To be a character in your own life
This person constantly picks her nails, so she makes sure she always has acrylics on; she likes them painted red. The nails worsen the marks she makes on her palm when she's anxious. Her rings are constantly spun, her necklace is rubbed between her two fingers, and her earring post slips in and out of her first piercing (the fidgeting is unreal). She tries to make her bed every morning, keep her room clean, and do her skincare; these are things that people who have their “life together” do; she fails a lot. Everyone has a thinking face, hers starts from her tongue running across her teeth to the pressure on the tip of her tongue from her fang.
She tilts her head when she speaks, slightly tucking her hair behind her ear; it makes her seem endearing. She could be considered an affectionate person, reaching out to touch someone's shoulder or hand when they tell her something painful. Her tongue clicks from the roof of her mouth when she's presented with hurtful words or something that is hard to rationalize. Every time she sits down, she crosses her legs in hopes that it makes her appear smaller. She speaks with her hands to the extent that people have made fun of her before. She gets it from her mom.
Every once in a while, a bit of an accent slips out, which she has acquired from the people surrounding her. The slight New York accent from her dad and first roommate, the Boston accent from her best friend, the valley girl from her mom, or the southern twang from her forbidden roots. Weird slang that doesn’t make any sense gets incorporated into her sentences, but she tries to filter it out for fear that it makes her sound less educated. She finds herself starting sentences with “also” even if she hasn’t spoken in a while; I think this comes from the words jumping out of her mouth in the middle of her internal dialogue. Her mom says, “No yeah,” before agreeing or relating to something; she adopted this trait. It tends to confuse people.
She wants to be someone of worth and be equated to something meaningful. She hopes that one day she will be able to live a light life, one that is not suffocating. She longs to be beautiful, but maybe more importantly, see herself as beautiful. She wants to be “better”, and to move away from the diagnoses, both medical and mental, but I don't know if that is possible. Maybe acceptance is the key.
Not being enough scares the living shit out of her. She fears making eye contact; she's been told you can see everything in her big eyes. You must keep the steel wall high and intact. She is willing to go to extreme lengths to ensure she doesn't turn out like certain people in her life. She’s scared of kites, specifically the big ones at the beach, and claims that she doesn't know why or understand how they make her feel, but really, she fears that the explanation is too personal.
To explain a person's existence means to understand them at their most vulnerable. To imagine how they behave in their room alone, in conversations with people they know and love and with strangers. To lay out who you are from a third person perspective is the most terrifying, it is a sort of embarrassingly painful therapy. If you truly think about it, you are just a character in your own life, hopefully the main character, but a character nonetheless.
February 2025
