**This piece is another personal one, not my usual hot-take on a current issue. Albeit terrifying, I wanted to publish this, not only to give you readers an insight into my mind but mainly for myself. Writing about myself candidly is a hurdle I wish to overcome... so this a small step in that direction. Enjoy <3
Our childhood and upbringing moulds us into the people we are. We hold onto good and bad experiences; we are shaped by what we’re told and we become the people we are around. Years and years of childhood psychology has shown that childhood is the most pivotal point in a human’s life for building their personality.
I’ve spent the last decade of my life trying not to become the people I was brought up around. I’ve spent hours mourning my childhood. A childhood suffocated by abuse, addiction, violence and trauma. A childhood where I kept quiet, small and fragile. A childhood where I locked myself away, physically and mentally, from the brutal outbursts and spiteful words that echoed around the chambers I called ‘home’.
When we are little, we are told that monsters live under our beds and in our wardrobes. But to soothe our curious minds, we are read bedtime stories and kissed goodnight.
When I was little, the monsters were reading me bed-time stories. Instead of telling myself ‘You can do anything you set your mind to’, it was ‘you’ll never get anywhere in this life, little Emily.’ The monsters picked me up from school, albeit an hour late and reeking of alcohol.
The monsters wouldn’t give me hand-me-downs but tear my clothes with the kitchen scissors when I was ‘naughty’. The monsters would pass out by 8pm. The monsters’ words would sink into my mind, like tar oozing into a crystal-clear lake. Once a thing of nature, turned into a gooey mess.
As soon as I realised ‘I am bigger and stronger than my monsters’, I worked to the bone to stop these monsters.
I’m older now and I know monsters aren’t real, but sometimes their illusion feels more fact than fiction. Sometimes the gooey mess in my head feels like liquid spilling into my veins. All of a sudden, I am consumed. Unlike Alice falling into the rabbit hole, I fall into a Wonderland that is not full of wonder, but full of dread.
Yet, again unlike poor Alice, I have tools to climb out this rabbit hole. Not a spade, pick-axe or a rope but my own will-power. My own determination. My own mind. I began to reclaim my power but grasping what was once mine back into my arms. My own mind.
I was raised Christian. I went to a Christian school up until I was eighteen and, while I must admit I have drifted from my faith, one of the few things that my Christian upbringing instilled in me is parables. I can vividly recall sitting cross-legged on the blue carpet of my primary school classroom and listening intensely to a little story about a boy called David. Little David, who fought and beat an archetypal monster, Goliath.
When I went home that night, I creeped into my bedroom and grabbed my rainbow-coloured children’s Bible, which I still have sitting on my university room bookshelf, among my dozens of novels which I’m yet to read. I flicked through to the First Book of Samuel and re-read the story of little David. But every time I read the name David, I replaced it with ‘Emily’. I was determined to beat Goliath and, to no-one's surprise, I did (or David did in the Book).
I wanted to be little David. I wanted to beat my monsters, no matter if they were real or fictional.
This quest which David completed is one I am still working on. One which has endless hurdles and one in which I have gained many mental bumps and bruises. Yet, sticks and stones merely break my bones, but the words which I tell myself last a life-time.
While I may be little like David, my determination is far larger than any Goliath in my path.
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