the innate fear that I’m growing up
I feel like I’m constantly gutted. That everything I do is always inherently wrong or not enough. Nor will I ever be someone whom my parents want as a daughter.
I feel like a tidal wave, yet I am never big enough to lift anyone afloat. It’s a firstborn daughter’s job to shut up, to follow protocols, and to understand by default. To hold back tears and swallow every ounce of pride in my blood. Because my tears and my pain are an inconvenience, negative energy. Because I don’t know anything, yet I’m supposed to know everything.
I was never sixteen, I was barely seventeen, I do not remember eighteen, and nineteen feels like a gap in my life where I’m suddenly supposed to know how to pay for things myself, to automatically understand circumstances, to swallow my tears and rise up to every occasion. I am almost 20, I’m supposed to already know what to do. But does it count if I skipped so many steps and milestones getting here? I never grew up, I merely slept at sixteen and woke up an adult who has to fully function as someone who never had to know what trauma is. And somehow it’s still my fault.
Where do you go when your home feels foreign and every plea of help I roar is reciprocated in anger? Every hug is thorny, every tone raised is one more year of my childhood I will never get back. All I’ve ever done is come undone. Unraveling on my bed that I rot in for days on end, but I have to get up before noon or I’m a failure.
No amount of stripping the melanin in my hair to paint it to different colors will bring back the child in me that is hurt. I can be blue, I can be pink, tangerine sky and green moss. I’m still a clueless sixteen-year-old with box dye and wide-eyed belief that one day she will get better. I don’t know how to tell her it does not. It’s true that a miracle spawned when I surpassed the age where I was supposed to be dead.
But I’m not living either.
