"when growing up feels like becoming nothing"

just an ~ Ordinary Girl ~

Here I am, standing at the intersection of who I am and who I thought I’d become. I’ve lit a cigarette, I’m flirting with the idea of living.

I’ve finally decided it’s time to embrace the emptiness and acknowledge it not as a void but as a potential to create life, to create a force. I’ve decided it’s time to strip away the layers of borrowed identities and see what lies beneath. I’m tearing off the wallpaper, releasing the stolen dreams, and speaking over the whispers guiding me to what they claimed was home. I am finding solace in navigating uncharted territories within myself, alone.

I’ve always wanted to be Ordinary Girl whilst also hating her for being the root cause of all my issues - who am I if not a woman who lives for a female friendship where the lines blur and living for each other becomes as simple as breathing? I’ve always wanted her struggles, her perks, her stupid little tick boxes, and her perfectly aligned timeline. And so I stole it.

I took it really believing it was something I deserved and needed. I thought there was great pride in pushing my health and brain capacity at double the amount Ordinary Girl would, to get half as far as Ordinary Girl does, I thought this made me a pioneer in living. I thought I wore the crown of thorns, I thought I cried the dainty crystal tears. I thought it made me a martyr. What a fucking idiot.

I woke up one morning in December too aware of the anger I had been resting in. Afraid I had been too angry lately. Afraid of what it meant and what it had to be.

I’d started to become too quick to feel the rage build up in my chest and settle in my throat where I did not speak. I did not let it out, but it sat and sat until the anger passed over me leaving me in confusion. Historically whenever Anger arrived I’d ignore it and choose to pursue checkpoints instead, the way I always had, and dabbling in the pains and aches of being Ordinary Girl. Trying on the dresses and pearls. This was easier than asking Anger “why?” and sticking around for the speech that would follow.

I left all urgent matters of health in the background in pursuit of this normal, the need to fit in took over when I didn’t yet fit in within myself and it felt comfortable enough that I never asked it to leave. In the background things got worse and worse, screaming out for attention, asking for a break, asking to change my path from that of which I had copied and pasted because this was simply all I knew. I kept ignoring it.

And then I woke up one December morning, and I wanted to punch a hole in the wall.

Surprise! The perks you get as a result of an insurance payout after a life-altering disability do not feel fruitful! They feel undeserving and even oddly shameful. On an even grander scale, it also means the things that drive you, your end goals are not necessarily in line with your peers! You can no longer relate and they no longer relate to you. This detachment from the same life path, the same end goal, and the same mundane issues feel like a monumental loss. And so, it is easier to spend an equally monumental portion of your life chasing the same dreams and climbing up that hill, and not enjoying the slightly rotten - on one side only, fruit, with not only nothing to be passionate about once you reach the top but also your health, your sense of self, your light being left so far behind you don’t remember if it was ever a thing you had to begin with.

And you attend the parties, and go to university and get your masters and date the stupid boys and wear the blazers and move into the house and grow up and grow up and grow up…you still don’t belong. You still don’t fit in. Not here, or there, not in your own skin, not in your own clothes. The drive for all of that was not your own. And now you are nothing. You are not even your own girl, you do not even know who she is.

I know now that the things you pursue are not the things you create. And the things you create, not the things you pursue, are your life force. And so, I am pursuing health - I am getting those ‘scars/marks/not quite sure what’s’ in my latest scans checked out. And so, I am creating love - through art and volunteering and pouring myself into myself and everyone surrounding me until it drowns us all with a life force so sweet we are all bees just drowning in honey.

I am now driven for myself, by myself, and that alone is creating so much anger.

I am feeling anger like this for the first time in over 10 years and it is not coming silently. I am feeling it wrap itself around my neck and kiss the depths of my depths, and it feels so good. Anger in itself as a life force, Anger holding hands with Love telling me THIS IS WHAT YOU DESERVE! ITS WHAT YOU ALWAYS DESERVED! Anger for not prioritizing what needed to be done, Anger for not allowing myself more. I am angry at people, places, and things because I know - for the first time in ten years, that I deserve more. I know - for the first time in ten years, that this love I have for myself takes priority and anything less will only make me mad, will only set me on fire more.

I’m furious at myself for not allowing more, all this time, just so I could ‘be,' just so I could fit in, just so I can chase the same dreams, lead the same life, be normal be fine. I feel quite literally the way Elsa does when she takes off that glove in Frozen and screams out LET IT GOOOOOOOO.

I spent so long not nurturing all the parts of me that were crying out because it felt so selfish to just take a step back, listen to myself, and enjoy what I was hearing. Tending my real wounds was too heavy, I simply avoided them to tend to superficial bruises caused by my own hands, trying so hard to mimic those of Ordinary Girl, careful to make them in the right spots - visible enough that they’d ask, hidden enough that it would still hurt. Ignoring doctors and physiotherapists and any professional in pursuit of Ordinary Girls struggles instead.

To love myself enough to be selfish with myself seemed unheard of, to know myself enough to be selfish with myself was a whole other level. To enjoy the good that came with the bad. To enjoy being ‘selfish,’ to enjoy prioritizing myself, knowing very well all my friends would still love and accept me. It wasn’t about fitting in with them or if they’d accept me, on a much grander scale it was about fitting in with myself, accepting who I was.

I spent so long being so afraid to accept and so I am furious now at anything that doesn’t serve me, and it is fun, there’s a fire in me and I didn’t even know I held the matches. I am standing at the top of the mountain I climbed following Ordinary Girl - and I am ready to leap right down, to give her the biggest kiss for giving me a sense of normalcy I so desperately needed back then, but I don’t need anymore, and that’s okay! And then, I will jump. Will I land? Will I squish like a cartoon cat? Will it hurt? Who knows?

And more importantly, who fucking cares?

A note falls out of my back pocket as I’m folding up this year. “It’ll be better,” it reads, it smells like last December. I have been telling myself over and over not to prophesize this new year. I tell myself it’s bad luck.

It’ll be better. It’ll be brighter. I’ll have more friends, and romance, and health, and wealth. More. More. More. It’ll be better. It’ll be brighter. I’ll have more friends, and romance, and health, and wealth. More. More. More. It’ll be better. It’ll be brighter. I’ll have more friends, and romance, and health, and wealth. More. More. More.

But it might not. And that is okay, that is life.

I prophesied a magnetic year back in December 2022. I didn’t even consider the fact that life could and often does get worse, that things could change in ways so peculiar and mundane…that things would not be better.

On the second day of January 2023 my sister’s phone was stolen, on the sixth, my ego was crushed and my heart was left bruised. On the fifteenth I had a phone call that changed my views on grief, followed by a message from demons passed - which somehow, in a very unexplainable way, turned into love. By the thirty-first day of January the ‘it’ll get better’ note had been through the wash twice and left soggy still in my back pocket.

One thing I can prophesise is just how shitty things can get, right before they get that much better.

At first, I took a seat with all versions of me and got us to trust one another. I promised the younger I could handle it, and the older that I would listen, it took a few turns and shocking twists but we got there in the end - sorta. Halfway through the year, I was able to look in the mirror and recognize myself, this version of me, with faith and sleeping anger in her eyes. With this recognition of who I was, it was easier to understand who I should be. I was able to allow light in and face it head-on without it blinding me. By December, I was able to love.

And I know, just because last year went well it doesn’t mean this year will. So I’ve started 2024 chanting “I'm gonna be the best person I can be on New Year's Day and decide if I want to do it again the next day from there," and knowing it will lead me the right way. I started 2024 holding hands with people who have been in shelters in storms for me this past year, people who wouldn’t bat an eye at whatever life path I take, people so honest and extraOrdinary they make life worth everything it is and more, and so, how bad can it go?

Ten days in and it’s been pretty good. There has been no crying in bed, there have been many conversations with myself and the people who love me, too much laughter in the rooms we have been huddled in, there has been a pursuit to find a drive, to create, to live and allow myself to finally leave the endless cycle of trying to relate to everyone - when nobody even really relates to themselves. Death to Ordinary Girl! But did she ever even exist?!

Being a teenager with adult perks and problems was a big source of confusion, it was always easier to lead life and follow the goals of everyone around me and be miserable when I wasn’t hitting the markers that were set out - that everyone else was hitting, or when I wasn’t struggling or striving for the same end goal. Now it’s time to let that go. It’s time to allow anger to set me free. Allow me to understand what I deserve, what I need, what passions I have, and what I am creating in this world.

2024 is the year of finding my life force. And also enjoying who I am, free from who I should be. Free from any checkbox or timeline. Free from Ordinary Girl. In love, with love, from love. The beauty of growing up and coming up empty means I can grow up to become everything, so long as I want to become. Happy New Year.

What I’ve been consuming -

Audio

Do I Ever Cross Your Mind - Chet Atkins ft Dolly Parton

Chiquitita - ABBA

New Year’s Eve with friends meant Karaoke as soon as midnight hit, and the moment this song came on I let my friend know this song reminded me of us, and then immediately began crying - for reasons I am still unsure of.

The funniest thing in the world is being sat somewhere as a song that makes you cry is being sung by a room full of totally unaware people, and feeling like you’ll be okay, as long as you’ve got them you’ve got this (and then wishing they would shut up because you just can’t stop crying).

Visual

Pricilla

Here’s my favorite review of Pricilla that says everything I cannot -

“What if, after everything, after you are no longer a teenage girl, after you have independence and friends and responsibilities, you have grown up and your formative years have coalesced within you, unveiling a woman who is nothing? 

Like, what if you are nothing? What if those surfaces, those songs, those fantasies, those pictures you have long tried to double expose onto your life have offered you no solace, no catharsis? What if you do not even like your own objects?

To grieve for an idol they must mean something and to grieve for a person they must had a life - so how does one grieve for yourself? Are you to grieve instead for the bland universality of a youth full of suffering, replaying its details ad nauseum, until all you can hold in your soul is a comfortable boredom and the fear of witnessing a world outside car leather and carpeted floors? 

No camera could capture light down that void.”

Is this not the inner struggle I have been facing for the past few months??? Is this not this entire newsletter but articulated so much better using much fewer words??

I <3 Pricilla, Elvis u fckn suck, just know if u ever haunt me i will end u

Ugly Bety

I finished my binge of Ugly Betty and can I just have a moment to say nothing makes me happier than Wilhelmina Slater getting her happy ending, my beautiful, evil, queen.

Reading

Tender is the Flesh

The pattern of my first book of the year being insanely underwhelming and hollow has continued with Tender is the Flesh.