Dear child, three ways

Or otherwise known as fuck it or radical honesty you choose

One

Don’t get any big ideas. They’re not going to happen.

You paint yourself white and fill up with noise but there will be something missing.

Now that you found it, it’s gone, Now that you feel it, you don’t. You’ve gone off the rails.

So don’t get any big ideas, they’re not gonna happen.

You’ll go to hell for what your dirty mind is thinking.

Two

I read somewhere recently that the only rational thing to do when you realise that you are facing abuse is to run from it.

And eventually, you will in fact do that. The trouble is, by then it will be too late. It will take more direct cruelty than you have yet to experience.

We both know you know cruelty. But I know that it isn’t straightforward. It will be fundamentally confusing to be raised on the mantra of blood is thicker than water and family first, right or wrong alongside the actions that those people routinely display to you. The lies about what you have or have not done. Being taught before you could even properly walk, to toddle along to your primary caregiver and lead her, shakily back to something wrong you did and announce this mistake with a wagging finger and a uhuhuhuh sound. Cruelty comes mixed up with love and the all importance of protecting family. It comes in the form of being persuaded to tell Frieda how much you hate your father, so that she can then go to her daughter and remind her of what a poor choice she made. It comes in other ways too, when the person you idolised as a child delights in your injuries when you try and impress him with physical tasks that are beyond your little frame.

You learn to get used to fear and the pain in your chest and your throat when you are forced to defend yourself over and over, the sense of injustice rising with the volume of your voice when you might as well have been a TV on mute, for all the effect it had on anyone.

Ultimately, two things will cause you to leave.

The first is when, after mainlining laxatives and experimenting with binging and purging you will climb all the way up from the kitchen, four long flights away up to your turret bedroom, get in to bed and promptly shit yourself. There will be a lot of shit. You’re quite out of it. You realise what has happened but part of you is physically too weak and the other part is mentally too vacant to really register much of a feeling. So you will lie in your shit and wait until the next morning when your now much older, semi retired caregiver finds you. She has always been careful with herself. She has perhaps never said that she loves you. She is cautious about physical touch or affection as that is not her role. I’m not sure she believes that such things are entirely necessary for parental figures either but that is definitely beyond her pay grade. So when she finds you, she will not ask why or what happened or are you ok or I think we should get you some help. Instead she will ask you to get up, tell you to go clean up and assure you, unprompted that she will not tell your mother. And you will never speak of it again. And you will be grateful? Confused? Afraid of course but more than all of that, you will be ashamed. Later on, at some point because at this stage you haven’t learned to shut up and push the feelings down, your parents will find out about the latest adventures of disordered eating. This isn’t knowledge, they know that this has been going on for years, in some form or other since you were 8 years old. Your father will take you to one side and advise you not to stop, but to counsel you that if you insist on keeping on doing it, you should really take vitamin C. And neither of these things at the time you experience them will feel exactly like cruelty. Or it will feel exactly like the kind of cruelty you have always known, the form of damage wrapped up in some kind of lesson or care placed in a box of neglect. And that is your normal and although you question it somewhere inside, the other more obvious things you are doing, the ones that should get some kind of reaction, don’t, so it doesn’t necessarily occur to you that this normal should be examined.

The second thing is less confusing, more straightforward, harder to obfuscate. It is delivered by the one member of the family who has always been consistently inconsistent, the most unreliable narrator of her own and everyone else’s world. Once more you will find yourself compromised, you will have taken too many laxatives, filled yourself up too much and made it even less far than the other time. This time you will barely make it out of the kitchen and into the carpeted hallway before projectile vomiting everywhere. You will lie face down on the floor, your hair and vomit spread out on the carpet like a blanket. You will hear soft footsteps padding towards you. They will come closer and closer until one foot is almost at your ear. There will be a brief pause and then a gust of air as the person lifts one and then the other foot and steps right over you. Just before the kitchen door is opened they will turn back in your direction and say you better clean that up before your mother gets back. In that moment, you will recognise, finally, truly, that you are on your own. You’ll feel this strangely, mostly as a sensation of shock. It is shocking that you thought that this person, the least qualified of any of your role models would offer you any kindness or support. And you will feel stupid but mostly shocked and no longer confused. You won’t think abuse or neglect but you will understand that is actually cruel. You will know that this moment marks the start of an ending. You will know that the choice is your own ending or the ending of accepting those life long mantras family first, right or wrong and blood is thicker than water. This will be the moment you realise that you can no longer be in that family, not really. So then, you will leave.

I don’t know how to write this to you, to the younger me in any other way. I don’t have inspiring words of hope. I don’t have answers, even now. In some ways things are far more confusing now than they were then. Maybe telling you about what will happen will help you to realise sooner that you do have choices. They won’t be easy ones and you will still be alone. But if I could go back and do it all again, knowing where it ends up I would try and choose myself sooner and try to understand that I don’t need permission to be myself.

Three

To the girl that had my experiences but isn’t me: You matter. Your feelings matter. You deserve to feel safe and loved. You did not deserve that.