BECOMING NOTHING
I have always wanted to grow up. I always wanted to get to that right age where I could do what I wanted, be who I wanted, be where I wanted, and not have to ask for permission.
Coming from a very overprotective nuclear family, I craved and looked forward to any sense of independence. I thought my parents were overprotective, controlling, overbearing and I was suffocating under them. If I was independent though, things would be different, I couldn’t wait to grow up.
My first sense of independence was when I joined high school. Looking back though, it was just a false sense of one. I believed that being away from my parents meant that I could finally be ‘myself’. I believed that up until that point, I had been living the life my parents wanted me to live. I dressed how my mom wanted, did my hair how she said it should be done, talked the way my father said confident people talked, and acted how I felt would be most appropriate.
Despite feeling that I had changed everything about myself to be an acceptable norm and reduce my time in the disappointment chair, I always fell short. I wasn’t confident enough, I didn’t behave like a certain cousin or my friends enough, I wasn’t girly enough and why on earth was I so easily influenced? Maybe it’s because I’m an introvert? It must be.
When my father said my introversion was the excuse I had for my inferiority complex, I felt crushed. This diagnosis went on for years and the more it was said, the more I believed it. Maybe I wasn’t an introvert, maybe I was just completely insecure because I could never measure up.
This is why I hate the mirror, it’s always felt like a note pad filled with every fault I knew I had. I looked at the mirror and saw a broken stranger overworked from building a foreign image overtime. The image was based on voices coming in from everywhere. The more it was built, the more they both broke. I hated the sight, it made me feel helpless and lost.
I felt damaged on both ends.
So when I was finally enrolled in the all-girls school in the middle of nowhere, I actually felt at home. I remember some people cried, some people talked all night about how they missed home and how they could not make it but I slept like a baby my first night. I told myself I finally had it, independence.
However, the truth was I had no idea what the fuck I was doing. I still don’t btw. I was suddenly shoved into the real world and I honestly knew nothing. My sense of independence did nothing for me because it really wasn’t there. I was fucking terrified of being in high school after learning what it actually was. I was terrified that everyone else knew everything more than me, I was terrified I didn’t have enough friends and just as fast as it came, I had lost my sense of independence again.
I found myself conforming to what I thought high school needed and then I was staring at the stranger again, building and breaking and building and breaking.
I got drunk my first break from high school and went to second base with a boy so that when I went back to school, I also had a story to tell. I never told that story. Fun fact, years later, I came to realize that I was actually attracted to the friend that took me drinking that day and only made out with the boy because she told me it would be fun. It actually was.
Liking her was me trying my best to be like her, to talk to her, to hang out with her, and overcome this crippling feeling of jealously when she started to hang out with different people. These types of feelings would happen with several girls through high school and part of the building and breaking was me refusing to admit they existed. I was scared of what that meant and what it said about me. Wasn’t I already broken enough? What was the need to adding more damage to that pile?
Ignoring these feelings would many times mean shaming myself for having them.
However, what started out as a potential safety net for me turned out to be a more complex web of a complication between who I am, who everyone wanted me to be, and who I thought I needed to be.
I was still stuck on this web when I decided to have my first penetrative sexual experience. My then-partner had broken up with me because I kept on saying I was not ready and when I was guilty enough, he finally had his shot one hot afternoon for about three minutes. I remember lying there wondering who the fuck allows themselves to be fucked in a dirty hostel campus bunk bed?
It was me apparently because despite it not being pleasurable, I did it several other times.
What’s fucked up is that even as I had lost what I thought was my last remaining shred of self-worth in the form of my virginity to him so we could be together, he still chose someone else over me. After I was done crying, I went right back to the kitchen and created the person who allowed him to cheat on his girlfriend every now and then. I told myself I was in control because at least he wasn’t cheating on me.
He didn’t give me orgasms but boy was the UTIs an experience.
I continued to get into relationships and transform into the magical person I thought those partners needed but the only time I ever felt connections was when I was drunkenly making out in the club with strangers. I loved that I didn’t know them and it didn’t matter who they were and who I was, they just wanted to do nasty things on the balcony and I was down for that. Soon, I told myself the solution was to not be sober. That’s probably where the independence lies.
The high.
The high made me feel transformed. I started to talk more when I was high, to dance more, to not be myself, and to let myself be nothing but drunk. I loved it. I loved to look into the mirror when I was altered, it started to feel like the only right time to look. Soon, I was the person who passed out for two days because they drunk too much.
The world spun that whole week btw.
Diving into my early twenties and ten thousand mistakes later, I was tired of transforming. I was tired of what conforming meant, I was tired that I really could not say anything about myself because I did not know myself.
Up until that point, I didn’t even know if I had a favorite colour. A favorite meal. A favorite memory, a favorite place, favorite film, nothing. I felt like a compilation of other people’s impressions of me and every memory I held was not mine. Might explain why I never remember anything.
I remember thinking I had finally found my independence after university when I got employed working what I thought was my dream job. I found myself still conforming in the name of security and stability.
Two years later though, I feel like an exhausted fraud and so I resigned and decided that I was going to be nothing.
