“OMG we need to put that on Instagram”.

Another Saturday afternoon spent at another friends wedding and yet another photo of my friends and I posing for the Internet clinking our glasses and adopting our heavily rehearsed poses with our heads tilted ever so slightly to the side. Just like last weekend, and the weekend before, seeking the validation that comes through the ‘double tapping’ of each picture posted that we all crave so badly.

What do I even have to really smile about?

Let the daydream begin, this picture will take a while longer to get right.

It sounds vain, but as I gaze back over the countless selfies I’ve taken over the last few years, I can only now see how I have really come into my own. I laugh as I lay here in bed late at night scrolling back through the good times, and the sad captured for ever, well, for as long as digital pictures last until my next episode of mania and I delete everything in the hope it takes the memories and the scars away by doing so.

You see, that is just the thing about healing old wounds, they leave a scar, a memory, and they leave a story that was once the only story we had to tell. And it is these stories, which we allow others to write for us, where we merely play a role, a character, the shell of who we really are. It is in these stories that we lose our voice, and we allow the voice and the mind of another, or many others to get into the driver’s seat, and we become nothing but a passenger in our lives, which are anything but, in most cases they are barely an existence.

Little do we realize that these same scars form the words that help us write the new story, the one that starts somewhere off in our mind, perhaps even somewhere further away, started by a higher power, our higher self, the version of ourselves who we tell no one other about.

It is this version of ourselves that has been trying to get our attention all this time, but we keep brushing them away because we feel like we have it all under control, despite the opposite being true. But we get curious about the soft voice that only we hear playing in the background day in and day out, so we turn up the volume and something wonderful happens. The fog lifts, the veil parts, the anxiety we have carried around all this time becomes our driving force.

We learn to go with the current, not against it, we start to flow.

Many therapists have suggested that I’ve had a vulnerability where the men in my life are concerned and that I have carried this since I was a child. Perhaps due to some sort of buried trauma or quest for attention that I felt I deserved, but never received, or maybe I did receive it, but felt it was never enough, I can’t be sure. They are correct in their shall I say assumptions, on this subject with me, or perhaps best guess, but it has only been since escaping the last less than desirable situation, that I have been able to reach this epiphany on my own.

The flashes of moments gone by play out in my mind’s eye, I feel that tense feeling creeping up into my shoulders with every thought that comes, but this is my time, my life, my story, and it is the right time to tell it, the right time to live it.

Being born into what most would consider ‘nothing’ in that we so often use such a word where there is a lack of money, is somewhat a privilege that we do not realize until much later in life. There is beauty in the innocence of being born into an existence below the breadline. There is often a more defined presence of love and connection to those who you spend your early days within such an environment.

Meals were often simple and light, but our family always dined together at the table. Holidays were to the beach, since when was water as a kid not fun right? There was always an injury or someone who fell over and started bleeding and there was always my mother who appeared at just the right time and made everyone, and everything feel better, and we just moved on like nothing had happened.

Her smile and her warmth is something that I think back to on the dark days, her non-judgmental attitude no matter what I did, she just had a way of making everything seem better at each point I felt like I was having a meltdown or a tantrum as it were when I was younger. No amount of money or privilege can buy that feeling that takes over your whole body when the one who brought you into the world and who has been there at every step of the way reaches out to invite you for a hug.

Even when my parents separated, they still remained the best of friends, and they bickered like brother and sister, it was fun and still is fun to watch. Part of me wishes I could say it was an awful divorce and ruined everything just so that I could have something to blame my twenties on, but I am coming to learn more and more that I have no one to blame but myself, and perhaps a few crappy boyfriends along the way, alas, I chose to stay for longer than I should have, but a bad hand I was dealt.

No one really prepares you, nor can they for the overwhelming emotions and feelings one begins to grow in the transition from childhood to the teenage years. When I look back now, I shudder at how much of an unreasonable bitch I was to those that loved me the most, and they just took it, they never pulled me up on it.

“She’s got a lot of spirit,” they’d say, when it felt like anything but.

Then along comes a boy, and he’s older and shiny and he offers everything I am looking for at that time of my life. He’s offering me an escape, somewhere to run to, someone to run to. I’ve never been sure though if we are ever running to that one person specifically, more so I feel we are running to the true capacity of who we are at the core, but it is this one other person that cuts across our path that we cling all hope to, hope that they will heal the damage.

I am convinced this is the nastiest trick of the universe because that ‘first love’ as they call it haunts you forever. It sets an impossible benchmark for the rest of our lives and once we’ve had it, nothing that follows ever compares to it, despite our elders telling us there will be another and that the first was merely a dress rehearsal.

But they say this with a slight quiver in their voice, and almost a feeling in their eyes that can only be shared via the souls. It is in these moments that the true communication between two beings takes place, the words that are never said, for there are no words to capture some feelings, despite the scholars that come before us insisting that there are, and that everything fits into a box, when those of us on the ground know that the box does not exist.

I suddenly come back to the world where I’ve been seemingly running on autopilot for how long I am not sure. No one seems to have noticed the daze in my eyes while we’ve been posing for this photo and the irony lies in the fact that while I have been performing my ultimate photo pose, the entire time I have been performing my ultimate happiness pose in that I look present when I am anything but. I feel like I’ve been wandering for days and have been seated in the deepest part of my soul, when, on the outside, I am at my most superficial. And just when I think that I have come to some sort of epiphany about my life and where I am going, as if I have seen the light and have been given the blessing to return to Earth to do things a little different, the words start coming up before I have the chance to catch them and redeem some part of this profound experience I’ve had in the midst of champagne, fake tans and fake compliments…

“OMG which filter are you putting on that? Can you send it to me so I can post it too?”

“I’ll be waiting,” says a faint voice.