2013:

When I was at an age when curiosity set in I wondered if my body was normal.

Was there something to be worried about and if there wasn’t, was there something wrong with the way I thought.

I was too afraid to ask…

I was afraid to ask because if I asked, I’d either be an alien with strange body parts or I’d have a brain that needed some tweaking. Tweaking that would require investigation into incidents that released the shame that I was so desperately trying to bury.

And as I grew, I changed… nature took its course. More questions, more concerns.

I started hunching to hide the fact that I was changing. Changing into something terrifying, unknown, disgusting. Guilt was my friend… The friend that helped me cope with what I thought was an injustice to my unprepared mind.

“Is there something wrong with me?”

I was still afraid to ask. Afraid that if I asked, they’d ‘discover’ that I was changing and that if they found out, it would be revealed that I was repulsive…  a walking, talking, hunch-backed offence. So I was silent. Loud only at 6 in the morning when I secretly locked myself in the car and sang to songs that tore my heart apart and put it back together again. I wrestled with the voice booming from the stereo, trying to drown her voice out with mine…” In this space, I can be whatever I want to be and right now, my voice overpowers yours.”

The day would begin and I was silent again. I had a secret that only this “space” knew and it felt special so I guarded it with care.

“Is there something wrong with me?”

Inches were piling up, frequenting were the times when my state of mind wasn’t what I would call me… because that made me forget what was piling up along with those inches… questions that needed answers but with that growing number was the growing space that could be filled, if only briefly, with the frequenting of these once infrequent highs.

Anger played the manager. It dealt with me in the space that I once guarded with care and retaliated with the world that invaded this space with its ideologies, expectations and methods that had tried to shape something that couldn’t be shaped. But because of the strength of its force this ‘something’ had become disfigured, deformed and had melted into a broken dream and a broken heart.

“Is there something wrong with me?”

So I wrote it down in the hope that if I put the questions that I had so desperately tried to hide into words that couldn’t be understood, I’d be killing two minutes in one second. I called it poetry to heal the heart but to the world it would be gibberish that didn’t deserve a second read… It was brilliant.

These words reached highs and lows. They sometimes came to conclusions but these conclusions would leak out of a tear in the paper and return to the introduction that I had so aggressively approached with. This vent would sometimes soothe my prickling back but the dry skin was too cracked to be healed.

It became hard to let anyone in. It was harder to stay in a space that someone had so openly given to me in their heart.

And so Doctor Dechen became the patient again…

“is there something wrong with me?”

It lead to 7 years of hatred, loathing, healing, praying, crying, hiding, writing, trying, crashing, senseless doing and the glow diminishing. I fell and got up so many times that every time I fell, I knew I’d get up and every time I got up, I knew I’d fall again. I cry as I remember this not because I’m sad, but because the human capacity to endure is so immense that even my brain cannot fully comprehend it… and compared to some people, I got off easy.

The hurdles have shrunk and the bricks are coming off more frequently but there are times like today when I feel like I’m at the starting line, when my words trickle out of the tear in the page and I’m left without a conclusion. Maybe it’s because I haven’t lived yet. I’m 23 years old and my bones feel brittle at times, my memory fails to remind me of the wonderful times I’ve had, the drudgery of everyday diminishes the creativity that was once so vibrant in my young mind.

“Is there something wrong with me?”

No conclusion. No resolution. No decision.

I was given a gift and today I gift myself with the freedom of expression. Not to heal, not to encourage or to declare a truth about life that I might have thought I had discovered.

I was given a paper and today I write myself a reminder that once again, I have a purpose in life.