – is simply a myth. An urban legend, that gives us hope in our darkest times that we have a purpose, a story all of our own.

Words have been my saviour and have been my downfall – my words fall too fast without censor, without guard, in spite, in anger, without purpose. My written words have become obsolete – I can no longer put together a sentence that touches anyone but myself, I can no longer find magic or peace within my writing. I hardly ever bother to try anymore.

I feel like life, which was once my kindly sparring partner is now nothing but a cold enemy without feeling, without remorse, without hope. I don’t know where to go from here, and I don’t know if have the energy to continue the façade. I don’t want to fight with myself any longer.

2014 will forever be known to me as the year I crashed. Emotionally it has been my hardest time ever and not just because of everything that has transpired this year to date, but because it all led up to me having to face not only my current issues but all the pain of my past in such a spectacular way.

There have been so many times when I have wanted to write it out, wanted to share but I never know where to start. How can I explain the deepest depression I have ever known, how can I articulate the craziness that possessed me to make some of the choices I made, how I trusted someone with my dark shameful secrets and that person threw them all back at me and ridiculed me with the shame I live with each day.

I want to tell you how my Dad got so sick that he lost all his movement, how it fractured my already dysfunctional family, how I had my own health issue and barely acknowledged it as important. Even after months in counselling I still told myself each day that if it turned out to be cancer I simply deserved it for not being good enough.

I stopped running and I stood still and I tried to show someone how much they meant to me, I refused to give up but became pathetic and crazy and they hated me with the very passion with which I loved them.

I stand alone now, as always, but without the shade that has covered my eyes for so long. My secrets are no longer secret and the telling of them brought me nothing but pain.

This is the year I crashed. This is the year I can’t hide or run from. This is the year I am living.

and I am not ok.

But words are so hard to put down when in a room full of people, when there is no silence.

I´ve stood with a noose around my neck and only just found a way back.