This place is not a good place. I wish I could tell you that it’s fine but that would be a lie. It is not fine. Life is not fine. I have not been awarded that luxury. Last week there was mental health awareness day, and I didn’t write anything for that. I wish I had. I had so many thoughts swirling around it my head they needed to get on to paper. That didn’t happen.
Some days I feel it is a miracle that I make it out of bed. On those days I wish I was normal. That I was able to function like a normal human being. That has plagued me for as long as I can remember, that I am somehow different, a freak, and why can I not just function normally. As long as I can remember I have been “stupid child,” “idiot child,” “stupid girl.” Those words have stuck with me throughout my life. I have two teachers that believed in me, and honestly I feel if it were not for them I would still be floundering somewhere. Mrs Lyons, who gave me a P.E. bag that she had made herself, after I had lost mine yet again that term, she was a teacher who had so much time for me, who made me feel like I could be normal. And Mrs Snowden, who realised that I was smart, that I could do it, just so long as she pushed me.
Some days I feel like I was let down somewhere along the way, though I know that was no one’s fault. I knew my own limitations; I just wish that someone in school had listened to me. It was only once I got to 6th form that problems truly started. My teachers didn’t understand how I knew something so well but managed to do so badly in exams. At that time, it was all so easy to attribute it to the other shit that was going on in my life at the time. I also wish I had pushed it further myself, I knew what was wrong, I had dabbled in the idea, but I thought that I was being silly, just my usual “attention seeking” self. These things that we are told as a child haunt us forever.
Being in a new environment, having to make new friends, living with new people, has brought about all these feelings. The social anxiety that I hide so well. Those feelings of inadequacy, of not being good enough, of being a freak, or different, or weird. People describe me as happy, as doing okay, but that is a lie. I learnt through school how to hide my emotions, and that has stuck with me. Now I feel broken. Like my emotions don’t act correctly. Somewhere in trying to be strong I forgot how to function as a normal twenty something. That is my legacy,
Sophie
A Place of Mine 