A Teenage Girl

This post has been sitting in my drafts since January 23, 2012.

Today at work I spent the second half of my day printing up insurance claims. The monotony and simplicity of getting each claim ready to print and then printing it allowed my mind to wander. I've always been a thinker, reflecting a lot on my own life, nostalgic at times. Even in elementary school, my journal included more than just a recording of what my daily activities were. I wrote down my thoughts about how my life used to be and what I hoped it would be. I wrote I wished I was five years old again because being eleven was too hard and my life was too difficult. Depression set in early for me.

But it was that teenage girl I thought about at work today. I thought about my old journal entries, my old livejournal entries, ramblings I had scribbled between science and english notes during high school. I thought about that girl who was so confused and so sad and so alone. The girl who wanted to graduate early and go to college, go to boarding school, kill herself-- anything to get away from where she was, who she was. The girl whose blogposts indicated she was angry, whose journal entries indicated she was despairing, whose ramblings on random pieces of paper indicated she was confused. That girl who thought she was in love many times but was really just in pain and used boys as band-aids for an illness that needed open-heart surgery. That girl whose parents didn't trust her and whose father told her he was worried about her character and she said she didn't care if she didn't have any morals. That girl who wished she could feel nothing at all so she would never be sad again accepting that if she got her wish she'd never be happy either. That girl who would sometimes feel completely numb, attempting to break her own fingers to feel anything at all. That girl who simply could not figure out how to be happy.

I was thinking of her today. And I felt so bad for her. And right now I'm channeling her through her old music, remembering those feelings, those nights she would go to bed with her silent tears and headphones. That girl didn't really know what she was doing. Locking her bedroom door, lying about having theater rehearsal so she didn't have to go home, turning in a completely blank Pre-Calculus exam, sending herself to the hospital three times. Pretending she knew how to make herself happy.

I want to tell that girl things will be okay eventually. And that she's strong and she can keep going, to just hold on. I remember telling myself many times, "Tomorrow. Just make it until tomorrow," and then I would go to bed early, listening to music, keeping the pills away. That girl I was then, was scared and almost hopeless. She often thought she was hopeless but she couldn't have been because she held on for another day, day after day. She didn't like making plans for the future because she wasn't sure she'd be around but she did anyway, just in case. She made a lot of mistakes. A ton. Probably more than you'd actually believe. But she wasn't the bad person she always told herself she was. She was good. But she was very sad. And I wish that this version of me, this older Natalie who got through her teenage years and graduated high school and college and married a wonderful person and is making plans for the future, could just go back in time and tell her she did well with what she had and I'm proud of her for holding on and to look forward to her future. She will still be sad sometimes, more often than she'd think is fair, but she will also be more happy than she knew she could be and she will love and be loved more than she thought possible.

Is it strange to think of myself in this way: my past self and my current self? Sometimes I miss that girl-- with her intensity, she wrote deeply and poetically-- but mostly I'm glad she's grown up. I just wish she could've known what her future had in store for her. She might not have been so depressed all the time.