I’m 18 and I'm terrified. I’m 18 and I’m scared of life and I’m scared of not living and I tell myself that I’ll be ok with an ordinary life with an ordinary job and a husband and a house and some kids and a cat and maybe even a pet lizard to mix things up a bit when I hit 40 and am a little bored with life and wanna do something that makes people be like “?????” that isn’t completely permanent like a tattoo that I will look at and regret for the rest of my life but then the idea of having such an ordinary life that doesn't help anyone at all except the government when I pay taxes and shit and where my midlife crisis is just me buying a bloody lizard, because what if I look back and think “gee my life was bloody boring...” then what is it for???? what if I do something I love like writing music but then I find out I’m not good enough for a career and I’m crushed and left with nothing and I end up hating something I loved and something that brought me joy because it didn’t work. Or what if I make what is responsible into something that I love, like getting a degree and becoming a librarian or something? But then what if I’m not smart enough or I hate my job and just end up working in retail or something my entire life, serving grumbling ladies and consoling mums with little kids and a food stain on their pants that was put their by tiny little hands. And I have my boyfriend, when I think of my future he’s in it, but what if it doesn’t work out? I plan on it working, so does he, he tells me so. but sometimes plans don't... go to plan. I learnt that when my parents got divorced. Well, after. a few years after. I admit, at the time I never knew nor cared that anything was going on. As far as I knew, I wasn’t seeing “daddy” any less than I already was, when I had to creep around the house before the age of 5 because “daddy’s sleeping. he worked late.” and then we were moving into this other mans house and this man was just a distant man at first, I didn’t think he was very significant. And then we lived in this house that didn’t have enough rooms and my brother and I shared a room with a single bed and a mattress on the floor and we worked out a system as to who got it on what nights so that we didn’t have to fight over it. We always worked things out like that, he and I. Even before I turned 4. I like to think we were independent in the negotiation idea, but I imagine mum had some meddling. 4-5 is an age I remember clearly. I remember being scared a lot of the time, scared of the dark, scared of bugs, scared that the tree’s outside would eat me alive if I played out in the yard by myself. I thought that when they swayed in the breeze, they were these tall giants waddling from my neighbours yard on tiny feet, and they only moved when I could see them, which is why they moved so slowly. I was too short to see out the window. I remember thinking “I miss being 3. I was braver, because I knew less.” Now I look back on it, I spose that’s a very in-ordinary thing for a four year old to say, a four year old who sang when I used the bathroom to keep the toilet monsters asleep while I ran the tap. I was so scared of these monsters I couldn’t see, the ones that hid in the dark so I had to lay stock still until the sun came up for fear that they were like snakes and could only sense movement. Or the trees. Or the toilet monster (we all had one). And now that I look back on them I can't help but laugh at the fact that I was scared of such things and that I got through it doing stuff like singing to the trees (while my brother played not far away with his toy trucks in the dirt) as a kind of offering so that they didn’t want to eat me because if they did then who would sing for them? And singing to the fairies in the garden so that they also kept the trees happy enough not to eat me because if I couldn’t sing for the fairies then the fairies wouldn’t keep the tree’s happy. Maybe this was a little manipulative of me, but peace was the only way to solve these things, as far as I knew. I even secretly named the toilet monster ‘Princess’ because its hard to be scared of a scaly serpent beast named Princess, but I never told him because I didn’t want the fact that I gave him a girly name to hurt his feelings. As I got older, my fears changed. I was scared of my step-dad for a while. He yelled a lot, and being as soft as bloody butter, I cried a lot because I knew that it usually made him at least stop yelling me, or mum would intercept and tell me what he was trying to say in calm terms that I could actually understand. By the age of 7 I already believed my life would be different from my brothers because I am in fact a girl. By 8 I was worried about my weight. By 10 I had quit playing soccer because my team-mates bullied me for being the only girl on the team, and even though I complained and said I would only play for another year if I was signed onto a different team, every year I was back on the same one. And even though my step-dad was the coach, he had no idea. So I quit, because if he wouldn’t stand up for me, then who would? By 11, I moved town and I wasn’t scared. I was excited. I counted down the days until I could experience somewhere new, and make more friends, and be in the State Capital. By 12, I was scared I would never make friends again. That the reason the few I had only held me in low-regard was because I was awkward, and ugly, and chubby, and because I tried too hard in school. Because even when I was humiliated in front of my class every day when my teacher made me reveal to the class my results from the math quiz (among the rest of the kids. I just happened to be the worst) and I was always the last person chosen to be on a team, I still tried hard. By 13 I was in high school. I was scared of failure, but also scared of shining too brightly. So I talked to people still, in breaks, but during class spoke to only a few. By 13 I had one really close friend, but I think we only stayed together through chance. We fought all the time, I always did something wrong without realising. Wore the wrong shoes, drew a flower that looked similar to something she drew the week before. We made more friends, I was always excluded. I was afraid I wasn’t enough, so I tried so hard, too hard, to fit with them. But I didn’t fit, and my only friends and my only bullies had a pretty intimate relationship, they shared faces. Eventually I let go, let them walk away. Stopped talking to people. Stopped caring. 16-17 I was scared I wouldn’t be smart enough to get into uni. I was, barely. Got into an arts degree, and am studying a course that makes everyone question me, and give me this look that says “oh... your one of... them?” I stopped being so specific before I even started studying. And now here I am. Scared of life and failure and unhappiness and fulfilment and that I’ll one day become a crazy-lizard-lady that makes print t-shirts online that say “punks not dead, its immortal” with little embroidered daisies and dinosaurs that no one will understand or wear. I’m still scared of monsters that I can’t see, but now they come from me.
I’m 18 and I’m terrified.
