A sad story: Ep 3/8: The day i lost my heart
Chapter 3: The Day I lost my heart.
I remember that day in dramatic slow motion black and white. I was 16. The school congregation was on its’ way to church mass in the morning and I was walking without friends amongst the other students. Then a delivery lorry slowly heaved past us on way to school gate exit. As the lorry rolled past I had a “matrix moment” - time suspended for a moment, in which the big tyre turned like the second-hand of a clock face. I wanted to run and dive underneath it. -
Time sped up suddenly, the moment gone. A thought still lingering, “Did I just imagine that?”
Every day after that day just felt like copy of that day, a repeat. It was significant because it was the day that I came face to face with the realization that I had to wear a mask (Sebastian) to be able to function at that nit-picky socially claustrophobic private school. I trudged through the silent pain and boredom of the fake friends and got on with it, trying to find new ways to enjoy the taste of the façade, the bland taste of the grime behind the mask
But looking back, those ‘new ways’ – really just turned out to be a long string of avoidance strategies and disrespect, that went like this:
I disrespected myself by:
1. Always getting drunk at most parties, because I used alcohol to self-medicate my social anxiety, I was in with the wrong crowd, and I hid my inadequacies by getting drunk as soon as possible.
2. Not trusting my own judgment because I never gave my real opinion if I knew it wouldn't fit with what I thought my "friends" were assuming about me. So I subjugated my values for the peer groups’ values, in order to not create any conflicts and conform to their ideals.
3. Allowing others to make up my mind for me because I let D&H finish my sentences for me in front of most of friends outside of our "Old School" clique (Derek & Harry were my friends since grade 3) - Even if that idea, that they finished my sentence with, wasn't mine. I still let it happen because I was so scared of conflict
4. Allowed my "friends" power over me because i couldn't give that power to myself because I wanted other people to define me, for me, I didn't define myself because I was scared of being bullied if my own image didn't click with the group. That's probably why I got drunk so eagerly and quickly went overboard at social occasions that permitted drinking, so that I could jump out of my real consciousness into drunkenness and "they" could define me as "they" saw fit.
5. I used the "Sebastian" character as mental armor against the likely-hood or suspicion that people might not like the real me and my real choices, and bully me again.
And I used "Sebastian" to make real life decisions, I allowed "Sebastian" to cross the line, cross a personal boundary, A boundary that was vague to begin with. Doing what I thought a T.V. character would do, using a fake character with fake values to make decisions in life about career and girlfriends. If it didn’t work out I could just throw away the mask, or so I thought.
Ironically by being fake, using the ‘Sebastian’ character in order to avoid being
Bullied, I bullied myself!!!
I was fake to the point that a movie characters values replaced my real values, losing the real me behind the mask.
I remember that day in dramatic slow motion black and white. I was 16. The school congregation was on its’ way to church mass in the morning and I was walking without friends amongst the other students. Then a delivery lorry slowly heaved past us on way to school gate exit. As the lorry rolled past I had a “matrix moment” - time suspended for a moment, in which the big tyre turned like the second-hand of a clock face. I wanted to run and dive underneath it. -
Time sped up suddenly, the moment gone. A thought still lingering, “Did I just imagine that?”
Every day after that day just felt like copy of that day, a repeat. It was significant because it was the day that I came face to face with the realization that I had to wear a mask (Sebastian) to be able to function at that nit-picky socially claustrophobic private school. I trudged through the silent pain and boredom of the fake friends and got on with it, trying to find new ways to enjoy the taste of the façade, the bland taste of the grime behind the mask
But looking back, those ‘new ways’ – really just turned out to be a long string of avoidance strategies and disrespect, that went like this:
I disrespected myself by:
1. Always getting drunk at most parties, because I used alcohol to self-medicate my social anxiety, I was in with the wrong crowd, and I hid my inadequacies by getting drunk as soon as possible.
2. Not trusting my own judgment because I never gave my real opinion if I knew it wouldn't fit with what I thought my "friends" were assuming about me. So I subjugated my values for the peer groups’ values, in order to not create any conflicts and conform to their ideals.
3. Allowing others to make up my mind for me because I let D&H finish my sentences for me in front of most of friends outside of our "Old School" clique (Derek & Harry were my friends since grade 3) - Even if that idea, that they finished my sentence with, wasn't mine. I still let it happen because I was so scared of conflict
4. Allowed my "friends" power over me because i couldn't give that power to myself because I wanted other people to define me, for me, I didn't define myself because I was scared of being bullied if my own image didn't click with the group. That's probably why I got drunk so eagerly and quickly went overboard at social occasions that permitted drinking, so that I could jump out of my real consciousness into drunkenness and "they" could define me as "they" saw fit.
5. I used the "Sebastian" character as mental armor against the likely-hood or suspicion that people might not like the real me and my real choices, and bully me again.
And I used "Sebastian" to make real life decisions, I allowed "Sebastian" to cross the line, cross a personal boundary, A boundary that was vague to begin with. Doing what I thought a T.V. character would do, using a fake character with fake values to make decisions in life about career and girlfriends. If it didn’t work out I could just throw away the mask, or so I thought.
Ironically by being fake, using the ‘Sebastian’ character in order to avoid being
Bullied, I bullied myself!!!
I was fake to the point that a movie characters values replaced my real values, losing the real me behind the mask.
