​Emotional – A Coming-of-Age Story

TW: Talks of SA, Death, and Suicide.

Life has an interesting way of bringing you into unconventional situations, and flipping everything you think you know upside down. You live, you learn, and you get broken and built back up. The experiences you go through become your defining moments. It’s all a part of growing up.

When I finally realized I was growing up, was when I was able to not just react to something off of pure emotion. I was able to separate and look at what needed to be done for me. That transformation within me led to the devastating reality that my youth was slipping away.

Throughout my life, I used my innocence and naivety to survive. I learned from watching those closest to me that you have to take the defining aspect of your personality and use it to your advantage to survive in the world. The world, so cruel and unforgiving, will eat you whole unless you become guarded. Weaponizing innocence is truly a double edge sword.

In life, you are either Predator or Prey. Assaulter or Victim. Manipulator or Manipulated. Innocence is so easily mistaken as being weak. You are glossed over, and dismissed as the ditzy girl who has yet to learn about life. That statement tends to be right most of the time, unless you are good at putting on a mask. The worst part of using innocence as a front is that you can’t truly fake it unless you are innocent to some degree, and if you aren’t careful that one aspect becomes your fault when you open yourself up too much. Innocence only works as long as you stay guarded.

I learned when I was very young that people, no matter how close to you, will inevitably cause pain. They will leave you, they will hurt you, and they will break you. Life was easier when I saw it in black and white. I kept those who I needed to close, and everyone else was kept at arm’s length. If they hurt me, I could cut them off. It would hurt, but it wouldn’t break me. That is until I lost someone who took a piece of my soul with them when they left.

My mother.

When she passed away, that was when I was taught how mortal everything truly is. Of course, I knew everyone died. Death came for multiple of my extended family members, but never for someone so close to me. Never anyone I couldn’t survive without. So I was taught a very valuable lesson from life from that point on. Everyone leaves, no matter if it’s by their choice, or external forces causing it.

I craved to fill that void that she caused in so many ways. In search of filling that void, I found myself falling into habits that only caused temporary relief but kept me alive. Suicide seemed like such an easy option at that point. A permanent solution to ease the pain that I could feel growing deep inside of me as each day passed. Depression, the disease that I inherited from a man who gave me half of my genetics, consumed my entire being. In those low moments, I learned another valuable lesson. My own mind will always choose to self-destruct if given the opportunity. My own mind is as mortal as my mother.

They say time heals all wounds, and in part that is true. As time moved on, I found myself healing more and more. The pain faded, and I was able to keep living. Scars will always run deep though. They will run all the way down to the void in my soul that is left gaping and hungry. The numbness was left buzzing inside me. In those moments, the mask I had kept on so tight started to slowly shatter. People had learned how to read me, one of my biggest fears manifesting. The innocence that I used to keep me guarded started to become my biggest flaw.

I became too open.

I was always a sensitive person and clung dearly to those who could understand me. A victim mentality that I couldn’t quite shake no matter how hard I tried. Being the youngest of 4 daughters, I felt like a glass child. The term glass child is defined as “… To describe how a child without these special needs may be standing next to a special needs sibling, but the parents see right through them as if they were ‘made of glass.’” Having a ‘Medical Mystery’ sister easily made me feel like a glass child growing up, and leaning towards the shy side of the scale caused me to be overpowered by my more outgoing sister when it came to receiving attention. With my sister and I, being so close in age rarely worked in my favor. She tended to take over the spotlight easily, where I was left in the shadows. That is the reason that as soon as I receive attention from people, I cling to them. Even to this day, as I sit here typing this, it’s one of my worst flaws.

When my mask started breaking and people started to read me better, my instincts took over, and I clung to them. My circle became wider, and my rule of arm’s length went out the window. I reacted off of emotions, and it burned me. It’s so easy to forget the logical side of thought when you feel so voided for so long. A simple glimpse of the pleasure of euphoria, and I was like an addict who was shown their favorite drug after an eternity of forced sobriety. In truth, there is always good with the bad. A simple rule of the cruel world that I’ve experienced often.

In those moments, I found my best friend who, like me, had received the iron fist of sorrow. I was shown that life didn’t just hand out constant cruelty to those wading through its shores. I had grown close to people, but forgot to be picky with my circle. At that time, I had moved in with my best friend after a falling out with one of my sisters. Convenience surrounded me, as my other sister moved out, and my second roommate moved in when he needed to move to the city that my friend and I lived in. And so, two became three, and I was content with how I was. Of course, contentment is a spot I can never truly be allowed to reside in.

A hopeless romantic would be the best word to describe me. Being a reader throughout my childhood and teenage years, I was always envisioning a happy ending for myself. Someone comes into my life, chooses me, and truly sees me to my core. My insecurities are washed away by their undying love for me, and we live happily ever after. The fantasies in my head of true love were something I clung to as time washed away the dreams of the naive. True love was something I knew wasn’t something as achievable as in the stories I read, but still my emotions took over my logic in moments. And so, I fell in love.

Love is something that comes to me easily even as my past tries to push away positivity. It honestly is because of my past that it comes to me so easily. I often struggle to tell the difference between romantic and platonic feelings, and that has caused a plethora of problems for me. Even in the beginnings of my friendship with both of my closest friends, I had fallen in love for a bit of the time. Feelings faded, and I was able to move past it to cherish having them as the closest people in my life. The struggle I dealt with though with my other roommate was that we weren’t really friends. We worked together, lived together, but were never truly close friends. That fact caused me to make one of the worst mistakes, and a huge taboo with the sanctity of working and living with people. As I started falling in love, I found myself forgetting to look at reality. Blinded by rose colored glasses, I was so swept up in the feeling of intimacy and passion that I failed to see how terrible of a situation it was.

He was an unachievable figure in my imagination, and that was what truly attracted me to him. Soon we started playing a game of flirtation, and I was intoxicated by the attention. I loved feeling seen and heard, and I craved the lust I felt. In the height of my starry eyed vehemence, I confessed to him. In the moments after, it felt like the worst error I ever pushed for. Being driven by raw emotion rarely works out well when feelings are one sided. I was never rejected outright, but it was written between the lines. Time heals all wounds is a statement that was brought back to me, and I found that a broken heart is not as challenging to get over when you have experience with a greater loss. Lust replaced love, and as I moved on from the moment of lapse in judgment, I found myself overtaken with attraction for him. A game was afoot between us, and I found frustration consuming me.

As months passed, I grew bolder as did he. Slowly, he saw more parts of me through photos and videos, and I grew addicted to the attention. Though we never touched each other during that build up, I was able to fantasize about the experience of sex with him. He moved from one pedestal of romanticism to one of lust and want. Then the experience grew to when we started teasing each other physically. He drove the factors of lust, with subtle touches at first. He got off to frustrating me, and I got off to fantasizing about the encounters turning into more.

It grew and grew, becoming more, until it was at its peak of touch. A day where I felt overwhelming confidence, and a drive home where fantasies turned reality. After that experience, my logic came crashing down and I picked up on signs. Up until those moments, I was under the assumption that he wasn’t truly in a relationship. I knew that he was staying with the mother of his child, but not together. I noticed signs though, ways he described things, and in my mind it seemed off. I had voiced my concerns with the one person I trusted with the deepest thoughts in my mind, and he told me not to worry about it.

I had always made excuses for people. The most defining moment of that was when I was sixteen, and I had started talking with someone. I had grown bored in my previous relationship, and being the idealistic teenager, I had broken up with him, and moved onto a shiny new toy. The man I lost my virginity too was someone I wasn’t attracted to physically. It never mattered when it came to me idolizing a person. It turned to months of him picking me up and we made his car windows fill with steam. Afterwards we talked about our lives. There were signs that something was off, but I made excuses. I finally was able to have someone, and being young, I was driven by my body and hormones. It was amazing until the day I was talking to my mother about him. He had grown up in the town I lived in, and I was describing him. My mother soon realized she knew who I was talking about. He had been friends with my cousin when they were children. The thing that she wasn’t sure about was that she thought he was older. I was trying to justify it by saying she probably didn’t remember it, and we agreed to ask my cousin.

A text message to my cousin with one simple question. At that moment, I was filled with fear as I had to ask if he knew him. He responded that he did. Then came the most fear filled instance I had ever experienced in my seventeen years of existence. I asked how old he was.

Twenty-four.

He was twenty-four the whole time. Seven years older than what he had told me. Seven years sounds like such a small number until it becomes the defining number of a predator. But even after I had heard that number, I made excuses. I had met up with him one last time. I didn’t realize then that it would be the last moment between us. In the true fashion of when we met up, we hooked up. It was different this time though. I hesitated.

We were kissing, and his hand started slipping down. Something in me told me to stop, and I told him I didn’t want to do this anymore. He didn’t stop though. He said it was fine and kept going, and all I could do was freeze. I don’t remember much of anything after that, except for two thoughts that ran through my head. If I tried to push further, I would have no ride home. I’d be stranded. But the more prominent thought inside my head was ‘Could I overpower him?’ He was much bigger than me, and he was much older. I would have no chance in this dynamic I strangely put myself in. All I could do was default to the primal side of my brain, and I froze. Frozen in that paralytic state, I was sexually assaulted. The next thing I could remember was being home. How I had gotten there, I had no idea, but there I was filled with numbness and dread. I reverted to my sense of familiarity, and I pushed it all down and made excuses.

Making excuses for so many people has sabotaged me in the past often. Innocence and naivety, the double edge sword. It had been proven right with my roommate. The conversation I had with my best friend had filled me with excuses again, but it felt off. I was provided with many reasons, that I was overthinking the situation, that they probably weren’t together, and that the little signs I saw didn’t mean that they were together. I accepted the fact until a couple weeks later, my thoughts were proven right.

My roommate came home on a Sunday night with his daughter, something that he hadn’t done for months. He asked my best friend and I to watch her while he took a phone call that lasted about a half an hour. The next day at work, he was upset about something. I was curious but from the past experience of knowing him for almost 2 years, I knew he wouldn’t talk about it until he was ready. On a ride home from work filled with conversation, he told me that he was cheated on. I didn’t push for any more information, but my mind raced with so many thoughts. I tried to justify that they weren’t together, but I then realized it didn’t matter. He obviously cared about her, otherwise he wouldn’t be so heart broken by it. Flashes of memories of his lips on mine and his hand between my thighs came crashing in and shattered in the fury of my emotions. There were no more excuses to be made.

The hypocrisy of his heartbreak was the main thing I noticed. He was devastated by infidelity in which he had partaken. My mind went racing with all these thoughts, but I was surprisingly level headed. As I layed in bed at night, I came to the realization that I wasn’t really bothered by it. In fact, I kind of felt relief, because at this moment I wasn’t idolizing him anymore. I took his mistakes in, and I didn’t make excuses for him. I knew at that moment, I was over it all, and I reacted not with emotion, but logic.

The idea of youth is not entirely lost to me. I know that I will react without logic, but I acknowledge the growth that I’ve had over the course of life up until this point. Emotional maturity is something that is not a defining factor of youth, but it is of my youth. My youth in which I’ve tried to grasp at while trying to outrun simultaneously. A checkpoint of my voyage of life, I’ve come to the realization that my early adulthood is something I’ve crossed. I think back to moments with my mom, and appreciate the thought that she would be proud of me. So right now, as I sit here in the present, I’ll experience being impressed by my accomplishments as she would. As I mourn my youth, I look upon these lessons I’ve learned and experiences I’ve faced, and I’ll take in this coming of age moment into my arms with a welcomed embrace.