my dear. you've tried hard. you've suffered. you thought everything was okay. i'm so sorry my dear. baby girl. you're okay. even if this doesn't work out, you'll be okay. i'm sorry that this is difficult for you. i don't know how to make it easier.
i understand that you want to succeed, you want to do well. you want to be smart and capable and strong and healthy and pretty. you want to have money, find love, make your own space, eat food you like, read books that fill you with joy, buy all the stationery you can get your hands on.
i know you want your friends around you, i know you want friends at all. you want to be able to converse easily, laugh genuinely, understand a joke that's being told. you want to be part of the in-crowd. you want them to include you, you want them to care enough to get past your awkwardness and stilted responses. you want to be loud and funny, you want to make witty observations. you want to be held.
you're past your prime, i know that's how you feel. you're approaching the wrong side of thirty. at your age your mum had just had you. she had been married seven years. she had done her masters and was working two jobs.
on the flip side you've been working for two years in a job with low pay and you haven't upskilled yourself at all. you look at jobs online and you don't meet any of the requirements. you're not talented, you're never going to be able to perform well enough to be hired by any jobs that are more meaningful and pay better than yours. even your current job will eventually need someone better than you.
what happened to the you from 20 years ago? what happened to that 12-year-old, fresh out of primary school with a successful standardised test in her backpack, just starting to play the flute, whose ambition in life was still, secretly, to become a singer?
do you remember life when it was simpler? do you remember when you could go to a bookshop with your family after seeing a movie and having lunch at burger king, and sit on the bookshop floor in a corner with a book your mum would never let you buy because it wasn't 'good literature'? you'd read and read until it was time to go, mark the page in your mind, and the next time you returned you'd pick it up from there.
when you were 12 you could cry and then feel better. now you can't cry at all. you used to cry so easily. what happened, my dear? you tear up but never cry. you never rage. you keep all that pain stuck in your throat. you can't breathe, you can't swallow, you can't speak. you've stopped self-harming because you 'know better'. you're an adult, not a 15-year-old acting out cos her mother called her a failure compared to her classmates, carving out FAIL into her skin with a divider from a geometry set.
i think you'll be okay. it's been a while since you've felt this low, this utterly and completely decimated by life and by disappointment in yourself. i think you just want a break from everything. i wish i could fix this for you. i wish i could show you how to focus and how to process information quickly. i wish i could snap my fingers and make it easier for you to write, to think, to do tasks, to get things done.
my dear girl. you'll be okay even if you aren't okay this time.
stormborns
dededos
izzy806
tangentwithtanner
snowghoul
