Love is All Around Me
I want to run back to my younger self.
I imagine shedding the years will feel like the first day of spring after a long winter. As each year fades I become happier and happier. I want to protect her like I want to protect my younger siblings and tell her that she doesn’t deserve anything that has happened or will happen. I want to tell her to never start hating herself because it will never stop once it has begun. I want to warn her of who to hang out with and who to avoid, I want to be the older sister I never had. But I can’t, so I lay at night with my eyes closed trying to will the past to change.
I don’t remember a period of my childhood where I didn’t hate myself—where I wasn’t crushingly aware of everyone else’s opinion of me. As a child it was always my weight. It didn’t matter that I was a size triple zero, it still wasn’t good enough, I still wasn’t small enough. Around age eleven, it moved away from my weight and to the growing acne I had on my face. I had ‘friends’ I could never please, and would send me into panic attacks in my high school’s bathroom stall. It felt never ending, like I was never going to be enough.
As I grew older, I became a shell of my younger self, I cried when I became intoxicated out of anxiety. I became shy and awkward, when I was once vibrant and talkative—so much that my teachers had to send letters home. I wanted to beg people to be patient with me. I swear I am not usually like this, I am funny, I am outgoing. I am just trying to get back to myself—someone who doesn’t exist anymore. I am trying on traits like clothes until I find something that fits—until I find something that is comfortable.
When I first sought professional help, they asked me to imagine my siblings in my place. I have six siblings and a few of them are around the age where transformative events in my life first took place. They asked if I would blame my little brothers or my little sisters if anything that happened to me, happened to them. I shook my head no, of course I wouldn’t, they are so little, how could they know any better?
While this question opened my perspective to what I had been through, it also made me feel a garden of grief. I don’t remember feeling that young, I feel like I have been nineteen my whole life. I feel jealous when I see my younger siblings get the childhood I didn’t receive, where they get healthy relationships with their parents and friends, where they are carefree, happy and childlike.
“I want to protect her like I want to protect my younger siblings and tell her that she doesn’t deserve anything that has happened or will happen. ”
My first year of university was the first time in my life where everything was okay. I had happy and healthy relationships, and it seemed like all the pain had just stopped. I had a hard time trusting this new found peace and I was anxious thinking that the next bad thing was right around the corner. I spent the better half of the first semester alone because I couldn’t bring myself to trust anyone enough to be friends with them. I ran at the sight of every red flag, I ran even when the flag wasn’t red, when it was pink or orange. I was scared of meeting the wrong people and I was scared of getting hurt—which often led to me being alone. This lack of pain in my personal life wasn’t as happy as I dreamed of it being. Constantly being surrounded by the wrong people and constantly being hurt allowed me to feel numb and not fully acknowledge what was happening to me. In this new peace, it felt like everything that I had been running from had finally caught up to me. I was crying over things that had happened four years prior, I was telling my parents secrets that I had kept about things that I had endured in my early teen years, but I was also finally healing.
I am in my second year of university now and the peace has remained and I am yet to find the bad thing waiting for me around the corner. But I've stopped looking for it, it will come when it is meant to come and there’s no stopping its arrival because that is a part of life. The difference between my first semester of university and my third semester of university is substantial in the best way possible.
The one important thing my life had always been lacking was healthy relationships and friendships. Throughout elementary school and high school, I didn't have very many good friends, just one or two. And while quality over quantity is always a good thing, I have found that platonic love fills me with such inexplicable joy. Maybe it’s because I never really had a solid group of friends and didn’t have the opportunity to take it for granted, or maybe it’s just the one thing that really makes me happy. Either way, it’s important to look around at your life with a lens of gratitude.
“I don’t want to take away from the idea of romantic love, it is beautiful and sweet, but I want to emphasize that love is everywhere.”
In the past year, I have been gifted with friends who inspire and uplift me—who make me smile instead of cry, and plan things for my birthday. Who will text me first, and not make me feel uncomfortable for being myself. We play football on Sundays, hike whenever we get the chance, spend hours in the library, and watch bad tv shows with dinner. We make plans for future adventures and whenever I laugh with them, I feel my past self glowing—like I am eight years old making friendship bracelets.
I often find that when people think about love they think of a romantic love. A love like Noah and Ally, a love like Carl and Ellie. I don’t want to take away from the idea of romantic love, it is beautiful and sweet, but I want to emphasize that love is everywhere. It’s in the laughter you share with your friends while in the library when you’re supposed to be studying, it’s the “text me when you get home” and “did you take your meds?”. It's the “I saw this and thought of you” and “do you want to come to the grocery store with me?”. It's there when your friend starts using your catch phrases and when your brother lays his head on your shoulder on the way back from your grandparents house. Love is all around you, love is all around me.
My stepdad always used to tell me I needed to grow thicker skin. That everything was a life lesson for later on and it was teaching me to be strong. I have spent most of my life trying to grow a thicker skin, but I can’t. I always leave my chest wide open so you can touch my heart, so you can see it beat.
I let everyone else have my childhood, but I will own my adulthood, and it will be filled with so much love you won’t be able to see past it.
Header by: Aglaia Joithe
