Letter to a writer – Part II

Dear you

I haven’t been feeling the greatest lately. I’m not really good with the sharing and caring thing, but you trust me enough to bare me your soul every now and again, so it’s only fair if I do the same.

I want to skirt around the issue and take the scenic route, ‘cause a part of me is hoping I can avoid this entire conversation. Would you believe me if I said I used to be the kind of girl that wore my heart pinned to my sleeve and trusted everyone with the majority of my inner thoughts?

I had absolutely no personal boundaries. I wanted someone to save me from myself. I was young enough and deluded enough to believe that one person could be everything. In hindsight I can see just how deluded I was and how my lack of boundaries didn’t endear me to people. I still have the bad habit of divulging too much sometimes, and I freak out every time I have to put myself on the line. If you don’t tell anyone, I’ll tell you it’s a lonely existence. If you plan on telling anyone, well, I am totally fine.

All of my best friends don’t even live in the same hemisphere as me. I’m what I call a socially retarded. The internet is a safe way of communing with people, my shyness isn’t as pronounced and I don’t feel the need to fake being fine all the time.

In poetry I can be anything I want to be, but more than anything I can be honest without fear of judgment. I can say whatever I want, and it’s okay, because it’s just art. And art has been saving my life for the last fourteen years.

I was thirteen when I became suicidally depressed, and had to be medicated (not that it helped). Death would be all I thought about all the time. It was completely oblivious to the fact that it freaked people out, I just wanted some to listen to me and ask me the right questions, though I’m not sure I could have articulated the appropriate answers. But no one asked the right questions, and I didn’t have any answers. Friends didn’t stick around, but what hurt more than that was that my relationship with my mother completely declined to the point of non-existence. She just shut me out, and her catchphrase regarding me for the last fourteen years has been “I don’t want to know!”

Through it all, I wrote. (Sadly I’ve lost most of it from moving around so much.) I stopped reading what records I do have a long time ago. They have a tendency to make me cry. It breaks my heart to read how sad I was, how much I hated myself and how desperately I wanted things to be better, if only I could figure out how.

I want so much to say that I’ve got it all figured out now, but I’d be lying. In some ways I’m still that teenage girl inside struggling with self-loathing and a desperate need to fit in. As much as I love being different, there is a part of me that would kill to be some kind of normal. I still feel like an outcast among outcasts, that feeling hasn’t changed, and maybe it never will. Maybe I’ll just get better at accepting the fact that I don’t fit in.

I think today, dear writer, that you only get a page of me. Some things should remain unsaid.

© Indie Adams 2012