MY LOVE CONFESSIONS

I have experienced so much love in my life, Dolls, and I feel very fortunate and grateful for the beauty it has brought me. From a young girl, I always felt unconditional love, which was instrumental during the times I suffered from bullying and mental health disorders. I don't think I would've come out the other side if it were not for that. Unfortunately, my exceptional experiences of love were not enough to protect me from the terrible experiences of love I faced. And these, Dolls, are my confessions of those prefusely heart-breaking loves.

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CONFESSION NO.1

This confession, Dolls, is a nameless one because, although these loves have had their ups and downs, I still respect the people this confession is about and consider them, always, to be my family. I confess to the trials and tribulations of having needs not met. I have held hopes on countless occasions for these people in my life to listen to how I believe they could love, support, and aid me, and despite this, they have chosen to go about things their own way. I’ve been met with a refusal to do things any other way than in the way they'd like to do them. It is difficult to reconcile loves in which you don't feel seen, heard, or respected. My confession is that these challenges have, at times, been a direct cause of my relapsing from anorexia. I fear their comments and views so greatly that I am afraid to even talk to them as a means of self-preservation. And it's so hard when you don't want to do that, but you know that if you do not set this boundary, your very life could be on the line.

That is the nature of messing with the mental illness of anorexia; it is a life or death situation.

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CONFESSION NO.2

This confession, anorexia, is both the many days that bleed into one,, as its horror is something you put out of your mind with all its harrowing moments,, and also, the singular day that rolls into weeks and months,, as suddenly everything good has passed you by. I confess that despite its horribleness, I’m hopelessly in an inevitable relationship with it that I don’t want to leave, even though I know how. And that breeds the shame that I confess, prevents me from loving myself, not even slightly, no, not at all.

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CONFESSION NO. 3

I had an idyllic childhood up until the age of five. I was incredibly close to my mum and dad, I had friends, I had an abundance of adult figures in my life who were close family friends of my parents, and beautiful relationships with my extended family members. If I were to describe the person I was as a child, I would say that I was very happy, independent, confident and conscientious. I sometimes wonder how saddened I feel that I completely lost this girl as I grew up. So much so that to me, these descriptions of myself feel as though I am describing a stranger. You may be wondering how I completely lost this beautiful girl, the beautiful girl who had so much ahead of her, as well as around her. And I also think many of you are expecting me to pin it down to anorexia, but in this case, you are wrong. From the time I started primary school, I was heavily bullied in the way you see on TV. Everybody made fun of me, ignored me, acted as if I were less than them, and I was a joke and an outcast. But it wasn't because I was weird or because I was mean, I believe it was because I was seen as a paushover; I was incredibly kind and continued to be kind even when others weren't. I think the fact that I couldn't stand up for myself made others believe I was weak. After the weakness was spotted, people knew that they could push me around to get what they wanted. I was a very smart child, and people would copy off me and say hurtful things to me to get other things they wanted, such as my snacks or money. I suppose I really struggled to say 'no' as I didn't want to let anybody down, which made me hate myself. As time went on, if I went to tell on people, their friends would come up to me and tell me not to. I felt so silenced. One day, after bottling all of this in, I told my mum, probably in the most tears she'd ever seen me in, that I was being bullied, and she pulled me out of year 4, and I was moved out of my primary school. Then, when I finished year 6 at my new school, I moved to high school, where things only progressed. During high school, I went through periods where I was popular for my kindness. People were a bit more mature and were drawn to the refreshingness of somebody they could trust who was genuinely kind and wouldn't talk behind their backs or do anything besides lift them up. In fact, throughout my whole first year of high school, I was friends with everybody in the year. I feel that in friendships that progress to closer friendships, it is expected that there will be a sense of something that isn't considered gossip but shared secrets about how one truly feels about the world, even the things that aren't always so nice. But I never felt that i had anything bad to say about anybody because we were all friends, and so some became frustrated when they wanted to gossip about others, and I always shut it down. I became a thing now that was called 'too nice'. My mum and I always recall this incident on the train home, where a new girl tried to gossip about somebody else in a group of four or five, and one of the girls said, 'You can't do that here. Luka's here.' My kindness quickly isolated me. As others developed cliques, I soon felt that I was a floater; somebody who sat with all the groups and so wasn't invited to any in-group parties, ever. The exclusion only escalated from here. It soon became people talking about me in earshot, talking to everybody in the group but me, sitting in circles but sitting in a way that cut me out of it, people sitting with their backs to me, and people rolling their eyes at me whenever I found the courage to participate in conversation. Finally, I had one friend who went so far as to make up rumours about my family after she would come to sleepovers at our house, even lying about my mum doing things that never happened on multiple occasions. As you can imagine, after this whirlwind of horrific and devastating experiences, from when it all started at five to the age it ended at seventeen, my mental health was a mess. I had spent a flourishing, promising five years of endless possibilities that evolved into a childhood and adolescence of suicidal ideation, depression, OCD, control issues, despair, abandonment issues and insecurity.

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I suppose this post will be as immensely sad for others as it is for me. Because as we go through life, we all experience loss... innate loss. And that is something everybody understands. My love confessions are about the agony of love, and not the beautiful and wondrous thing it can be. I promise, love has brought me so much good, but there is a side of it I wish that nobody ever had to face.

Kisses,

COS x