Life and It's Troubles

Her hair was dark red, her eyes emerald. She grew up in one town, but spent half of her time in another. No one knew her in her hometown, except for a couple neighbors who had been there since before she was born. Music was what kept her sane half the time. Between the petty arguments she got into with her mom and the petty arguments her parents got into, it helped. Sometimes it just helped her get away from the craziness called life. She tried turning to her Bible and to God when things got difficult, but she knew when she did that she would have to admit to herself that something was wrong and that she was struggling. For her it was just easier to deny it. It was easier to put on a smiling face even when she didn’t want to and to throw out a sarcastic comment to mask the true feelings. When people wanted to get close, she got close, but not too close. Because what if she got too close and they decided to drop her. There were few people she claimed to be truly close to, but sometimes even those relationships got hard. It always felt like she had to be the strong one, whether it be for her little sister who looked up to her, or her parents who saw her as being the one who could handle anything, or her friends who dealt with tough issues and leaned on her for support. Some days it was difficult and some days she just wanted to quit, but quitting meant admitting defeat, quitting would show weakness and even she wanted to admit her weakness to the world, she couldn’t. 1

Some people started coming along, people who didn’t come to lean on her and see her as strong. It was to these people she told her troubles, not all, but some of the ones that she’d never told her best friend, the best friend who had leaned on her in the past. Desperately she wanted to share her deepest thoughts with her best friend, but it was hard, because it image of happy and carefree was hard to break. A mask was painted on her face and even though she desperately wanted to remove it, she liked it, because there were only two people who knew what type of person lie behind the mask, her and God. 2

What if she let it go though, what if she just let people know who she really was? Could she let them know that she was sick of being seen as naïve, or sick of being the “innocent” one? Sometimes taking a knife to her skin sounded pleasant, but then the thought of explaining the cuts and why they were there stopped her, because by doing that she would have to admit her feelings to the world, to admit what was truly going on inside of her. 3

In high school she kept all her feelings and emotions to herself, never allowing others to see. Everyone else told her what they were feeling and at the end of every year people exalted her on always having a smile. What they didn’t know though, was that some days, and as high school drew to a close, many days, that smile was fake. Towards the end it took everything she had to not scream.4

It took coming to college and leaving those closest to her, to realize that she could lean on her friends, even the ones that leaned on her, especially the ones that leaned the most on her, because that’s friendship. College made her realize she could open up to people, that she didn’t have to hold it all inside. However, even with that realization it wasn’t enough, because the mask always covered her face, hiding it all. Feelings and emotions started to emerge and half the time she didn’t know why seeing as nothing big was going on in her life, she wasn’t losing a family member, or being abused or anything of the sort, her life was normal, she was normal, but her feelings weren’t and she didn’t understand them. So when she told people she was feeling stressed and they asked why, she couldn’t answer. 5

She had a good life, her parents were together, her sister loved her, her friends loved her. Life on her end was good. When it came to life struggles her best friend received them. It was because of this that she sometimes wondered why they were best friends, why was someone who had seen much more than she had a sister like figure in her life? She didn’t quite understand it. Why was life fair on her end but not quite so fair on her friend’s end, or had she gone through struggles and she just hadn’t noticed them. She’d dealt with parents fighting, a lot sometimes, medical issues had definitely found her early on, two grandparents who she had actually known were dead, while another whom she’d never met was dead, leaving her with only one grandparent, people had a tendency to ignore her, or so it seemed. There are issues she deals with, but are they that massive to count as honest to goodness struggles. 6

Would a boyfriend make her feel wanted or would he only complicate things? What would it take for her to acknowledge that she really isn’t alone, that there are people out there? Would it take falling hard or would be something more subtle?7