A Serious Post, Seriously
Or Part One of "Big Surprise? Ashleigh has issues".
One of the things I am told most frequently is that I need to open up more. Truth be told, I really don't know how. So here I'm going to try and open up about why I don't open up.
For those of you who have had the misfortune to have met my parents, you would know that my mother has the maturity of a fifteen-year-old and my father has less emotional capacity than a pile of scrap metal. You can see where I'm going with this, right? Any problems I had during my formative years were internalised, thanks to the shittiest emotional support system known to man. If I complained, I was told to suck it up. If I cried, I was told to stop being such a baby.
On top of that, my brother had so many issues of his own that I was often overlooked. It's not that surprising; he was rather more vocal than I was. Throwing tantrums at teachers and getting into fistfights often requires more attention than a girl who cries silently into her pillow at night (cue Linkin Park music). As a result, I learned that all my problems were unimportant.
This went on for sixteen years until my brother flew the nest. If I thought that I wasn't going to be invisible any more, boy was I wrong. Halfway through my last year of school, out of the blue, my parents rented me a flat in the middle of nowhere and told me to move out. Their excuse? "Now that Michael's gone, we don't want kids around any more." That is a direct quote straight from my mother's mouth. It's not something a teenage girl wants to hear, especially one who has spent her entire life trying not to be a fuck up like her siblings.
So, although I was a mere seventeen years of age and woefully unequipped to handle the real world, I had adulthood thrust upon me. I only had myself to rely on, and I had to use my limited social skills to deflect awkward questions such as, "Why do you live on your own?" and "Who pays your rent?" without making my parents seem like the bad guys. I don't have any problems with it nowadays though, because that really screwed me up and as far as I'm concerned, they were the bad guys.
I know this probably sounds like I'm blaming my parents for everything, but they're not the only reason I never open up to others. My environment has made me the way I am. Nothing in my life has really ever given me a reason to trust people. For example, my limited social skills have meant that I've never been very good at making friends, and most people can't be bothered to stick around and work at fostering a relationship. Even now, so many of my friends that I made years ago don't know a lot about me because I take so long to warm up to people. Thanks for sticking it out though, guys. I love you.
I'm trying really hard to let people in. It's tough. I'm not very good at voicing how I feel. I've always been better at written communication, hence this post (plus I'm home alone and have no one to talk to, so I need some medium to help me get it off my chest). I'm so used to being overlooked that I don't even really mind any more, but something inside me tells me that this is wrong- that I have a voice too and god damn it, I'm gonna be heard.
