Last time when I was younger, I used to cry silently. Tears would just form in my eyes and slide down. Now however, whenever I cry it’s a rather violent and physical affair, with screaming and hitting of objects. Somewhere down the line, the emotional pain just escalated till I couldn’t cope with it anymore. Not only could I handle things less well emotionally, I couldn’t handle it physically as well. For the past few days, my appetite has been gone, I’ve been getting bad stomachaches, my head feels dizzy and my breath feels sucked out of me. Plus I keep vomiting. As a result I’m paler than a Brit now because I literally have no blood flowing through my veins. It’s like getting a mild version of extremely bad stomach flu.
Like I said, I wasn’t always like this. It’s not hard to imagine why I want to go back to the past. But today though, I laughed and felt genuinely happy for the first time in the past few days.
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I was 13 when I had my first boyfriend. He was someone from my church, called K. He was a year older. He pursued me. He also dumped me 3 days into the relationship. Fantastic. All we ever did was text and instant message each other, but damn did being dumped leave a nasty impact. It made me feel worthless, and I felt that I couldn’t face him. I left a series of dramatic messages where I told him not to contact me. I also remember being fairly depressed, something that didn’t lift for months. I couldn’t really remember why I was depressed, except I’d start crying in class, be really moody and snap at people. I shouted at my teacher once when I thought she was being unreasonable and immediately burst into tears. It only abated when I got really upset and started scratching myself. Looking back, I think it might have been related to my first failed relationship, but I’m not too sure. I actually forgot about K all these years, so I guess he left a smaller impact than originally thought.
Of all my years in Secondary school, I remember Secondary 2, when I was 14, as the fondest. I remember it because it gave me some of the best friends I ever had, Ianthe, Stephanie and Angeline, even though I’ve lost touch with Angeline. I remember all the useless project work days when we would hang out at each other’s house with the pretense of doing work, filming and finally video editing. I remember doing really retarded things, while screwing around with the camera. On a more somber note I also remember spearheading a petition to get the class chairperson ousted. It was so happy, that I don’t really have much to write about. I also remember running home and playing a lot of Warcraft III and GTA: Vice City. I scraped by in school again.
I guess its fair to say when I was 14, something happened that forewarned of the mad path my mind would take. At the end of church camp in 2003, when I was 13, I met a guy called M. He was 4 years older than me, and obviously was in the same church as me. He and I would text each other everyday and talk on instant messenger every night. Once he mentioned how awesome it’d be if we were both got married because our wedding invites could just say M2. AND of course being 14 and absorbed in my world, I didn’t imagine for the slightest moment that he liked me. And liked me he did, soon convincing himself he was madly in love with me. Like all completely irrational and hormonally imbalanced teenagers, I freaked out.
I cut off all contact with him. Whenever I thought about him, all I felt was fear. I was filled with an insane fear that he was going to pin me down and rape me. Once I saw him in church and ran out to the toilets to cry. I had an asthma attack. Then another time when I saw him, I hid in the darkness of my now empty Sunday school classroom till I was convinced he was gone. It was madness really, looking back. All his friends hated me. Hell if I were him, I’d hate me. But yet I did it anyway. I still remember it vividly. It was an all-consuming fear, a fear that made my heart race and adrenaline kick it live never before. It was a fear that completely overwhelmed all mental rational processes and defenestrated it. It was a fear that turned out to have lingered for so long, than when he asked to be my facebook friend in 2007, I rejected him while feeling the same fear coursing through my veins.
2005 however, was the pivotal year of my life. It was the year when I was well and truly kicked into the realm of maturity. I like to think that the events that happened in the end of 2005 and early 2006 that ended up shaping me into the person I am today, batshit insane anxiety, full blown proper depression and extreme paranoia included. It was because everything happened at once, in a most violent manner.
2005 however, didn’t start on such a dire note. I remember it starting as the happiest year ever, when I confessed my liking to a guy I had liked ever since I was 13, A. It was one and a half years of liking the same guy. He was perfect to me, smart, funny and passionate. We would talk online and message each other with our phones. It wasn’t till end 2004 that he started attending the same church as me when our mutual friend brought him. At first after church, we’d go out as a group. Then when everyone slowly left to go home, we’d hang out together. He was the first person I kissed. I still remember the afternoon when he first brought me up to the top level of Tan Tock Seng Hospital and showed me the view. Then there was the afternoon we hung out and he lay in my lap at the small park next to KK Hospital. I documented everything thing down excitedly in my diary.
But he refused to commit. I didn’t press the issue that much, I think.
However at this point of time, L (as mentioned in the previous section), decided to hold training sessions to groom a new generation of church leaders. I wasn’t chosen because I wasn’t deemed ‘holy’ enough. All my friends, the gang I hung out with in church were chosen. Now this was highly unfair of a number of levels. It was evident that she had picked and chose those that came only from good schools, with no respect to actual depth of Spirituality, because A who was chosen had just become a Christian recently. Finally I had been serving the church since I was 13 by helping out in Sunday school and teaching. I was the ones who had gotten my friends into even serving in church to begin with. For all I had done, I had been unfairly passed on to be groomed as a church leader. I was upset enough, but I bore with it.
As friends are unconsciously wont to do, they drifted. All they talked about were little in jokes and things that happened during the training. Plus as the classes happened right after our Sunday school, I didn’t even have time to hang out with them. It also so happened that my best friend, C, was one of two girls really chosen in a class full of boys. I remember saying rather bitterly then that it was more of a potential mating club than a real church leader training group. I felt even more hurt by the fact that I now felt alienated from my friends completely.
And then before I knew it, the signs started cropping up. He started talking to me less. She started telling me less. Then I found out by accident that they were hanging out together a lot. Still I wasn’t sure. This was at the end of 2005. Then it really happened. I still can’t remember when I found out exactly, but it was to the effect that everyone now knew they were dating each other. But what about me? He, the guy I was crazy about, never told me anything. Nor did she, my supposed best friend. I was devastated. The two people who I trusted most, had betrayed me.
I had been with Hakka Methodist Church for my entire life, but I had to leave. I cried and cried for days in the interim. Even leaving the church cut me to pieces. This was the singular institution I had spent my childhood days playing about, where all the familiar faces of my parents friends were. This was where I imagined going to church my entire life. This was where a large portion of my hope and life had been. With one fell swoop, I had been betrayed by a church elder, my best friend and the first boy I really liked. Worse still was the growing gap I felt between my friends and they not even attempting to pull me back. It hurt. For all the love that I had given, I felt nothing in return.
I dropped contact with almost everyone. But they kept finding me, finding me on facebook where even now till today their little church outing photos pop up in my livefeed, and I tell you it still hurts even now because it feels like for all I felt that I had done for them, they had not appreciated me. They didn’t chase me when I ran. They had forgotten me. I felt like I had been easily replaced. All we were was just facebook friends, who didn’t contact each other directly.
At the same time I was experiencing problems in school. A classmate had tried to commit suicide at the end of the year when her school results showed that she had not qualified to move on to the next year of school. I still remember the blame I heaped on myself, for not taking Angeline’s casual passing remark about that particular classmate mentioning suicide before, for letting her out of my sight. As I ran through the corridors that day looking for her, I felt all the hope fly out of my life. We found her. We cried.
That Saturday I remember I started thinking about the events during church practice. I remember breaking down uncontrollably and crying without cessation.
When 2006 rolled around, I was a Senior in Girl Guides. During one of the first orientation meetings, some of the older girls were trying to break in the juniors by making them play those typical orientation games with the apparent idea that public humiliation = bonding session. I remembered being an awkward 12 year old and not wanting to make a fool of myself, so I stepped in and told the other leaders that if those girls didn’t want to do the chicken dance – or some other absurd thing – then they shouldn’t be forced to. I walked away not knowing the implications of what had happened, that the other leaders felt offended by what they felt was an usurp of their authority. They started boycotting me.
At the same time, a lot of my classmates were also in girl guides. I remember calculating that either one-third or a quarter of the class were girl guides. I first found out by the boycott when a long time friend just stared ignoring me completely. While the rest of my classmates still behaved as per normal, she ignored me completely. But there were the others that treated me coldly. At the same time, I had also been talking to and counseling my ex-classmate who had been retained. That my classmates had so easily forgotten about her, and had written her off as “desperate for attention” had affected me badly. I could not accept that others could do such a thing to another person, a depressed one at that.
The more the life that I had known and previously treasured deteriorated, the more inward I turned. I lived 2006 inside the confines of my mind and online, talking to Suat Ying, I had literally felt that my life had gone, I had no classmates, no girl guides and no church. The three largest portions of my life had turned into a nightmare for me within a few months.
2006 was the year that made me into the person that I am today. The crazily depressed, anxiety ridden, paranoid and insecure person that I become whenever I feel life goes out of control. The scars from 2006 affect me even today.
And that is why I’m writing this, so I can finally learn to let go of everything.
I worked my ass off, getting 10 points for my O levels and somehow making it into ACS(I). I felt like I had finally succeeded and was working to a better life, to leave 2006 well and truly behind me. But of course more things happened.
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