A Simple Tale, Really.
I was going to say that my biggest regret was not punching this one person in the face. What they did to me, well, it was fucked up. But I stood there. And I let it happen. Because I was scared of what people would think if I didn't.
Which takes me to my actual biggest regret. You know, two years ago, maybe three? My father asked me why on earth I was so damned depressed. And for the first time, I thought about it. I pushed past my self-loathing and anger and I really, really thought about it. The response I finally gave him was the first time I'd ever figured it out. The first time I cracked the secret code, found the underbelly of my great sadness. And he admonished me for my feelings. So I stopped thinking about it.
Recently, I remembered. It's been years of work. Maybe not.on my social anxiety but on my depression, there's definitely been improvement. Things have been pretty bad for years now, specifically the last two. I went to university. One I didn't choose, studying a course I hated that my parents decided I should do. No one told me how difficult it is to force yourself to do something when your parents aren't there as a constant reminder of how shitty you'll feel if you don't.
So I tried at first. That didn't last long. Depression... I thought it had left me for some time. During the pandemic, staying home all the time was bliss and peace. I grew closer with myself. Showed myself kindness. But that experience? I've spent the past two years - like many college students - in what felt like unnecessary agony. You pay so much fucking money and for what? A piece of paper to show for all the years of struggling to keep yourself alive?
Cos that's what it was for me. A struggle. During my two years in that university studying the great, prestigious Law my parents both have their degrees in, I experienced things on an entirely different lev from what I knew. You've heard of that kind of depression where you can't get out of bed right? I hardly ate. Hardly bathed. For weeks. Months, even, at first. I was lost. I experienced derealisation. Reality was so bad that my brain began to convince me that this wasn't real, that I needed to get out somehow. Self harm and suicide spun around in my mind when it wasn't an empty haze in there and I dreaded waking up every day.
Is it sad that I felt that way most days of my life? I'd wake up and I'd immediately hate myself for it? Beg for Death like a desperate, devout worshipper at the alter. Mine has been such a life of nothingness. I wasted so much time looking at myself like I was nothing. So here's what I would change. The one thing.
If I could go back, I'd do just one little thing. I'd accept myself. I'd choose to understand and I would work towards making myself happy. I'd do that instead of learning to judge myself as my parents judged others, internalise everything society said so I would be perfect enough, hold making pretty grades and getting people to laugh over the rot going on in my own head. I'd choose me, not them. Me.
Just that one thing. That one little thing. It's funny how I've spent my life denying myself. I run from people when they show me too much kindness, truly believing I don't deserve it. I harm myself for being "weak", call myself a "coward" because I just don't like to exist the way some others do. I'm shy and I'm lazy and I'm loud and I'm quiet. I am a dickhead and the sweetest fucker you'll ever meet and I love and hate how good and bad people can be. I am a mountain of contradictions that was taught to hate themselves by watching their parents, by watching the world and comparing myself to every single thing I could find.
This isn't a spot the difference book. You can't become anyone else. I spent my entire life running from myself, hating myself, listing all the ways I was "wrong" day and night. I tortured myself with thoughts of how I wasn't good enough. It's taken so long to realise that there is no good enough. People are murderers and charity workers, swim like fish and swear like the devil himself.
You know what I am? Human. I'm just me.
If I'd known, all this years ago, that I could just be me? What a life I would have lived. Every bad thing that has happened happened because I've spent my entire life telling myself I had to be something different. I had to fit into that box, those expectations, being anything less than what I felt society wanted seemed a fate worse than death. But I have died for them.
I've spent the last two- no, the past six or seven years of my life dying over and over again. I know the pain and the empty by heart. I've felt my heart explode in my chest from crippling panic attacks, I've felt it still to a stop from the cold nothing of being a ghost in a living body. I've learnt a lot. Most painfully.
But hey. I'm leaving Law. I'm going to study English and see where we go from there, soon. I can't change the past anymore than I wish I could. But I suppose... After so many years of being a corpse, I might as well try to remember how to live and breathe, again.