Fresh starts and new beginnings have always played a major part in my life. Starting Sixth Form was a fantastic one for me, I’d already made friends with a few people from the year above so was excited to finally join them (in the common room and the good parties mostly).
School work started well, I got an A in my first Psychology essay, I had always loved RS and Law was, well… Less enjoyable than I had hoped but still interesting. When I had a free period I would spend time with one of my new friends, A. We’d go out for food and then come back and watch day time TV in the common room. We got really good at knowing where and how to sit to get the TV to actually work. You could say we were doing Yoga poses in front of Loose Women.
My friends and I started going to more gigs- Battle of the Bands and stuff. Rachel and I were still close and experiencing things together still. She had broken up with the drummer a while ago, so for both of us meeting new boys was another fun, new experience. She was getting closer to someone in the year above and so was I.
Things started with ‘D’ as a friendship for me. We would spend nights driving around, talking and laughing. It was ideal for me as I preferred to be out of the house as much as I could, my mother was drunk and crying a lot at this point in time. It also didn’t hurt that I was starting to quite like D and I knew that he was feeling the same. Everything started very sweetly for us with me mentioning that I’d never had a chocolate advent calendar and him presenting me with one. I thanked him with a very innocent kiss on the cheek and soon after that ended up as boyfriend and girlfriend. The L word came soon after.
I will talk more about this first love in more posts but first I want to say that this was a perfect first love for me. It taught me a lot about the way to behave and not behave in a relationship. It allowed me to make my first mistakes and to learn how to deal with others mistakes. It is something that has led me to being the person that I am in my now (and hopefully forever) relationship. I will always talk about D with respect, even when I address our mistakes as I believe it is important to pay respect to what makes me who I am.
A few months later, my mother came home one morning in pieces, something had happened in her life that I won’t talk about as it’s not my story to tell. I will just say that something awful had happened that was dealt with terribly by all involved. This sent her back to a very dark place. She began to self harm a lot more regularly and I ended up exhausted at my weekend job and school. I’d started to miss classes and my work started to get worse. My teachers were getting concerned, my grades had dropped that much. I felt like an unpaid nurse, except for when I was spending time with D and his family or my friends. That was much-needed time away, I am grateful that I had so many places to turn to.
Not long after that, my mother was back into a sort of ward. I remember going to visit her, with her now Fiance and thinking that she was a shadow of herself. It was so awkward for the first time ever, I just didn’t have the words to say. I don’t know if I would, even now.
Sometimes there just are no words, and that is okay.
Self Preservation to Self Love 