Holiday

I`m taking a holiday.

I`m not okay. There`s no other way to say it: I`m not okay. It`s not about where I am, or what I`m doing: it`s not my job, or my house, or my scooter, or my friends. It has nothing to do with my plans for the future, or where I want to go, or what kind of life I want to build. All of that is fine: great, in fact, because I live in a beautiful place and have a job that allows me to save money in the middle of a recession. It`s me. I`m the problem, and I`m what needs to be fixed.

I`ve told nobody this - not my sister, not my mum, not my best friends - but I`m still having nightmares about The Boy. It has been a year, and I still have nightmares almost every single night: nightmares so vivid that I frequently wake up crying, and so real that they haunt me when I`m awake. And I`ve told nobody because I`m ashamed: because I`m supposed to be over it, and because not being able to heal like I should makes me weird, and strange, and weak. But I can`t stop them: I can forget about him during the day, but when I`m asleep he always comes back. And it`s not even that I miss him anymore: the dreams where I woke up wanting to call him, or wanting to be with him, ended a long time ago. Now, they`re nightmares about how he made me feel. Ugly and talentless. Pointless. Uninteresting. Uninspiring. Crazy. Replaceable. Less than somebody else; than everybody else. Not worth loving, or of being loved. It`s as if the little voice that was inside me for twenty nine years - the little voice that whispered you`re not good enough, and you never will be - was proved, and made real, and dragged outside myself, because I wasn`t good enough for him, no matter how hard I tried, and I was replaced. Because he told me every day, in words or in actions, how unattractive I was, and how annoying, and how stupid, and how forgettable, and showed me - every day -that knowing me more made him love me less. Because he compared me, every day, to somebody better. Because he put me on a pedastal and then clawed me down, every day, until I didn`t know how to get back up again.

And now the little voice inside me has become big, and strong, and it has turned into him: the demons I`ve been fighting all my life have clustered together, and turned into one, real Demon I have to fight every single night in my sleep. Every night I try and I try to make him love me, and I try to feel worth it, and every night he - The Boy, turned into The Demon - tells me how useless I am, and how unloveable, and how unattractive, and makes me fight him over and over again. Until I wake up crying because every single night I lose. And the irony? I fell in love with The Boy in the first place because he was the only person who had ever told me he would fight my demons for me so that I didn`t have to anymore. And he didn`t just become one of them: he became all of them.

I can`t do it anymore. I`m not going `mad`, and I don`t hate Japan at all: I`ve just lost myself completely. The demons - the little ones inside me, and the bigger one that broke my heart - have finally won. A year of a destructive relationship, followed by a year of nightmares that get stronger with time, and I don`t believe in myself anymore: not as a writer, or as a woman, or as a lover, or as a person, or as a friend. I no longer believe that I can do anything, or that I`m worth anything. I`m struggling to write because I`m embarrassed of my own voice: I shy away from social situations, because I`m ashamed of who I am. I don`t look in mirrors, because I hate how I look, and I won`t apply for jobs because I don`t think I can do them. I`m not lonely because there`s nobody around me: I`m lonely because I stay away from everyone who is. I haven`t been on a date in a year: not because I haven`t been asked on any, but because I automatically reject all of them. And I`m scared of life, and of love, and of the world, and of my future: not because I have no choices, but because I don`t have the confidence to make any of them. Because where I used to be fearless, now I`m constantly terrified.

It`s my own fault. I should have realised a year ago that I wasn`t okay: that it was more than just a breakup. That it wasn`t just about moving across the world for and then losing the only man I had ever loved fully, which would have been hard enough in itself: that it was about having every fear and every insecurity I had ever had proved to me as true, and not being strong enough to deal with it. And while I did what I always do - curl back into myself, and cut myself off, and try to handle it all on my own - the only thing that could have fixed it was to let others heal it for me. To surround myself with people who would fight my demons with me: with people who loved me, and adored me, and could prove that none of it was true the way that one person - and his other girlfriend - proved it was. Instead of burying myself in the countryside in a strange place, with strangers, and fighting myself and my demons every night on my own.

I`m so tired; so unbelievably tired. It`s no wonder that life has lost its magic when every single day all of my energy goes on forgetting the nights. I`m not depressed, and it has nothing to do with bipolarity. I`ve simply been defeated.

So I`m taking a holiday. My parents and my sister arrive in Japan in four and a half weeks after eight months without them, and until then I`m not writing and I`m not thinking. I`m going to watch television, and draw pictures, and go for long walks, and ride my bike, and drag myself to parties - parties I`ve been rejecting for months, now - and force myself to have dinner with friends who barely know what I look like anymore. And - most importantly - I`m going to let myself be, until the people arrive with the weapons I need to start fighting again. The people who think that the world wouldn`t spin without me.

And when I`ve started to believe that too, I`ll be back.

To be - once again - somebody`s Write Girl.