But I did have a bad night just a few days ago. A friend sent me a picture, a snapshot of her and her boyfriend smiling back at me. I felt like it was screaming at me. Thank god it was only a snapchat, so I didn't have to look at it for more than five seconds. What the hell had either of them EVER been through in their entire lives? Nothing like me. Why am I fighting so hard to be okay, and they don't have to put in an ounce of effort to SMILE like that?! God it was disgusting.
The day before I posted a new year's eve facebook status about how everything was looking up and I was so happy. Hypocrite? Definitely.
I remember being sixteen years old, my favorite teacher had just written a gorgeous memoir, and I was at rock bottom. She had been through just as much hell as I ever had. I told her I resented her for it. Rather than being a good friend and celebrating everything she had been through, I spat out accusations. "Why does this get to happen to you and not me?" I had forgotten that the time span between her tragedy and the present stretched out over half a decade, I didn't think about where she was only a few months afterward like I was at the time. I didn't care. I was sixteen and childish. She didn't send me out of the room. She didn't even scold me the way she always did when I half-assed a paper. She understood. She stepped down from her successes for a moment and sat at my side. She talked to me about how she remembered what it was like where I was. I listened to stories of people I will never meet, whose names I do not care to know, and how their stupid perfect lives pissed her off. She hugged me, and I was off to class at CASA, not thinking about how much damage I could have just inflicted. I left without the anger I deserved to have directed at me.
I forgot about that conversation for a long, long time. I thought about how if I talked to this friend, she wouldn't have been so understanding, and probably rightfully so. There isn't anything right about screaming accusations at people just for enjoying life's small pleasures: New Year's eve with someone you love. Or getting a book published. Yeah, it's the little things.
But I post about my successes on facebook all the time. I love my school and have been given so many opportunities to grow as a leader, a writer, a scientist, a musician, a young mind eager to soak up as much knowledge as I can find. Does that hurt anyone the way it used to hurt me?
Talk to me about it. I'll step down from my good life to hold your hand. I will tell you all about the place I was mentally trapped it. Every poor decision I made, and how even though I may have worked very hard to get to where I am, it's really just dumb luck that I am even breathing today. I will remember how I was, and I will not resent you for resenting me. I will talk to you about the time span, how healing doesn't work according to a schedule but that time will, eventually, give you distance from your past. It is truly wonderful, and it will happen. I will tell you that most people aren't even that happy anyway. It's all bullshit, and that you are in pain because you are something genuine suffocating under the superficial.
This conversation can happen tomorrow or in ten years. I am in a good place, even if I'm "working on it." But I cannot, and will not, forget the bad place.
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