What if a heart is turned to stone before it’s had the chance to be broken?
Slow trauma.
Fast trauma.
What’s the difference in the end?
You pour over maps, with the longing to finally get on the right track. Maps are both an aspect of our alienation and a comfort from it.
Whatever this mental health ‘thing’ (and it must be a disorder, judging by the way it shapeshifts every time I think I’ve sussed it out), I still feel caught by some late teenage snare, staring at that missed moment from where life branches out, from where the ambience and assets of our future are roughly predetermined, unless we hit some middle age crisis.
At this delicate moment I was in the throws of Anorexia.
I’m not bitter, and not asking for pity. It’s just been hard to move past a crucial part of my life that I believe that if I’d had it I’d had been a lot better equipped to deal the standard trials and tribulations that life throws at us. I missed an important life lesson, and it’s absence is filled by some inner Jeremy Kyle-esq figure whipping you with ‘hard truths’.
My home town is a traumatised town. The young adults who remain and don’t join the university flock, tend to be more vulnerable, damaged, traumatised. It’s something I’ve observed year after year.
Without sounding like a nobhead, I wish I’d had an experience of friendship building and recreational habit-forming with others who weren’t like myself trying to hide the emotional lesions from where pain perpetually oozed. I say this with nothing but empathy, but I needed to see horizons that didn’t reflect my interior landscape.
More and more desperate for connection, any diagnosis that I may or may not receive in later life may be no more than a conciliation prize for my own stability, and will do nothing for the consequences of my mistakes that have oozed quicker than pain can ooze.
I have been lashing out in the void. The void that exposes itself in every form but in the one that craves to scream “help me”.
John B Ledger 