Teenager in Torment
She looked.
She saw.
She sighed.
She pulled the trigger
Well, that’s what floats around her head. She wants out. She no longer wants to be in this disgusting body of hers.
It has grown too large. So large that she is now invisible.
No body looked at her the same anymore. They averted their eyes or they looked at her with revulsion. She was revolting. So unlovable. So fat. So ugly. She may as well end it all because this life has become her torment.
The worst part, though. She feels all alone. Lonely. No one to talk to about it. She lives with other people but talking about the emotional stuff is not recommended.
No one understood, yet they were all in the same fucked up family. Each and every one of them too removed to see what everyone else was going through.
So, she remained silent. An undoing that will keep her stuck in her own torment for many years to come.
She walks away from the mirror in a huff of hatred. How the fuck did she get to this awful place within her? How did her body become something to abhor?
Surely she deserves more than this?
She doesn’t. She knows that. If she did then her life would be different. She would have parents who loved her, who cared for her and who took the time to talk to her. But, did she want them to? How do you explain such hatred for yourself to another? How does someone even begin to understand all the torment floating around inside of you? She doesn’t even understand it.
Sitting alone in her room, she pulls out her notebook and begins to write.
“She looked.
She saw.
She sighed.
She pulled the trigger.”
One of many short poems she has expressed onto paper. Most of them dark. Most of them encapsulating in only a few words how she feels deep inside.
Yes, she wants to escape this world but she does not really want to end it. She wants nothing more than to live. To experience all that life has for her. In what way, though? In what way can she allow that to happen when all she feels is a weight holding her down.
Not only is the weight now on her body, it is also living inside of her.
She’s not a little girl anymore. She is now a teenager. Sixteen. Going on seventeen. Eighteen is only around the corner. Adulthood. What will she do then?
Her life is there in front of her but she can’t seem to reach it. It is just out of her grasp. She lunges herself at it, desperately using all her will to grab onto it. It keeps moving from side to side, here and there; mocking her. “You can’t catch meeee”.
She sighs, closes her notebook and asks in quiet despair, “If this world isn’t for me, then what world is?”
Her eyes fall upon the walls of her room. Each one full of pictures of America. The United States. A world she longs for in a secret reverie. This is the place where dreams come true. A place full of beauty and wonder. Where everyone is beautiful and no one hates who they are. That’s what she sees every week on TV, anyway. Yes, there is drama after drama, regardless of that everyone seems wonderfully happy. And skinny. Everyone is skinny.
Soooo, if she was able to move there then she could become one of them and all her skinny dreams would come true. She would find her world.
Instantly her heart sinks for she realises her dream world will probably never enter her real life. It is only a fantasy. A self-indulgent fantasy for a fat teenage girl. Shit like that never happens. Maybe in a ridiculous movie where the fat girl loses weight over the summer and the hot guy finally notices her. Fantasy stuff.
Maybe this summer she can lose the weight finally and go back to school to see everyone’s shocked faces at how skinny she is now? That’s what she will do. Lose all of her ugly fat.
Then will she be loved? If she made herself be like one of those girls someone might notice her? That’s her biggest wish. To be noticed. To be wanted. To feel loved. Not too much to ask, right?
All those movies she adores and TV shows she watches religiously each week inform her of this fact. Skinny equals love. As a woman you can only be loved when you are skinny. And that love will come from the hot guy. The gorgeous, brooding guy. He will pretend he has no idea who you are and then he will suddenly see you for the first time as you walk your skinny body by his. It’s so romantic isn’t it? The girls dreams have come true all at once and she can now live happily ever after.
The end.
What happens after all of that, though? She wonders. Does all the shit that floats around inside you just magically melt away? I hope so. Wouldn’t that be wonderful. It certainly seems that way.
Her mind wanders back into the room. The room she sits in night after night feeling sorry for herself.
It’s not always going to be like this, is it?
When did this all start? When did the torment begin?
Questions she has asked many times with no answer to appease them.
She feels like she was doing ok then one day she wasn’t. Something shifted inside of her. She was her happy skinny self and then she mutated into what she is now.
Hard not to become a mutant when there is no one to stop the mutating.
Where was her dad when she needed him? Off in his own fucked up world where his kids mean nothing. Hardly one to stop the mutating. He became a mutant himself. A far cry from the man he was supposed to be, that’s for sure.
What of her mother? Why did she not stop the mutating? Also in her own fucked up world.
When two fucked up worlds collide the mutation magnifies.
Argghhhhh! So much shit going on.
She wants it to stop. She wants it to end. This torture, this torment. Each day the torment intensifies. Her mind swirling with horrible thoughts. Her body overrun with horrible feelings. They all gang up on her and take over. She understands the real her is lost somewhere amongst all of the torment. Her heart has grown cold. It is harder than a rock. She can feel a pull back to some sort of good feeling every now and again but it doesn’t last long. It is so fleeting she wonders if there is any good left in her at all.
The good she longs to be never seems to be reinforced. She isn’t told by those around her how awesome she is. How beautiful she is. How she has every right to be here in this world. No. The words she hears the most are ones of anger and disappointment.
She is a disappointment. She isn’t pretty enough, thin enough, loveable enough.
“How do I become enough?”, she asks.
She’s tried many, many times to lose the weight believing that will make her enough but she’s failed every time. So many ridiculous diets she has tried. The worst one was the laxative diet. Very embarrassing when she had to be sent home from a school trip because she threw up on the train. Thank goodness it wasn’t the other end!
That was a big fail. As was the stop eating so much food diet. That lasted all of 2 hours before she was starving and had to eat. Oh, and what about the let’s eat healthy and exercise diet? The should have worked. It was what all the experts recommended. Count calories and then burn them all off with cardio. Put your Jane Fonda outfit on and do some aerobic exercise.
She actually enjoys moving her body. She feels good. She feels (almost) happy whenever she does a bit of exercise. Even eating “healthier” foods gives her some good feelings. She’s so proud of herself for sticking to it. Then day 3 happens. Someone says something she doesn’t like and it’s back to the fridge to stuff her real feelings down deep inside her. Or there’s an argument at home and she feels as though her worth goes right into the bin. And, that is that. Back to the old way of being.
Another failed attempt to get the ugly, disgusting weight off of her ugly, disgusting body. Why does she even bother?
She wants it to stop. She wants it to end. This torture, this torment. Each day the torment intensifies. Her mind swirling with horrible thoughts. Her body overrun with horrible feelings. They all gang up on her and take over. She understands the real her is lost somewhere amongst all of the torment. Her heart has grown cold. It is harder than a rock. She can feel a pull back to some sort of good feeling every now and again but it doesn’t last long. It is so fleeting she wonders if there is any good left in her at all.
The good she longs to be never seems to be reinforced. She isn’t told by those around her how awesome she is. How beautiful she is. How she has every right to be here in this world. No. The words she hears the most are ones of anger and disappointment.
She is a disappointment. She isn’t pretty enough, thin enough, loveable enough.
“How do I become enough?”, she asks.
She’s tried many, many times to lose the weight believing that will make her enough but she’s failed every time. So many ridiculous diets she has tried. The worst one was the laxative diet. Very embarrassing when she had to be sent home from a school trip because she threw up on the train. Thank goodness it wasn’t the other end!
That was a big fail. As was the stop eating so much food diet. That lasted all of 2 hours before she was starving and had to eat. Oh, and what about the let’s eat healthy and exercise diet? The should have worked. It was what all the experts recommended. Count calories and then burn them all off with cardio. Put your Jane Fonda outfit on and do some aerobic exercise.
She actually enjoys moving her body. She feels good. She feels (almost) happy whenever she does a bit of exercise. Even eating “healthier” foods gives her some good feelings. She’s so proud of herself for sticking to it. Then day 3 happens. Someone says something she doesn’t like and it’s back to the fridge to stuff her real feelings down deep inside her. Or there’s an argument at home and she feels as though her worth goes right into the bin. And, that is that. Back to the old way of being.
Another failed attempt to get the ugly, disgusting weight off of her ugly, disgusting body. Why does she even bother?
“I’m hopeless”, she thinks to herself.
Hopeless she is not but hopeless is what she believes. She believes in it so much she cannot see herself in any other way.
She cannot she how wonderfully unique she is. That even though her body is not skinny like she wants it to be she is still an amazing young woman. A teenager who doesn’t need to be in torment. But torment it is. Torment that will hang around for another 30 years. If only she could have foreseen how this torment would play out in those decades of her life, she may have been strong enough to fight it.
There is not enough strength inside of her, in those moments. She is weak and powerless. Exhausted already. It’s unthinkable to believe change was possible for her. An exceptional amount of shit is in the way. Her exhaustion prevents her from clearing it out. Not only that, she has no idea how to do it. The shit show was still raging on around her. She is stuck in its vortex.
One thing does bring a small amount of relief from all of heaviness she feels in her body. Food. Gross, disgusting, fatty, sweet food. That is her saviour. She can rely on it anytime she needs the comfort she craves. No body else is able to give that to her.
Food never judges her. Food never tells her she is hopeless or unworthy. Food gives her a hug from the inside and helps her to feel some version of love. A version she wrote herself. A version she held onto because the real version was demolished. At some point over the last 10 years the real love she knew had a sledgehammer taken to it, smashing it to smithereens.
She endures every single shard of that broken love stabbing and poking her insides from the moment she opens her eyes in the morning to the moment she falls asleep at night. Some nights it even keeps her awake. Affecting her dreams with unbearable torment.
Food actually gives her a few traces of normality. It’s the thought of what to eat. The decision to go to the kitchen. The second the food hits her lips and moves into her mouth. The sensation of love and disgust all in one bite. It’s that moment she keeps going back to. And each moment after is full of intensifying amounts of torment for allowing herself to be suckered back into the bliss.
It’s not really bliss, though, is it? There’s a semblance of bliss. A sensation that feels moderately like bliss. Yet, it’s fleeting. She connects to that nanosecond with everything she has (which isn’t much). There is something there, otherwise she wouldn’t try to find it over and over again.
When that is the only good part of your life then your life must be truly fucked up.
She knows that. She isn’t stupid. She just can’t seem to pull herself away from the force of it. It’s all she has. A control over something uncontrollable.
So, there she sits in her aloneness. Alone with her thoughts. Alone with her feelings. Alone in her aloneness. Consumed with what to eat next. To get to that sliver of bliss.
She wishes people would see past her body. See the teenager in torment instead of the size of her thighs and the roundness of her belly and the wideness of her bottom.
“Am I not a person? An actual living person who has dreams and desires? A girl who’s pulse is congested with feeling? Why can’t I be seen for more than what my body presents to the world?”
She thinks back to her darkest poem where she pulls the trigger. Could she really do that to herself? Pull the trigger? There isn’t even anything around with a trigger.
It’s metaphorical. The trigger. It seems as though the trigger brings about blood and death but maybe it means something else? Maybe it means to explode. Discharge. Take action.
Who is she kidding? She explodes, nobody hears the explosion. She discharges and no one is even aware. Taking action? She wouldn’t altogether know what to do.
And, despite all of that, she knows deep in her cold, hard heart that her life must continue. Why? Well, that she is so completely unsure of.
So, the torment remains.
But, little does she know the torment she has suffered and shall continue to endure will bring her to a life her teenage self can’t even begin to imagine. A life where the torment will end. Where the torment is her greatest gift. Where it will finally connect her to the one person who truly matters. Herself.
For she is forever being guided and loved by one she cannot see. And by many who know her torment. They understand her pain as it is revealed to them.
They see her in the mirror.
If only she could see herself the way they do. One day she will. One day that torment will no longer look back at her.
