The accident had me thinking really hard about some things that had been on my mind for a long time.
It feels like the depression from my teenage years pretty much just melted into a very long and dreary quarter-life crisis that seems to go on forever.
I try really hard to do my best, to hopefully keep up with my promises and live for the ones who're no longer here. But sometimes I really feel like I'm not strong enough to go that far.
Sometimes when I look back, it feels like my life is merely an accumulation of running-aways. I left RGS because I couldn't fit in, because I was used to excelling in primary school and in a school full of girls made for the Ivy League, I was far from hardworking or smart enough in comparison.
My god-sister won her Olympics gold at 16. For so long I yearned for something close. I trained hard for air rifle, much harder than my peers at my best times. And much more than photography, I did know for certain that I was more than talented, prodigious or whatever they called it, I reached scores people took years to reach within months, I knew I was born for air rifle.
So for those years my mum and I struggled against the association which wanted me to do bad no matter what, just because I was the coach's daughter, just because I did well, just because I was talented, just because my stepdad wanted to rein my mum in.
I thought I was strong, I thought I could hold out till my moment of glory to prove them wrong and be saved. I tried so hard, but I was so wrong.
There was no one to save us when I won my gold at the Commonwealth Shooting Championships. What came after can only be called fate's idea of a bad joke—people ganged up to sabotage my mum in attempt to get her jailed for life. They lied and coerced students to sign letters of events that never happened. She was in and out of the police station every other morning.
We lived those months in constant fear. I repeatedly dreamt about my stepdad's threat to hurt or kill my sister if my mum didn't lend him money in visuals too vivid and bloody for comfort—we were always being hunted, I would always try to hide her away. And he would grab hold of my arm and carve the flesh off my skin as I watched and it felt too real and too horrifying.
Whatever last bits of strength I might have had left from those earlier years of pain left me. I broke. And then it was a downward spiral into nothingness.
Despite being trained by the best coaches with the sincerest intentions with the best teams in China and Korea those six years, I failed.
No matter the circumstances it's all excuses when it's over. I couldn't climb back up. I was messed up. In searching of something else to focus on I turned my attention to photography which was then only a hobby. The worse I was doing in air rifle the more I tried to run away from it because there were no expectations for me to fail in photo-taking.
I left school again one semester short of finishing my fashion diploma because I still didn't fit in, the school was being retarded, and because people hated me for doing well when I was always away too often for rifle. Lame really, couldn't never fit in.
Just fail after fail after fail after fail.
No matter what I do I'm just never strong enough.
And the more people tell me how amazing I am at photography the more I fear how I'd just fail and not be able to go on.
The more I think I'd gotten over their deaths the more the guilt of being alive haunts me.
Some nights I remember Noah telling me the stories from his village the traumas from his childhood the freezing winters we spent together and how much more fortunate I am than what we were as children.
Some nights my mind won't stop replaying the image of L's fractured sprawling body, the blood, his broken head and all the brains that were spilled on the grounds, it hurt so so much to think.
Some nights I remember M crying and she was like the sun and she never cried, but when we talked about H's death she cried and cried and cried and we were only twelve and they used to be so close and I knew how it hurt and it hurt me too.
Some nights I remember grandma visiting me and the empty hospital corridors and how lonely I'd felt ever since my first memory.
Some nights I remember the first time I tried to stab myself with a pair of scissors and how I wished that process wouldn't hurt so I could just go and despite being four I knew I'd never be fixed.
Some nights I remember being told I wasn't wanted and I think about how little I do and how much I fail and I really wish I didn't exist.
Some nights I wonder how everyone else copes with everyone else's deaths and at the same time I don't want to know, because if I don't hurt and don't remember then their deaths and existence would be lost and that would be too sad.
Sometimes I just really want it to stop hurting but I know it never will.
And no I'm not suddenly being emo, I'd just always tried to hold it in for fear of being a negative influence, for fear of being judged. But the people who want to judge will judge either way and people who don't get it will never do, and the people who talk without consideration for others' feelings will continue to be that way, so whatever.
Sometimes people talk like I don't have feelings, but I'm only human like you and probably more emotional, and I can't be treated like a hero and be expected to be perfect because I am not. I'm just someone broken trying to live a little bit of life in this world and it's so hard because it's as if there is no place for me anywhere.
Sometimes all the expectations really weigh and I seriously don't think I'm that great or amazing, and whatever I do it never seems to ever be enough because it's never enough because there's still so much farther to go and I feel like I'll never have the strength to get there, because my life had been nothing but a spiral of fail and hurt and pain.
Sometimes I just really want it to stop hurting.
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Update:
I just want to say thank you everyone for the emails, messages and comments.
I feel very touched, very loved.
You have no idea how long and often those thoughts have plagued me, how much your words and reassurances and understandings mean.
Sometimes there is no room and nowhere to say anything else next to a piece of work, and it's so easy to be taken granted for to be assumed to be judged at and it's so lonely and painful to deal with along with everything else.
Your words and support really made me feel that I'm not as much a... failure as I believed. Made me feel that, even if just for a little bit, that those failures were okay.
I read every single comment, email and message received, and I cried reading many of them. Thank you, thank you thank you thank you. I'll get better and be a stronger girl.