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She gives me a speculative look, like she realizes what she’s saying is hurting me. If she does, it’s not enough to make her stop.
“I’m just trying to look out for what’s best for you, darling. Actually,” she says, her face lighting up. “I just read thisamazingarticle in Elle. This wonderful new diet that all the society girls are following, it’s so great you’ll see. Basically, you start with a ginger tea and a sugar free plain yogurt in the morning and then…,”
I zone out as she continues talking. Leaving my burger on the passenger seat, I pull back onto the road and head for home, nodding and humming at key points so she thinks I’m still listening.
But inside, my heartbeat pulses in my temple and the itch starts to rise like a threatening tide in my brain. Every time I try to focus back on her words, the obsessive thoughts reel me back in like a fish on a hook.
I’m trapped in the worst place I know – the dark and twisted recesses of my own mind.The price I pay for the quiet place in my mind that I escape to when I need a safe space is a sadistic voice in my head. A hateful, unkind version of myself who seeks only to self-destruct.
I start tapping my left foot anxiously, trying to silence the voice. I pick at my nails, digging my thumb into the flesh around it and peeling back the skin. The pain is a welcome relief from my swirling thoughts. They scream at me that I’m worthless and unlovable. They’re unintentionally validated by every word my mum says.
“You better not be ripping your cuticles,” My mother’s reprimanding tone breaks through the haze.
You can’t do anything right, Nera,the voice screams.
You’re worthless.
An embarrassment.
I close my eyes against the tirade of self-flagellation the voice unleashes on me, hoping that if I squeeze them shut hard enough I can keep the self-loathing part of my brain out.
A failure.
“It’s a disgusting habit,” she gives an exasperated sigh. “Really what’s the point in spending all this money on your clothes and hair if your hands are going to look like you dishwash for a living?”
Telling her that it’s hard for a fencer’s manicure to stay pristine will fall on deaf ears. She never wanted me to get into sports, it was my dad’s pet project to make me an athlete.
She wanted me to be a society girl, a debutante like her. She’s endlessly disappointed in anything that falls short of me being the perfect lady and gives me no grace for how her ambitions for me are in direct opposition to my father’s.
Failure is not an option for me, but neither is success when I’m stuck between the differing and often suffocating aspirations of my parents.
My stomach roils as I pull into the parking lot, choosing to park at the back where bushes and trees will give me privacy. I need to get off the phone before she finds fault in the way I breathe.
Like an itch in furious need of a scratch, the voice yells at me to eliminate.
“I have to go, I’m about to go meet my new roommates,” I tell her.
Her eyes soften, the first time she looks at me with anything other than judgement since I answered her call.
“You know I love you right, darling?”
I do, actually. In many ways, my mum is a good parent, she just has no interest in breaking the cycle of generational trauma. She parents the way she was parented, with criticism overshadowing compliments and emotional intelligence being ridiculed as something reserved only for hippies.
“I love you, too.”
When I’ve hung up, I rest my head on the wheel and try to breathe. I try to ignore the itch that crawls beneath my skin, to disregard the voice in my head that bullies me and controls me, spewing hateful words at me like some dark monster, but it’s too late.
I’m powerless to resist it.
It takes over my rational thoughts, pushing the real me to recede into the background as I fall into it once more.
I’m out of the golf cart and looking around. I can hardly do this with my new roommates upstairs. There are a few bushes off to my right. No one is here, no one can see me.
I run for the bush and drop to my knees behind it. I don’t need to put my fingers down my throat to do this anymore, but I do it anyway.
I watch with dispassionate detachment as the burger and fries come up with ease and hit the grass beneath me. I go again, wanting,needing, it out. I’ll push through the dizziness. I have veggies and chicken upstairs that I can eat if I need. Acid burns my throat and bile chokes me. I go again. Something wet hits my cheek and I wipe it away with the back of my hand.
Relief is short lived and quickly washed away by crushing shame. I don’t have time to feel those thoughts, not when I have to go meet the girls. Reaching into my duffle bag, I grab a pack of gum and pop one to get rid of the sour taste in my mouth.
