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____ ?).::u is for understanding::.__ _ ___
************************************************************************* ‘If one does not understand a person, one tends to regard him as a fool.’
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I always wanted someone to be able to understand me, to see how I felt, the things going on inside my mind. But no-one ever could, I hardly understood myself. It was always nice when people would at least try, when they would seek to understand what was happening inside me. My boyfriend never understood, but that didn’t matter because he gradually learnt what I needed. One night I was with him as I began to sink deeper and deeper. He was great, he just held me tight and told me how much he loved me. When some bangs sounded, reminding me of gunshots, I was terrified and clung to him. And he didn’t mind, he just accepted me how I was. He tolerated the fact that I couldn’t speak to him at the time because I was too busy inside my head, but he hugged me for hours until I was able to whisper back that I loved him. I was also afraid of explaining how I felt because I was scared of sounding melodramatic, exaggerating my petty problems. But that’s all they ever were. While so many people in the world had real things to worry about and real bad stuff happened to them, I had to invent my own minor grievances. I guess I just couldn’t be content with being happy and getting on with living. Because I never had a very good reason for cutting myself. I just did it because I felt like it, which is not even a good excuse, let alone a reason. There was nothing wrong with me, nothing bad had ever happened to me, no-one had ever abused me and there I was, attention seeking. And yet I hate not being able to put my pain into words for you. I hate the way I can’t get it across, tell you how it feels, the agony. But no words are in existence that can adequately explain the feelings. When I was a young child I’d have exactly the same desire, where I’d want people to feel my physical pain or my intense tiredness and exhaustion. I wished I could transfer my hurt to them for a while, not so much for a reprieve for me but to show them how much it hurt, to prove that it wasn’t all made up. And this was how I felt as a teenager, longing to be able to convey the pain inside of my mind. But there is no satisfactory way of getting across the confusion and constant torture of eating disorders, or the perpetual arguing in my head or the inexplicable torture of loving people so very much and being dependent on them but feeling unable to see them or feeling that they hate you. I can think of no words to even begin to describe the depression. And few could ever comprehend the emotional numbness of being cut off from feeling or the physical numbness of my mind leaving my body for a wander. The best I could say to those ‘treating’ me was that the pain of the self-harm could never even compare with the agony inside. What I really wanted was for my feelings to be accepted at the very least. But I always felt that they were discarded, that how I felt did not matter, and that I was equally worthless. To have people telling you to ‘pull yourself together’ or to ‘snap out of it’ or being angry with you for not speaking a word when you just feel too crushed and squashed inside yourself to do a thing, however much you wish to escape and join in with the happy people; that hurts so much. I think that’s the worst of all, feeling such pain and being largely ignored or being accused of just being ‘attention seeking’. Hard to stop attention seeking really when you are desperately seeking for someone to validate you and your feelings, to recognise at least some of your pain.
This page is dedicated to my friend Jo |
