What I Became

What I Became.
March 2000, aged 18. (revised again Sept 2002)

Back then I didn’t know any better. I was too young to understand all the complexities that living life as an adult would bring. There was nothing else I wanted to be. To reach maturity, to be wiser, to be older, to be treated differently, to be able to do what I wanted, without people telling me what to do all the time. Just to be an adult.

I was in such a desperate need to grow up. To be something I wasn’t. There was no past or present. Everything was done for the soul purpose of looking forward to the future and being the very best that I could be. Always striving for something. Working towards another goal to make myself better than I was so that I could be perfect in the future. Being seven, twelve or sixteen meant nothing. Being an adult was what it was about.

Well, things change, don’t they? They certainly did for me. All that time spent preparing for things that hadn’t happened yet made me neglect what I was supposed to be doing now. Or then, I should say. Things are different now. I’ve been out in the big bad world, and yes, it is bad. I’ve held down a steady, but crap job. I’ve lived in my own apartment, which was crap as well. I learned responsibility and independence, which I now know isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Life will never reach the expectations I made for myself when I was that kid, playing dress up in my mum’s clothes all those years ago. To be honest, I’m still playing. Adulthood is as scary as those dusty pavements in a foreign country. Venturing into the unknown. Half scared, half exhilarated. Going further and further into something I had and still have little control over.

All the years I spent wishing upon stars and secretly praying to a God I didn’t believe in just so I could be grown up, only to find I’m not sure anymore and maybe I wished for the wrong thing. Why couldn’t I have gotten a pony like my friends? I was an adult in kid’s shoes. Trying to be sophisticated, mysterious and demure. Well screw that. Those years were wasted on me. I lost my childhood through my own fault in my rush towards the end of the rainbow. Never did I stop to think what would happen once I reached it. Then what? Now what?

I had done everything I’d set out to do by the turn of my eighteenth birthday. I’d been there, done it all, seen the movie and bought the T-shirt. When I finally reached my dream, I was already sick of it. What more was there to achieve in my young, short life? I’d outlived the hopes and dreams of most adults in the life span of a kid. Now I wanted out. I wanted so badly to turn back those years and live again; oblivious to the downward spiral world I’d cast myself into as a pre teen. I know things I shouldn’t know and I did things a child of that age shouldn’t even be thinking about. What did I do to that sweet little ballerina girl? Who replaced her with me? This empty shell of a girl?

I looked around me and wondered what to do next. I’d done everything I thought I could do and often surprised myself on the way. I became scared and tentative about the future. I didn’t want to run and embrace it any longer. It was my turn to step back a few paces and reflect on what I’ve been doing and where I’ve been. The power of retrospection is a strong one, and like everyone warned me as I hurtled past them, I needed to slow down and take a look at the mess I was creating, not the future I was making. I wanted time to sit down and say, “Hey, look what I’ve done! But none of it matters because this is it. This is where I am and I’m still not happy.”

I guess that was what had driven me all those years. Not the wish to be older or to have something to look forward to and do all these spectacular things. It was a pure want for happiness and a need to make others happy. It was something I had tasted very often through my life so far, but was never able to hold onto it for longer than a day or so at a time. The bad days seem to have out numbered the good ones and have gotten lost in all the tangled memories squashed into my oversized and tired brain. When I am down, it’s as if that’s how it has always been. When I am happy, I am perched precariously on a fence, wobbling one way and another between those two worlds. Too scared to let go of the past and jump on one side, and too proud to let myself slink completely into the other.

What I became was a bitter and unhappy adolescent on the verge of a nervous breakdown because I had simply burnt myself out. Just like all those hundreds of little girls who graced the screens of Hollywood all those years ago and disappeared by puberty into the oblivion of the underworld. The place where the ones who had everything had eventually lost the battle and there was nothing left to achieve and nothing left to top the previous high. So, we sank lower and lower into our own misery praying the knight in shining armor or the prince with his jewels and charm, or sometimes just someone to help us find the courage to get up, would come and save us any day now.

Well... I can’t have everything. I can get close, but never achieve the one thing I craved so much. Eternal happiness. Of course, now, as a real adult, I know that I can’t have good luck everyday. There is no such thing as an eternity in anything. I realized I hadn’t made any decisions for myself. Never! So I figured that’s what I should do. If I want happiness I have to get off my lazy, middle class, fat butt and work at it. Nothing in life is free and everything has a labored price. I can’t expect my ideals to come true and I no longer live in the fairy tale fantasy world that occupied so much of my life before.

What I became is this: lonely and wise beyond my expectations, with a will to carry on no matter what. -That I am better than the world I plunged myself head first into. Just plodding to whatever beat I happen to hear instead of inventing my own and running wildly to it. I am not happy, yet I’m not sad either. I am more of a woman than I ever thought possible and I know I can live out there on my own if I have to, but that I don’t have to if it's not what I want. And that is what matters. So long as I remain true to myself, I cannot go wrong. I know it sounds trite, but it’s true. Any therapist worth her doctorate will tell you the same thing. Most importantly, I will learn from whatever I choose to do or do not do…