When I was young, and my world was literally and figuratively small, it was very easy (and the only thing you can do) to assume that it is the only thing, the correct thing, and the rest of the world must exist like this too. When I grew up living in a small cage lined with thorns, it could be terrifying and earthshaking to find that others didn’t. The fact that if you so much as sit wrong you are yelled at, or that life, your “home” and all of existence feels like a prison to you but not others is a horrible realisation. So I rebelled against it for a long time, made easier by the isolation itself. But like a really poorly made dam, once the floodgates opened, they couldn’t be shut.
Of course, the next thing I do, is try to find why. Why me and not them? In an ideal word, every thing must have a rational, pinpoint-able cause. There must be a reason I am suffering. And finding no other reason, I turn inwards. It is my fault. It must be me, for not being a good enough child. Or a good enough student. Or a good enough …something, doesn’t matter what. Because the adults, multiple of them, tell me that it’s not them. And so it must be me, because after all, these are the people who should be my anchor and my harbour.
It takes years of therapy and talking and safe spaces to even realise it might’ve been something else. The adults, the circumstances. Not me, a child who did not choose any of this and could not control any of it. Certainly not by trying to shape myself into whatever moulds I think I should fit into. Eventually, it lands somewhere, that it wasn’t right and it wasn’t fair. I was just a kid. There was no amount of being perfect or normal or exceptional I could have done to make it better. I deserved love and care because you existed. And I didn’t get that. That changes how I see the world. It lands harder than the first realisation, because for the first time the world is inherently wrong and unfair and there was nothing I could have done hurts worse than I failed.
When you grow up in a space like that, it never leaves you. Nearly a decade later, despite love and care and everything else, I spend my life never sitting with my back to a door, and hiding browser tabs. I look at food menus and wonder if they’ll think it’s okay for me eat something. I look at other people in pain and sometimes wonder if its anywhere as deep as mine once was, or if they can even comprehend how my life is painted in a palette that is so far from theirs. I look at things that I missed out on.
And there’s so many of them. Children in the swimming pool, laughing in the summer sun. The gentle touch of a concerned parent wiping away food at the next table. A crying child, going to their parent instead of running away from them. Parents boasting about how smart and amazing their perfectly average children are. I’ll never have that. Even if you keep my soul whimsical and childlike and young, even if the magic of curiosity and laughter never leaves me, as I hope it won’t, I’ll always have grown up with thorns that cut very very deep, and even scabbed and scarred over, they are never truly gone, and sometimes they bleed.