Oh my god I got some healing done today
I’ve stolen that phrase from my friend’s mum, she says it after a really nice day catching up with people you love. I had such a great day like that today.
I have a friend who is 22 years older than me and a couple of times during my childhood she lived with us. She is almost certainly the most bizarre person I know, almost definitely neurodivergent. Even though I’m an only child I feel this is what having a sister must be like. And honestly? She was the biggest and best influence I could have had.
At the age of two, we started making in-jokes with each other consisting of silly ways of saying certain words. Which we do to this day. A lot of this involves screeching and cackling like witches. Literally no one else understands what we mean when we do this, we can have whole conversations like it that make no sense to anyone else.
When I was three or four she used to take me on walks and I would never be told off for skipping or running in squiggles or climbing on *everything*. If there was a wall I’d walk on it and pretend I was on a tightrope. She’d look behind her and laugh and say “you and your flippin’ walls”
When I was nine I got my period. My mum gave me a leaflet and a biology lesson. My friend screamed on the other end of the phone “WHAT A BLOODY NIGHTMAAAARE” in her best witch voice and every month I’d phone her and say “NIGHTMAAAAAARE” in the witch voice and we’d have a five minute moan about the fall of the uterine wall before getting on to less serious topics
One Christmas I remember us wrapping her dog in a blanket and squealing “IT’S THE BABY JESUS” and the joke didn’t die for years.
When I was being bullied at school she took up martial arts and made me go with her. Probably saved my life because it gave me something to hold on to when she wasn’t there.
She’s half Indian and does not understand what the word “mild” means. Nowadays I can handle whatever she cooks but imagine being eleven and weaned on bland British nonsense and then trying to swallow pilchards marinated in hellfire
Me “I SAID MILD HOW MANY CHILLIES DID YOU PUT IN THIS”
Her “idk like 6, maybe 7? That’s not a lot?”
Me *chugs milk from the carton*
I remember my mum getting sooooo pissy when I info dumped about my Special Interests because I made such little sense but my friend just listened and joined in with randomly quoting stuff out of nowhere. To this day we still just take it in turns to info dump at each other and scream quotes in the witch voice, quote poetry and laugh hysterically.
I didn’t see her for a long time, but one day I turned up on her doorstep crying after having left my abusive parent and she opened the door and said “Oh my God. I’ll put the kettle on”. She just took me in without a second thought in her tiny flat and helped me get back on my feet and go back to university when I thought I’d have to drop out.
Even though she doesn’t do hugs or physical contact or big displays of emotion (complete opposite of me) she tells me she loves me in strange little ways. I have trichotillomania and while I hadn’t gone bald in years, I must have been doing it loads when I first moved in with her. One evening I remember her just sitting on the sofa behind me and taking my hands away from my head and holding them in my lap. And she didn’t move, she just sat there for ages holding my hands so I didn’t pull my hair.
Tonight we were drinking gin and tonics and feelin’ groovy and she was all like “shame the weather’s bad, I bought this to put in the fire when you weren’t looking. You’d love it if you were sober so it’d be magical right now. Go on take it home with you and use it with your boyfriend on the beach.” It was a little packet of powder that makes the fire go all different colours. She knows I am aaaaall about bright colours.
People with difficulties like mine, I’m not saying they don’t need famous people as role models because clearly, they do. But you don’t have to have made it in life to make a difference to a child. Some children need a slightly dysfunctional, largely misunderstood neurodivergent adult who knows what it’s like to be on the outside of acceptable society looking in. And the beauty of it is, once you’ve got someone else like it, you don’t look in and wish you were normal. You forget why normal was ever so great in the first place.
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