She Jumps

(TRIGGER WARNING: MENTIONS OF SELF-HARMING, SEXUAL ASSAULT AND MENTAL HEALTH ISSUES)

When she was six years old, she started having nightmares of being chased.

The antagonists of her nightmares took the form of horrible, terrifying mythical creatures: mountain trolls, dinosaurs, dragons and werewolves were among the regular rotating roster of monsters that would chase her through dreamscapes every night.

These nightmares continued to rear their ugly head as she got older. Eventually, the story-book creatures began to morph into realistic animals. Lions, tigers, hyenas and wolves chased her through desolate, dusty deserts until her legs could no longer support her weight or carry her any further. As she collapsed in a heap on the ground, the animals surrounded her, snapping their teeth and snarling in hunger. Right as the animals would pounce on top of her, she jolted awake in her bed.

When she reached her teens, she dreamed of people she knew intimately. Her father, who she never liked, became the most consistent monster hunting her whilst she slept. Appearances were also made by her schoolyard bullies. After an incident on a public bus when a middle-aged man groped her buttocks, a man who’s name she didn’t know – with a face she would never forget – hunted her through dreamscapes.

She started to have an exorbitant number of sleepless nights. Insomnia made her paranoid and unfocused. The line between nightmare and reality became incredibly blurred and she could no longer decide whether being awake or being asleep was the preferred option.

Coincidentally in her school library, she stumbled across an encyclopaedic dream dictionary. In her hour-long free period, she tore through the contents of the book. Eventually, she found a section of the book that described the meaning behind someone being chased in their dreams. According to the book, being chased signified heightened anxiety in a person’s waking life and embodied situations the dreamer struggled to come to terms with in real life.

It surprised her to think that she had been riddled with high levels of anxiety from such a young age. It also surprised her that as her brain matured and she gathered more life experiences, her brain subconsciously began to substitute the monsters in her head with the monsters in real life that caused her anxiety and depression. For each new catalyst in her life that caused her stress, fear and despair to skyrocket, her brain projected them into her nightmares.

Somewhere in her late teens, the monsters transformed into herself.

***

The first time she fell in love, she was 12 years old.

Her best friend was the centre of her universe. Together, they would wreak havoc in their class, their mischief and pranks earning them the simultaneous title of class clowns. Any activity that required a partner or being part of a group, they instantly gravitated toward each other.

He made getting out of bed every morning and going to school a worthy task.

Hordes of butterflies constantly threatened to explode from her stomach every morning when they met outside their classroom, and she would remain in a constant state of elatedness until they parted ways in the afternoon.

She became dependent upon him as he became a cure for her sadness brought on by her homelife. He was the single drop of water in the desert that her life was transforming into.

In all iterations of her dreams for the future, he was the key player in all scenarios. She fantasised having her first kiss with him. She imagined being high-school sweethearts with him, something she saw constantly in romantic movies. She wanted to marry him. She wanted all of these exciting things that she had to wait to be an adult to experience. She was terrified that her fantasies could be ripped from her in the blink of an eye.

It took overhearing a single conversation for her fears to be realised, crushing all the hopes and dreams she had for a future with him.

“It’s so obvious she has a major crush on you,” one of their mutual friends said to him. “You guys are so fun to hang out with when you’re together.”

Her crush chuckled in response. “She’s really funny and nice, but I definitely don’t have a crush on her.”

“Really?” the other boy queried, sounding dubious. “The way you guys behave with each other sometimes says otherwise to me.”

Her crush sighed. She didn’t dare peek around the corner to watch the exchange. She held her breath in anticipation, her heart in her throat as she listened to her friends speak to each other. She heard scuffing and shuffling noises as the boys kicked an empty plastic water bottle back and forth.

“I would have a crush on her, but… her body stops me,” he cleared his throat awkwardly and huffed out a laugh. “I don’t want to have a crush on someone that’s fat.”

Through the loud ringing in her ears, she faintly heard both boys laugh as they continued to kick the bottle back and forth, moving onto a different topic of conversation.

She felt her world crumble. She felt sick to her stomach, nausea causing her vision to blur. She squeezed her eyes closed as she fought back a torrent of tears. Before she gave away her presence, she fled in the opposite direction, making a beeline for the girl’s toilets.

She stumbled through the entrance before throwing herself on the floor in front of the toilet, gagging as bile climbed up her throat. For a moment, she remained slumped against the toilet, trying to control her roiling stomach. When the nausea subsided, she collapsed against the wall of the stall as tears raced down her face.

She thought he was different. She thought he didn’t care about her appearance, especially considering he had defended her many times against her bullies. She thought he saw the true version of herself that she had struggled to like most days.

Maybe he wasn’t much different to her schoolyard bullies, after all. Her mind began to spiral, concocting conspiracies about their ‘friendship’. Maybe he made fun of her behind her back to their classmates. Maybe he used her during partner and group classwork just to copy her work. Maybe, in reality, they were never truly friends.

The first time she had her heart broken, she was 12 years old.

***

“Self-harm is one of the main signs of someone that is experiencing depression,” the student welfare co-ordinator intoned to the Year 7 cohort; she tapped a button on her computer to bring up a slideshow of images on the projector at the head of the classroom. Multiple graphic images of teenagers – only girls, she noted absently – with cuts littering their limbs lit up the screen; some cuts were scabbed over, some raw and fresh, and some were bright white and had scarred. Motioning towards the screen, the welfare co-ordinator continued, “if you see a friend or fellow classmate with self-inflicted injuries like these, please don’t hesitate to come and tell a teacher.”

The concept of self-harming confused her. She didn’t understand what would make someone think it was a good idea in the first place – what purpose did it serve? Wouldn’t it just cause more hassle in a person’s life?

As the students filed out of the classroom after the talk, many of her classmates were snickering as they discussed the topic. “Surely it’s got to be an attention-seeking thing, right?” one of her classmates hypothesised. “Why else would you do that kind of shit to yourself? They probably aren’t even depressed; they just want to make themselves the centre of attention.”

The day she turned 15, her perspective changed, and suddenly she could understand the temptation behind self-harming.

Her father was already on edge when he arrived at her house for her birthday dinner. Visits from her father were often riddled with a tense atmosphere, but his demeanour gave away just how angry he truly was under the surface on this particular day. Something that she hated having in common with her father was how quickly her temper would peak, and at the time, her body’s initial reaction to anger was to swear.

Her father hated anyone else swearing. Only he was bestowed the privilege of being allowed to curse.

“Fuck this,” she spat in anger after a small argument with her mother, “I’m going to my room.”

She stormed off, and he followed.

They screamed at each other. He pushed her up against the wall and held her captive as he spat expletives in her face. He called her a fucking ungrateful, foul-mouthed bitch (oh, the irony). When she began to cry and verbally fight back, he did something that he had never done before, but something she had always feared would happen when his anger would spill over.

He hit her across the face, three times.

Something shifted in her psyche after those slaps. She spent weeks in a depressive limbo, barely leaving the house and missing weeks of school as a result. With each passing day, the temptation to harm herself grew. She definitely didn’t want to do it to get anyone’s attention. She wanted back what her father took from her with three simple smacks: control. She was spiralling; fears that had been so engraved in her mind were rearing their ugly head. It terrified her that all she could think of to stem the breakdown was to hurt herself.

She tried her hardest to convince herself it was a bad idea. It was as though her brain was at war with itself. She couldn’t stop thinking about it, but also knew it was not a healthy solution to her problems. The direction that her thoughts took on a daily basis frightened her.

The temptation eventually became too much to bear, and she gave in.

***

“I feel pretty good at the moment,” she commented to her psychologist. “I haven’t been feeling as anxious as I normally do, and I’ve been going out more often.”

It had taken her ten years to finally find a psychologist that truly helped her. When she was younger, she felt as though she was being talked down to by her first few psychologists. She may have been a teenager, but she believed herself to be incredibly mature for her age. When she was 18, the psychologist she was seeing at the time spoke to her as though she was a 5-year-old.

“You need to think of life as climbing a set of stairs,” her psychologist had insisted. She grabbed a blank piece of paper and a pen, drew messy zigzags ascending the page to represent stairs, then finished her drawing by adding a stick figure with long hair and a giant smile half-way up the staircase. “This is you, making your way up the staircase that is life. Some days, you’ll find the journey tiring, but other days, you’ll find reaching the next step to be easy, and enjoy doing so.” The psychologist then glanced at her and smiled warmly.

That was the last appointment she had with that particular psychologist.

“What do you think is different about your life right now?” her current psychologist asked. She didn’t answer straight away. She glanced around his home office and locked her gaze onto a piece of art hanging on the wall behind him, avoiding making eye contact with him. It was a charcoal drawing of a cottage with a water well in the front garden, finished with his signature in the bottom righthand corner.

“I don’t know,” she sighed, staring intently at the drawing. “University is going well, I feel like I’m keeping on top of my coursework, and everyone’s healthy right now.” She lowered her gaze to her lap, her fingers fiddling with the hem of her sweater. “Pop’s health has improved a lot. He’s back to doing all the normal things he was doing before he had to go into surgery to have his bladder removed.”

Her psychologist nodded. “So, at this stage, he’s cancer free?”

She shrugged and tugged at a loose thread on her sleeve. “It seems like it at this stage.”

He tilted his head as he observed her. “If things are going well at the moment, why do you seem melancholy?” he probed. He knew her tells too well by this point.

“Honestly?” Finally, she made eye contact with him. “I’m waiting for the other shoe to drop. Something is going to happen now that I feel like I’m in a good place. Feeling good isn’t something that ever lasts for me.”

He tutted and shook his head, seeming disappointed in her justification. “There are some people who would hypothesise that if you think something hard enough, you will it into existence. Do you think you’re putting yourself in a position where you will become unhappy again because you are in constant fear of something going wrong?”

She flinched at the implication. “You think I want to be unhappy?” she snapped.

“Not at all, I think you desperately want to be happy. I also think you have a great fear of disappointment and having your happiness taken from you in a split second.” He stroked his chin as he thought through his next sentence. “I think you have no idea what to do once you are happy.”

For the rest of her appointment, she kept thinking back to that single comment. Did she know how to be happy anymore? Were the moments so few and far in between that she was forgetting what it felt like to not be buried in sorrow?

A week after her appointment, her fears materialised into reality. Her Pop ended up needing to be rushed to hospital after suffering a stroke. After multiple tests, it was revealed that his cancer had begun to attack his nervous system aggressively and without warning. Four days later, he died in the hospital.

Two weeks after her grandfather’s death, she had her next appointment with her psychologist. The moment she sat down across from him, she burst into hysteric tears.

“I think I willed Pop’s death into existence.”

***

A fear that first bloomed during her late teens has steadily been growing over the past decade, but she didn’t realise how much so until she reached her 30^th birthday.

She was petrified that she was going to be alone forever.

She’s felt so many variations of loneliness over her life, but for some reason, this one feels the most painful and unbearable.

She can pinpoint the events that increased the prevalence of this fear very clearly: her family and friends getting engaged, married and having children. Her brother was now married with a kid on the way, her cousins were all paired up with some of them having children of their own, and all of her friends had romantic partners and were well on their way to creating their own families.

Dating is something that had always scared her. She wants the companionship but can’t bring herself to open up to someone because of the possibility of being heartbroken if things didn’t work out. She doesn’t want to burden another person with her issues. She can’t see why anyone would love her.

She has spent over half of her life in therapy of some sort, but this was one topic she typically steered clear of. She doesn’t want to hear her psychologist feed her lies, telling her that she was someone worthy of love. She knows she isn’t. She’s too abrasive, too unlikeable, too tainted.

It was becoming increasingly obvious how much it bothers her.

An evening spent with her best friend eating tonnes of junk food and drinking far too much wine is the first time she verbalises these fears to another person. Her best friend cried for her heartache, which in turn made her cry, too – it could also been put down to their level of drunkenness.

“Can you put your trust in me for one thing?” her best friend asks after their tears subside.

She releases a frustrated sigh. “I suppose so. What’re you planning in that head of yours?”

“There’s a guy that I work with,” she says as she pulls her phone out of her pocket. She scrolls through Facebook and pulls up a man’s profile. “He’s super sweet, down to earth, a mega nerd, and I think you two would get along great. Just let me set you up on a date and see where things go.”

She shrugs, much more pliable to agreeing with such a crazy idea with some alcohol in her stomach. “Fine. Let me know where he wants to meet and what time.”

Three days later – and decidedly more sober, meaning far more anxiety-riddled – she walks into a quiet and quaint bistro. Casting a quick glance at the tables, she spots the man she is meeting: dark brown curls, vibrant green eyes framed by thick-rimmed glasses and a smile so sweet it makes her stomach flip.

For a moment, she freezes as fear grips her heart. In a flash, she remembers her first heartbreak. She thinks of all the sleepless nights she experienced after being sexually assaulted. She remembers what he’ll see the moment she takes off her coat and her arms are exposed. She recalls being convinced that all good things she touches become tainted.

She’s petrified to take another step, and he sees that.

He rises from his seat with a warm, empathetic smile and approaches her slowly. When he reaches her, he holds out his hand in offering.

“It’s okay, I’m scared too,” he murmurs quietly. His voice is like a soothing balm on her nerves. “We’ll jump off the proverbial ledge together over a cup of coffee and a really delicious lunch,” he jokes.

A small smile tugs at the edge of her lips as she places her hand against his warm palm.

For the first time in her life, she jumps.