I noticed a few things over the past few days. Some of them are nice, some are so soothing it almost hurts, and some show me I’m only human.
But first, just for the sake of pictures – I love pictures :) – some photos of stuff I baked on the weekend. It’s my dad’s birthday tomorrow, so I had a lot to do. I made a batch of chocolate chip cookies for a (lousy) party on Friday, then lemon cake on Saturday, which didn’t quite turn out the way I had planned, then my brother insisted on another batch of cookies – he almost wouldn’t let me take the first one to the party – today I made paella, and sweet potato buttermilk rolls! And candied ginger. Another birthday.
So here we go:
I think I’ve mentioned my depression in one or the other post. For a few years now, or more or less since the middle of grade six (the first year of middle school), which is quite a while, I’ve been feeling very…down. Of course there were also times during which I was truly happy, but they were very scarce. I guess you could say it’s normal, everyone has mood swings during puberty.
That’s true, of course. The problem was, though, that I always thought there was something wrong with me; I thought nobody liked me, I thought people were only pretending to be my friends. There was a reason for this: once in grade five, when a group of friends – all of my friends at school – decided they didn’t want to be friends with me anymore – I still don’t know why – but they gradually all came back. Another time was in grade six – I was eleven – my two best friends started cold-shouldering me and saying really stupid things about me, while still pretending to “like” me in my presence. They had a code name for me. And then they told me to get a life, being all “we only want what’s best for you”. Then everything was forgotten, and we eventually became friends again, but it was different. After that I had a new best friend at school, it felt like we were in this together, she was the only person at school other than them who really knew all about it. Then my family moved to Germany.
Another episode is a very tight friendship I was in during grade three. My best friend at the time was very dominating. Our relationship was sort of like you might imagine one between a woman and a man who gets what he wants or hits his girlfriend/wife if he doesn’t, but without the hitting. I was the woman. The hitting happened inside my head, or my soul, or whatever you believe in. I believe it was my soul. I was her puppet. I think she loved and hated me. Just like I loved and hated her. She would throw fits when I had agreed to come over to her house, and then said I didn’t feel like it anymore. She wanted me to be mean to my wonderful little brother, just for the sake of one or two of the millions of clubs we established in the course of one year together. In grade four she went to a school for the arts. My mother wanted me to go there too, and made me audition. I didn’t want to because my friend was there. My mother made sure I was in a different group from her at the audition, I wouldn’t have been able to do anything with her there. She wouldn’t have let me. Turned out I wasn’t able to do anything without her help, there were so many things I just hadn’t done before, including drama improvisation, dance, singing; I still had dreadful stage fright at that point (actually I still do, everything other than concerts and recitals makes my heartbeat explode to about three times its usual rate, but I guess that’s normal) … the visual arts part was great, of course, but that wasn’t the only thing that counted. So she got in, and I didn’t. I was so relieved. After that I never saw her again.
So what was I actually heading up to? These incidents made my never very strong self-confidence crumble to dust. When we arrived in Germany, I was scared stiff of my new classmates. It actually never really got better; a few times I thought, well, these people are actually quite nice and funny. But mostly it was the exact opposite. My motivation in life was sinking to near zero, I really cared about doing well in school, but I wasn’t doing anything about it.
My body was always a difficult topic. Like all girls my age, I thought I was fat. I had a strong urge to tell my mother about it sometimes, and other times I just tried to ignore it, which made it even worse, because in ignorinng the problem, I was fighting a fierce battle inside against doing anything to make it better. I needed to tell my mother partly because I really thought it was true, I was too fat, and everyone else was thin, and I had the worst problems because I was fat, and everyone else had none because they were thin. Right.
But that was like nothing compared to the first half of this school year.
I realize this is a very long, text heavy post, so I’ll leave it at that right here, and continue to recount those insights I made sometime soon.
Remind me to continue the story about Albert, as well as the unknown woman I drew a portrait of…
My brother made pizza this evening. As if I haven’t had enough carbohydrates and calories already. At least it literally forced my to get on our wonderful rowing trainer again.
