There I was, barely fifteen years old. I was still a little girl as far as the world and I were concerned. But, being a typical fifteen year old girl I wanted so badly to become a woman. The kind you see on movies, these women that portray girls my age seemed so perfect. It didn’t seem so ridiculous to me that I wanted to look like they did. I wanted to be them. I wanted to live in a movie. Heck, I just wanted to be anyone but me at that moment.
He didn’t know what was running through my head while I was sitting on the couch. I was nervous; by far the most innocent girl in town as far as I knew and I hated that. In the locker room I’d hear the rest of the volleyball team talk about what they did that weekend. I hadn’t the nerve to even attempt what they did. I was the perfect little girl to my family. The brain and the musician, well not so much the grades but I was a brain. I was the pride and joy, the smile my dad wore whenever he’d talk about how things were going with the family. I was his little lawyer to be.
He didn’t know that only recently I had my first kiss and it was absolutely terrible. He didn’t know that I was overtly self-conscience, that I hated everything about my body. My hips were there, but my boobs were so small and my waist wasn’t small enough. All he knew was that only minuets ago I had agreed to be his girlfriend, and that just as he had liked me as more of a friend since we had met, I’d felt the same way.
I have a very compulsive manner about me. With food (or lack there of), study, exercise, work—I always take things to an extreme. Once you start me on something there’s no turning back, but this, I knew this was wrong. This was something I could walk away from. I was trembling inside, as much as I wanted to be like those woman in the movies I felt this wasn’t worth it at the time. I wanted to run out of that door but I knew if I did he’d leave me. Of course being such a co-dependant person, I stayed. I tried to hold my ground that night, I told him no. But he did anyway, I didn’t fight back…I only said it once. No. As I walked to my house, tears streamed down my face I repeated it over and over in my head “NO NO NO NO NO!” I said NO. So why did I let it happen still? I suppose this was another compulsive act of mine, I took the blame. I stepped through the front door and walked up to my room. What was I supposed to do? I got in the shower and scrubbed. I scrubbed until my skin was raw. Until I felt clean again and I cried some more knowing I’d never feel as “clean” as I had just days before. I didn’t want to be a woman anymore. I didn’t want to be anything at that moment.
That night in particular will always be engraved in my memory. That was the night I’d lost my sanity, or what sanity I had left. This abrupt and unwanted leap from childhood to womanhood was startling, something so shocking I have yet to recover from it. I never came to experience what lay in-between childhood purity and the sins of the flesh. This, I believe led to a very struggling history of mental instability in my life.
Not that I wasn’t already mentally unstable, what with the eating disorder I had kept secret half my life. But this was the final straw, so to speak. I changed completely overnight it seemed. I went from this quiet little child freshman year to a provocative tease come the end of summer. I was still self conscience and well into my eating disorder but that didn’t stop me. Nothing could, I acquired a false sense of confidence. In a year’s time just as my personality made a one-eighty, so did my reputation. I struggled so hard finding myself.
My therapists said I tried to find myself through drug use, sex and underage drinking. That wasn’t it; I wasn’t trying to find myself through substance abuse or self abuse. I was tired of looking, tired of failing and feeling pain. I was trying to lose myself in it all. The first time I took a hit, I realized I didn’t have to be that lost girl anymore, I could be nothing just as I had wished that very night, that night I regretted so.
I walked a thin line; I had a social awkwardness about me. Later it was described as multiple personality disorder. I could change in a second’s time, emotionally and mentally. I would constantly switch personalities semi-consciously. One moment I’d be a little girl, I took it to the extreme. I would play with dolls, my voice would even change. I’d cling onto my daddy for dear life and at times like these my six year old cousins were my best friends. Just as easily I would switch to the complete opposite. I turned cold and sexual, manipulative and seductful and somewhat violent. I would have everything I wanted, anyone I wanted at anytime. I would scream at my dad to leave me alone. I couldn’t find the in-between, as hard as I looked…I just couldn’t see it.
Who would have thought that the night my innocence was robbed from me, my sanity would be too?
