Taken from my blog (this that distorts me has saved me)
Friday, 6 June 2008
As a child I was a loner. Being selectively mute I found it hard to make friends, well I found it hard to generally talk to people, if I wasn't spoken to I wouldn't talk at all, and if it was up to me to keep the conversation going, it would stop right away and an awkward silence would follow. I'd be kicking myself for days thinking about it, thinking about what I could have said, regretting every moment, shriveling up inside. I found school increasingly difficult because of this, the fear of embarrassing myself, or being rejected by others.
When I started high school, after the first two years I realised who I wanted to be, I wanted to break out of my shell – my mute cocoon that had been protecting me from embarrassment. Yet, as I was known to be the girl who rarely spoke, this made everything a whole lot worse and harder to do, so I continued being who the others knew me as. In my bouts of confidence and frustration I managed to surprise people when I was able to keep a conversation going and talk to them every time I passed by. I just kept smiling to show that I was a friendly, nice person to talk to, and it worked some of the time. This lifted my confidence little by little, and in my last year at school my shell had lifted more, I had a "fuck this shit" attitude, frustrated by years of my silence, I tried to make the effort of change because out of school I was me, and I loved it. I hated the way one building could crush, and twist me. I'm sure people noticed my change and I managed to find myself with friends in lunch breaks. However, I was still haunted by the past me, the girl I hated so much was still lingering, thoughts like, "They don't know you, how could you have a sudden change in personality?" tormented me. I didn't quite have the confidence to be that whole new person, I hated surprising people, I hated it when people said, "Oh my God, you spoke!" I just wanted people to be normal. I spent most of my school years in the girls toilets (and at home), hiding from everyone, hiding from the world. Bullied into the cubicle by my anxieties, forced to keep hidden from the world…
