I finally realized!
Okay, so I’m on my way home on the bus, listening to “If I Were A Boy,” when I figure why I’m not myself. Why I pretend to be a dumb, clumsy blonde. Why the person some people here love and others hate isn’t me.
It’s because I’m hiding. I’m hiding behind a big bowl of weirdness and happiness. I’m actually a lot like a clown, but not the scary ones, or the funny ones. I’m more like the depressed ones that hide it by trying to make other people happy. I enjoy the thought of Ulrika laughing because I made a fool out of myself, or seeing Neha smile because she knows I care about her, even if it means that I have to sacrifice the real person behind the mask. It’s not only hiding good stuff, that’s why. I can’t bare people feeling bad for me. I’m not like Naomi (I’m not saying she wanted attention, which is okay, people sometimes want it) or Neha who took every compliment as help to climb the ladder, I just feel like I’m pushed down every time someone says I’m not that bad. It feels like there’s this person in my stomach who tells me when people are lying by reaching up toward my throat, but stops somewhere in the middle to squeeze my heart. That feeling grasps me every time someone tries to be “nice”, especially girls. Boys usually don’t give compliments, obviously ’cause they don’t think it’s necessary to lie. I get the whole Universal Law that all girls have to be nice when it comes to beauty (even if it’s just pretend), but I don’t like it. It ruins me.
I think I was able to be myself in Norway because everyone knew the story. And because it wasn’t that bad back then. Being bullied was awful, yes, it’s never going to leave my soul, I know I can’t replace my broken heart. The thought never really bothered me, I’d gotten my revenge that time with Victoria when I stole from her. I was furious, she couldn’t just do that to me and also be my friend. I had given her too many chances and I hid my anger in all the stolen toys in my room. It started with her sticker book that time with Elise. And the other one. And then that other one. Soon I started stealing her toys and one day they caught me. I wasn’t allowed in their house for a year. Later when everything stopped, everyone in my class were okay with each other (except Jeanette, but that’s a different story). I’d gotten over the whole bullying thing, and everyone I knew were part of my “family”. We all cared for each other. It was perfect at my school in Norway. Here it’s about popularity. There’s no real family here. People say they hate each other for every little mistake, pretend they’re friends, and stop hanging out for nothing.
Yesterday Eila left. Duuh I miss her, I’ve missed her since the moment she stopped talking to me, but I couldn’t change anything, not even the fact that everyone hated me for what I had done according to her. I was basically chased out of my grade which is the reason for me switching to the eighth graders, the popular group hate me for doing that, but they don’t know why. Anyway, there were some times, like at WOW, when she was nice to me, pretending nothing had happened between us. Those times we were alone, or with people we didn’t know well who hadn’t even realized we weren’t friends anymore. When we were around people we knew, we didn’t really talk, not unless we had to ask each other for a green sharpie or an eraser. We were never alone again after WOW, which made me give up. I lost all hope of her missing me until today when Sahana told me Eila wanted to give me this lock. It’s the neonish, pastelishpink-tripplecode lock with or without a keyhole… Don’t really remember the last part, but I was surprised she remembered. The day we found it, looking into each other’s eyes, we promised to figure out what the code was, no matter what happened. That’s what Sahana came with, and she told me that Eila said: If you ever find the code, tell me.
The thing with Keegan… Well it pretty much made everything worse. I felt sick to my stomach, still do. If I start thinking about it I have to make myself think about something else before start crying or puking or whatever. I don’t blame him. It was my fault. I didn’t do anything about it and he didn’t know that I couldn’t despise it.
My brother is a long story. It’s been going on since I was in third grade. Apparently he was smoking, but since I was bullied, I couldn’t focus on that, and I didn’t even believe it. When we were small, my brother and I, standing in the hall of our old house in Geneva, made a pact and said we would never smoke in our whole entire lives. That’s why when Victoria’s sister told me the news, I wanted to go die. The rest is gonna take a book to write so I’d rather just leave it at this; He basically ruined his future with drugs, moved to India, went to an awful school, moved to Norway a year early without us, and is on and off with drugs. So I miss him.
I’m just depressed, and I don’t wanna come off as an attention seeker. It kind of takes away the depression when I’m in character as this “perfect girl with normal girl problems”.
Not that I haven’t had fun before this, ’cause I’ve had lots of fun, but it just hasn’t been enough. I feel like I have been annoying Maria and Ulrika and almost everyone I’ve been around. It feels so lame. As in I don’t feel like I’m myself and I’ve realized that what I am isn’t what I was. I’ve kept telling myself that everything in India has just been a giant pause from reality and that what happens here is only part of a weird dream. I thought I would wake up form that dream as the same person I used to be, and I also wanted that to be the case, but the truth is, I have changed. I’m a new person wether I like it or not, and when it comes to that… I don’t really know if I like it… I just want to be a happy, crazy Signe, who people actually like.
TheyCallMeTheSquirrel 