A Story.
Once upon a time, there was a little girl. She grew up the only child of two Christian parents, learning everything that she needed to be a good woman, and a good child of God. She believed everything she was told because there was nothing else to believe. It was her entire life, her religion and her God. It was the truth, and the truth told her how to behave. However, as she grew, she realized the world and her small family were not as perfect as she believed.
Following her determination and her heart, she started becoming another person at school, more brash, more harsh, but also more loving. This dichotomy was easy to keep up, as her parents were rarely around her friends. However, when she was ten, things started to collide. Her parents were around one night when she was around her friends, and it gave her a headache, trying to be two people at once; the girl she felt she was, and the girl her parents wanted her to be.
Her family, however, was falling apart in front of her eyes. Her parents would argue almost every evening, her mother yelling to decibles that she was certain the neighbors would hear, not to mention throwing up after each yelling session. Each night, she would curl up under the covers of her canopy bed (which she had always wanted, and her father had gotten as a surprise) and pray and pray and pray that it would stop, that her family would go back to the way it was, that her parents would love her again.
That's when it started. Small, at first, just staring at a window and thinking, but grew, grew to sitting on the windowsill and willing herself to just lean a bit further. One night, when she couldn't take it anymore, she downed half a bottle of Tylenol, and with a prayer went to bed. Unfortunately in her eyes, she woke a few hours later, ridding herself involuntarily of what she thought would be her saviour.
It didn't change. One day, however, she told someone about it, someone in her church that she thought she trusted. Her mother found out and accused her of lying and taking the family's problems outside of the family. A cardinal sin, it would seem. Cowed, the girl bottled it up even more, delving deeper and deeper into herself. On the outside, at her school, she was outgoing, caring to her friends, and a seemingly normal (if a bit over-conservative) teenager.
Another move and she was in highschool, trying to make her way in a fascinatingly diverse group of students. First she wanted to be a doctor, then a politician, then a music teacher. Inside, however, she was falling apart. Homework was being forgotten in favour of nights of reading, of yelling and being yelled at. Wednesdays were spent at church, learning, teaching, and determinedly being -right-. She would wear Christian shirts to school, certain that she had the answer to everything. No, there's no pushing, there's no Bible-banging, but it was there. She did everything right. She truly believed what she said.
Inside, as always, she was torn apart. All that was there was a burned-out shell of a person, and the people around her knew it. She tried too hard. She flirted too hard, she reached out too much for that one connection, that one love that she could grab onto and keep for her very own.
Her mother would not admit that she needed help at first. She just needed to pull herself up and keep going, keep fighting the good fight. That wasn't enough, however. It wasn't enough to just try. So she saw a doctor, and got the pink pills. They worked for a while, but it all came back. Harder. One night, she took the modem cord and tried to strangle herself. She'd even written the note. The cord broke, and she was back where she was.
Eventually, it affected her schoolwork, and that was the last straw for her parents. They did everything they could to get her to calm down, to just be normal, but she couldn't. Or wouldn't. They locked her in the house, with double-deadbolts on each door when they left, they slapped her across the face when she was hysterical, and finally, they sent her to lose a part of her life to a fuzzy week in a mental hospital.
After the hospital, she was determined to go to the very Christian college that had accepted her based on essays that her mother mostly wrote. Going, she was still certain that it was what God wanted her to do. The summer before, however, she met a man at a Christian camp, almost certain that this was the man she was going to marry.
They kept up a correspondance while she was at school, learning, and quietly getting more frustrated. The dichotomy returned with a vengeance the few times her parents were around. She worried that her closest friends weren't good enough, so she would go through elabourate charades to make sure that no one met each other. It eventually failed, but her parents liked her friends, so it didn't matter.
Her first summer of school changed her life, although she would never have known it at the time. She discovered an online community through a web-based role-play game. She spent hours and hours at work dreaming up her character, and composing her story in her head. At night, she would be her character, a strong confident girl from Ender's Battle School. Between her boyfriend and her new love of the game, she was fairly happy. In the middle of the summer, her boyfriend's friends paid for her to go out and visit him as a surprise. Her parents freaked, saying that her boyfriend was nuts, and he wasn't the kind of person she should be seeing, mostly because it was a long-distance relationship. She didn't care. She thought she loved him, and broke down miserably when she was not allowed to go. Although she didn't realize it, that was the beginning of the end.
Going back to school, she got even deeper into her game, and started to really think about herself and her God and her life. School was unsatisfying, as she noticed the hypocricy of both the students and the professors. The more she saw, the more she longed for her online community of people who were confident, loving, and inclusive. Then it really started. She found that if she took a razor blade and ran it along her wrist, a bit of blood would come out. No one noticed at first, so she kept doing it when things got too painful. It was a way to let it all out, a release for the pain that was still there. Eventually, one of her friends did notice, but all that made her do was get longer sleeves. She broke up with her boyfriend after he almost proposed because she was scared. Somehow, what she was so certain of didn't feel right anymore.
At the end of the school year, after a bout of mono and a depression like no other, she left the school, not knowing if she would return. When she got back home, things got worse and worse. All she could see was pain, and all she could do is cry and reach out. Two people from her game opened their house to her. Together, they planned how to get her out of her house and to live with them. In her panic and worry that she wouldn't be allowed to go, she didn't tell her parents, just packed some suitcases and left, only leaving a note. Once the fuss from leaving died down, she settled in to her new life, a life where she could actually decide things for herself, and figure out where she stood on everything.
Time passed, some of her friends moved on, some stayed. She found another boyfriend, but it really wasn't a relationship. Ever since she was small, she had been attracted to women. At first, she just thought it was the cross she had to bear, that it was her struggle to keep it under wraps. However, in her new thinking, in her new world, it wasn't a bad thing. It was something that she could explore, and perhaps even admit to herself. It took a while, and a close friend with a girlfriend before she really admitted to herself that she probably didn't just like men.
Life moved on, time moved on, she changed her online community, she moved out of her friends' house, and she had an almost girlfriend, but was there really anything there? She didn't know, chalked it up to just a roommate who ended up hating her and moved on. However, she didn't move on. Her roommate moved out and left her alone and jobless. The cutting came back, going deeper this time, opening a wound time and time again. One person kept her signing online, her best friend, who could always make her laugh, the one person that she really believed cared about her. All of her friends who had brought her there had moved on in their own lives. It wasn't something she faulted them for, it just happened.
Eventually, she moved on as well, but not before her best friend confessed her love. That moment, she realized that she loved her too. It was only love that had gotten her through almost dying, almost overdosing on her inhaler while she was cutting her wrist. That love kept sustaining her, through a homeless shelter, and a group home after yet another move.
Finally, though, she found a group, a volunteer job that she loved, and that loved her. She could be herself, or at least as much of herself as she felt that the world could accept. She accepted that, however, because she had such a good thing going. Her fears, though, started again, as her parents lived in the area and stopped by every so often. They approved of what she was doing, however, so it was not too bad. What they did not know wouldn't hurt them.
Back before one of her moves, her mother had read a notebook (typical, she'd been doing it since her daughter was quite small) and found out that she had a girlfriend, waxing crankily about the evils of homosexuality and how it wasn't what God wanted for her. She brushed it off, more mad that her mother had read her notebook than anything else. It probably wouldn't last, nothing did for her. It seemed to be forgotten for years, however, her parents moving on to bigger and better things.
As with everything in her life, however, her success and her family wasn't to last. Things at her job started to go downhill. Little tihngs at first, snowballing into a huge mess. She blamed herself for losing her good thing, beating herself up mercilessly for losing what probably couldn't have been kept in the first place. She was homeless yet again, sustaining herself in hotels, in her car, and on a friend's floor for about a month, eventually finding a kind heart at an area college.
All colleges have breaks, however, and then she went to one friend's and finally found a place at more kind-hearted friends in the town where she had been so many times to visit her girlfriend at college. By this point, she was being held together mostly by her girl's love and sheer stubborn determination. Years ago, she made a promise to her girl that she wouldn't hurt herself or do anything stupid, and she was more than determined to keep it.
That is the end of the tale, but not of the story. All through her life, she had struggled with the dichotomy of her past and her present. The Fundamentalist Christian doctrines clashed with what she felt, and what she saw in other people, both religious and not. Some days, when the pain was too much, she would sit back and wonder if she was right after all. Her friends called her compassionate, an empath, an ear whenever it was needed. However, she felt anything but. She felt selfish, charmed, always somehow keeping going no matter what, leaving pieces of herself, and pieces of chaos in her wake whenever she left. In her eyes, she couldn't keep relationships, people would always see her for who she really was and leave. If she knew anything, that was it. Sometimes late at night (and sometimes not-so-late) she would sit curled up and wonder if her parents were actually right, if everything she was and everything she was doing was wrong.
It was a struggle she would always have, she knew. Even though she was certain that her girl would always be in her life, even though she was determined to get married, she knew that doubt would always be there, the dichotomy of life always a part of her existance. Her parents, however, did not and would not respect that. Her strenght was cynical stubbornness, her pain a sign that she wasn't right with God and never was, and her love, her passion for her girl invalid because of a trick of biological bits.
How could she tell her parents that they were actually quite rudely demanding sometimes, when they'd never see that? How could she make them understand that she didn't want a blessing, didn't want acceptance, but just for them to acknowlege that her girl was a large part of her life, and possibly meet her as a human being? It made her physically ill sometimes, giving her headaches, stomachaches, and pains when she had to bring her two worlds together, but she couldn't bear to lose either.
For all of their non-understanding, her parents were... her parents. They tried to help when they both didn't understand and refused to understand. It was against her nature to dismiss someone when they were honestly trying, no matter how hard they were failing.
It was her life, for good or for ill, and she was determined to make it work, no matter how much it hurt her, no matter how much pain she had. If she was wrong, she was wrong, but at the end of the day, her heart told her that loving people and supporting them, and loving someone more than life itself couldn't really be wrong. It was against everything, especially the Christian mythology.
Such is life, such is the tale. Did she live happily ever after? Of course not. That's only in faery tales. She didn't know where she would be in a year or two, and in her heart of hearts was fairly certain that she'd lose everyone again, but she was determined in a backwards way to still be around to see it.
At the end of the day, she was too scared to die, too scared that she was actually wrong. That was the last thing she wanted to deal with.
Following her determination and her heart, she started becoming another person at school, more brash, more harsh, but also more loving. This dichotomy was easy to keep up, as her parents were rarely around her friends. However, when she was ten, things started to collide. Her parents were around one night when she was around her friends, and it gave her a headache, trying to be two people at once; the girl she felt she was, and the girl her parents wanted her to be.
Her family, however, was falling apart in front of her eyes. Her parents would argue almost every evening, her mother yelling to decibles that she was certain the neighbors would hear, not to mention throwing up after each yelling session. Each night, she would curl up under the covers of her canopy bed (which she had always wanted, and her father had gotten as a surprise) and pray and pray and pray that it would stop, that her family would go back to the way it was, that her parents would love her again.
That's when it started. Small, at first, just staring at a window and thinking, but grew, grew to sitting on the windowsill and willing herself to just lean a bit further. One night, when she couldn't take it anymore, she downed half a bottle of Tylenol, and with a prayer went to bed. Unfortunately in her eyes, she woke a few hours later, ridding herself involuntarily of what she thought would be her saviour.
It didn't change. One day, however, she told someone about it, someone in her church that she thought she trusted. Her mother found out and accused her of lying and taking the family's problems outside of the family. A cardinal sin, it would seem. Cowed, the girl bottled it up even more, delving deeper and deeper into herself. On the outside, at her school, she was outgoing, caring to her friends, and a seemingly normal (if a bit over-conservative) teenager.
Another move and she was in highschool, trying to make her way in a fascinatingly diverse group of students. First she wanted to be a doctor, then a politician, then a music teacher. Inside, however, she was falling apart. Homework was being forgotten in favour of nights of reading, of yelling and being yelled at. Wednesdays were spent at church, learning, teaching, and determinedly being -right-. She would wear Christian shirts to school, certain that she had the answer to everything. No, there's no pushing, there's no Bible-banging, but it was there. She did everything right. She truly believed what she said.
Inside, as always, she was torn apart. All that was there was a burned-out shell of a person, and the people around her knew it. She tried too hard. She flirted too hard, she reached out too much for that one connection, that one love that she could grab onto and keep for her very own.
Her mother would not admit that she needed help at first. She just needed to pull herself up and keep going, keep fighting the good fight. That wasn't enough, however. It wasn't enough to just try. So she saw a doctor, and got the pink pills. They worked for a while, but it all came back. Harder. One night, she took the modem cord and tried to strangle herself. She'd even written the note. The cord broke, and she was back where she was.
Eventually, it affected her schoolwork, and that was the last straw for her parents. They did everything they could to get her to calm down, to just be normal, but she couldn't. Or wouldn't. They locked her in the house, with double-deadbolts on each door when they left, they slapped her across the face when she was hysterical, and finally, they sent her to lose a part of her life to a fuzzy week in a mental hospital.
After the hospital, she was determined to go to the very Christian college that had accepted her based on essays that her mother mostly wrote. Going, she was still certain that it was what God wanted her to do. The summer before, however, she met a man at a Christian camp, almost certain that this was the man she was going to marry.
They kept up a correspondance while she was at school, learning, and quietly getting more frustrated. The dichotomy returned with a vengeance the few times her parents were around. She worried that her closest friends weren't good enough, so she would go through elabourate charades to make sure that no one met each other. It eventually failed, but her parents liked her friends, so it didn't matter.
Her first summer of school changed her life, although she would never have known it at the time. She discovered an online community through a web-based role-play game. She spent hours and hours at work dreaming up her character, and composing her story in her head. At night, she would be her character, a strong confident girl from Ender's Battle School. Between her boyfriend and her new love of the game, she was fairly happy. In the middle of the summer, her boyfriend's friends paid for her to go out and visit him as a surprise. Her parents freaked, saying that her boyfriend was nuts, and he wasn't the kind of person she should be seeing, mostly because it was a long-distance relationship. She didn't care. She thought she loved him, and broke down miserably when she was not allowed to go. Although she didn't realize it, that was the beginning of the end.
Going back to school, she got even deeper into her game, and started to really think about herself and her God and her life. School was unsatisfying, as she noticed the hypocricy of both the students and the professors. The more she saw, the more she longed for her online community of people who were confident, loving, and inclusive. Then it really started. She found that if she took a razor blade and ran it along her wrist, a bit of blood would come out. No one noticed at first, so she kept doing it when things got too painful. It was a way to let it all out, a release for the pain that was still there. Eventually, one of her friends did notice, but all that made her do was get longer sleeves. She broke up with her boyfriend after he almost proposed because she was scared. Somehow, what she was so certain of didn't feel right anymore.
At the end of the school year, after a bout of mono and a depression like no other, she left the school, not knowing if she would return. When she got back home, things got worse and worse. All she could see was pain, and all she could do is cry and reach out. Two people from her game opened their house to her. Together, they planned how to get her out of her house and to live with them. In her panic and worry that she wouldn't be allowed to go, she didn't tell her parents, just packed some suitcases and left, only leaving a note. Once the fuss from leaving died down, she settled in to her new life, a life where she could actually decide things for herself, and figure out where she stood on everything.
Time passed, some of her friends moved on, some stayed. She found another boyfriend, but it really wasn't a relationship. Ever since she was small, she had been attracted to women. At first, she just thought it was the cross she had to bear, that it was her struggle to keep it under wraps. However, in her new thinking, in her new world, it wasn't a bad thing. It was something that she could explore, and perhaps even admit to herself. It took a while, and a close friend with a girlfriend before she really admitted to herself that she probably didn't just like men.
Life moved on, time moved on, she changed her online community, she moved out of her friends' house, and she had an almost girlfriend, but was there really anything there? She didn't know, chalked it up to just a roommate who ended up hating her and moved on. However, she didn't move on. Her roommate moved out and left her alone and jobless. The cutting came back, going deeper this time, opening a wound time and time again. One person kept her signing online, her best friend, who could always make her laugh, the one person that she really believed cared about her. All of her friends who had brought her there had moved on in their own lives. It wasn't something she faulted them for, it just happened.
Eventually, she moved on as well, but not before her best friend confessed her love. That moment, she realized that she loved her too. It was only love that had gotten her through almost dying, almost overdosing on her inhaler while she was cutting her wrist. That love kept sustaining her, through a homeless shelter, and a group home after yet another move.
Finally, though, she found a group, a volunteer job that she loved, and that loved her. She could be herself, or at least as much of herself as she felt that the world could accept. She accepted that, however, because she had such a good thing going. Her fears, though, started again, as her parents lived in the area and stopped by every so often. They approved of what she was doing, however, so it was not too bad. What they did not know wouldn't hurt them.
Back before one of her moves, her mother had read a notebook (typical, she'd been doing it since her daughter was quite small) and found out that she had a girlfriend, waxing crankily about the evils of homosexuality and how it wasn't what God wanted for her. She brushed it off, more mad that her mother had read her notebook than anything else. It probably wouldn't last, nothing did for her. It seemed to be forgotten for years, however, her parents moving on to bigger and better things.
As with everything in her life, however, her success and her family wasn't to last. Things at her job started to go downhill. Little tihngs at first, snowballing into a huge mess. She blamed herself for losing her good thing, beating herself up mercilessly for losing what probably couldn't have been kept in the first place. She was homeless yet again, sustaining herself in hotels, in her car, and on a friend's floor for about a month, eventually finding a kind heart at an area college.
All colleges have breaks, however, and then she went to one friend's and finally found a place at more kind-hearted friends in the town where she had been so many times to visit her girlfriend at college. By this point, she was being held together mostly by her girl's love and sheer stubborn determination. Years ago, she made a promise to her girl that she wouldn't hurt herself or do anything stupid, and she was more than determined to keep it.
That is the end of the tale, but not of the story. All through her life, she had struggled with the dichotomy of her past and her present. The Fundamentalist Christian doctrines clashed with what she felt, and what she saw in other people, both religious and not. Some days, when the pain was too much, she would sit back and wonder if she was right after all. Her friends called her compassionate, an empath, an ear whenever it was needed. However, she felt anything but. She felt selfish, charmed, always somehow keeping going no matter what, leaving pieces of herself, and pieces of chaos in her wake whenever she left. In her eyes, she couldn't keep relationships, people would always see her for who she really was and leave. If she knew anything, that was it. Sometimes late at night (and sometimes not-so-late) she would sit curled up and wonder if her parents were actually right, if everything she was and everything she was doing was wrong.
It was a struggle she would always have, she knew. Even though she was certain that her girl would always be in her life, even though she was determined to get married, she knew that doubt would always be there, the dichotomy of life always a part of her existance. Her parents, however, did not and would not respect that. Her strenght was cynical stubbornness, her pain a sign that she wasn't right with God and never was, and her love, her passion for her girl invalid because of a trick of biological bits.
How could she tell her parents that they were actually quite rudely demanding sometimes, when they'd never see that? How could she make them understand that she didn't want a blessing, didn't want acceptance, but just for them to acknowlege that her girl was a large part of her life, and possibly meet her as a human being? It made her physically ill sometimes, giving her headaches, stomachaches, and pains when she had to bring her two worlds together, but she couldn't bear to lose either.
For all of their non-understanding, her parents were... her parents. They tried to help when they both didn't understand and refused to understand. It was against her nature to dismiss someone when they were honestly trying, no matter how hard they were failing.
It was her life, for good or for ill, and she was determined to make it work, no matter how much it hurt her, no matter how much pain she had. If she was wrong, she was wrong, but at the end of the day, her heart told her that loving people and supporting them, and loving someone more than life itself couldn't really be wrong. It was against everything, especially the Christian mythology.
Such is life, such is the tale. Did she live happily ever after? Of course not. That's only in faery tales. She didn't know where she would be in a year or two, and in her heart of hearts was fairly certain that she'd lose everyone again, but she was determined in a backwards way to still be around to see it.
At the end of the day, she was too scared to die, too scared that she was actually wrong. That was the last thing she wanted to deal with.