‘Okay.’ I take my breath. ‘I am sorry for saying all the wrong things, and doing the wrong things, for running away, multiple times really, for how I have treated you, for how I haven’t treated you, for never having the right words to tell you how much you mean to me. I have fucked up more of our friendship than I ever brought to it, I think, which is the exact opposite of what I have been trying to do. You are the most important person in my life, and you deserve better than my messy, poor attempts at showing you that. Now that I understand a little better, I am focused on figuring things out, on figuring me out. It’s been chaos inside my head for as long as I can remember, and I’m not excusing myself, I just desperately want you to understand.’
‘That it’s not me, it’s you?’ he says, with a wry smile.
‘It is, though! Itisme. It’s been the not-knowing-why of it all that has messed me up, and the terrible choices I have made while trying to exist in that not-knowing. I have been trying to fit in, or run away, or be a different human, or not be a human at all, or to do what I think people expect of me rather than what I want to do and what I know is actually right. I have, over time, shut down my own feelings and thoughts and beliefs until I did not even know what was left. But I know now, and I am going to figure everything else out. I am going to make it up to you, and be a better friend, if you want that. Or, if you don’t, I understand that, too.’
He sits in silence for longer than should be legally allowed. I can only hope even some of what has just come out of my mouth makes sense to him.
‘I think I get it, Nora,’ he says, heart open.
‘Okay . . . cool,’ I reply.
‘I should probably be honest, too. You really hurt me. Like, a lot, a lot of times. Over and over. I’m embarrassed, actually, that I let you treat me like that. And I need to take ownership too, of the ways I allowed you to hurt me and didn’t communicate with you about it because I was scared it would push you further away.’
‘Yeah, that makes sense,’ I reply. ‘We definitely could have talked more openly about things.’
He laughs at my understatement of the century.
‘I think . . .’ he continues, ‘I think I just always thought things would have been different if you’d liked me more – if I had been enough, we would have figured it out. I thought the right person would make you want to do that.’
Frustration sparks and I try to hold it in. He is wrong, though, and I need for him to get it.
‘That has been my fear this whole time. That your enough is different to my enough, and that I can’t be that for you. I have raged against that thought. Because, despite how things have been, despite all evidence to the contrary, I have always liked you enough. I have always loved you the most I could humanly love another person. And I was always scared you needed someone more like Emma than like me.’
‘Emma? Emma Ferguson?’
‘Yeah . . .’
‘We dated for like a month when I was in Year Eight.’
‘I know, but she was a great girlfriend. The kind of girlfriend you deserve. And I want you to have what you want. I want you to have the person who remembers all the small details and can make grand gestures and be comfortable around your friends and marry you and have your babies and be a great mother. Yes, clearly getting carried away a bit there, but you know what I mean.’
‘She hooked up with someone out the back of the surf club while we were together. She wasn’t great – or she’s probably fine now, we were kids, but she wasn’t what you’re saying. It wasn’t like that at all. I haven’t thought of Emma in years.’
‘Well, I have. And I don’t want to keep feeling deficient because what I might be able to give you is less than what you want. Even if I get my shit totally together – which, let’s face it, isn’t a given – I might still be less. Only, it’s not less to me. At any given moment, me giving the entirety of what I have to offer might not measure up, that’s the fear. I know I will have more to give the more work I do, and the more my life aligns with my needs, but it might never be all of that, and I might need to keep more for myself, because I am currently having a hard time even doing a terrible job at life.’
We are both stunned into silence by each other’s and our own words. The aftermath of a meltdown, following the shame and self-loathing and brain-melting exhaustion, can bring a kind of clarity. I would not say it is worth the price of admission, but I may as well make the most of what is offered. There is a lot to digest. I have done my best to make him understand. That it is about energy, and how much of mine he might require to be happy, how much that has always scared me. A life that does not have room for my aloneness, my rest, my down days, my bad days – a life that resents it or squeezes it or takes it away – is not a life I can afford to live, because that is what is keeping me here. Safety is going to be my lifelong goal, and a safe life might seem small to someone who does not need those parameters in place just to exist. The fullest version of me, the version I have been denying, suppressing, blunting around the edges, that is who I want to be. She needs safety if she is ever going to find her way out of survival mode and into a life she can inhabit with comfort. Any sharing of this life cannot come with competition for energy. And I am surer than ever that I will always choose her, even when it hurts because of what it means I might lose along the way. Fran sits very still on the side of my bed, and I take a mental picture of the way his face is in the light, the way his limbs are draped.
‘I guess Idoneed more time to digest,’ he says, though his tone indicates where I think his mind has landed.
I want to revolt, to shake him, to drop to my knees and beg him to agree to accepting this version of me right now. But I won’t; I would not do that to him. He deserves the chance to make his own choice.
‘I do love you,’ I say. ‘More than anyone.’
‘I love you too, Nora. Obviously. That’s the whole thing. And I’m really glad you’ve figured so much out, and that you’re home. I just . . . need some time.’
He stands, and leaves. It is a clear choice; I could not mistake his intentions when he is quite literally getting up and walking away before my tear-filled eyes. I had hoped my small fragment of context could counter a lifetime of mistakes, but of course that is not the case. Of course he wants more. We wave goodbye through the window, and I keep my smile on until he is out of sight. Behind my teeth, my breath starts to louden and I try to wrestle all of the emotional dysregulation coursing through my veins into submission, to tame it with the power of my rational thoughts.
As always, I want not to exist in this pain, but to skip ahead to the part where I have grown to accept it. Thinking about my feelings is a beloved pastime, butfeelingthem I could do without. I want to be the scientist who shakes the bottle and records observations about how the water inside reacts, but instead I am inside the whirlpool, a molecule – two parts hydrogen and one part oxygen. And I need to be. I need to allow space for that chaos and that pain. I turn off the ceiling light and turn on the lamp. I find my hairbrush and sit on my bed, brushing my hair in long, slow strokes, giving my central nervous system its best chance of recovering and returning to a resting state.
The first doctor I spoke to talked about a lot of things: bipolar, and various personality disorders, and of course anxiety and depression. I saw him twice a week for a month, a luxury only afforded to me because Mum and Dad still had me on their private health insurance. Mum flew down to be with me for two weeks, and we had had enough of one another after one. But, rather than focusing on her frustrations with me, it is worth acknowledging that this was a big deal for Elsie, that she showed up for me when it mattered. I had more appointments, spoke to more doctors. She booked my return flight before she left. The only reason I even landed on the final diagnoses – ASD, ADHD, OCD, DDD, ARFID, and PMDD (try sayingthatthree times quickly) – was because I lucked out when I was referred to the beautiful angel that is Dr Montague, who specialises in neurodivergent women and gender diverse folk, herself having recently discovered her own identity under that umbrella at the ripe old age of forty-eight. I am fairly sure she took one look at me and figured it out. Autism diagnosis by peer review, before the assessment even began. And while I did not feel particularly lucky at the time, rehashing my childhood memories for signs that I felt and processed and thought about things differently, I can see now that I fast-tracked my way to diagnoses with money, access, and privilege. The same money, access, and privilege that allowed me to move back to a safe and beautiful home and be angry at my parents. I flew back with one suitcase to my name, barely able to speak or eat, and here I have stayed, untangling the mess until it finally began to make some sense. I have retraced my past, put every experience in context, felt it all. Only now can I even begin to move forward. I am finally at the starting line.
But, hey, not everyone who inherits neurodevelopmental conditions or mental illness or trauma also inherits a comfortable room they can move back into when they blow their life to shit. I have won the individual lottery within a rigged system. It is a fairly extravagant consolation prize, while remaining deeply unfair. Other people might be rich in the emotional support they receive, but I cannot envy them from this comfortable bed. I can take it from here, and I want to care for myself enough that I am eventually able to do something worthwhile with these precious moments before the next bad phone call comes.
25
Boxing Day
Boxing Day is for one thing and one thing only: cricket. From what I understand, nobody in my family so much as thinks of the bat-and-ball sport for three hundred and sixty-four days of the year, but on 26 December it takes the wheel. And every year, but perhaps especially this year, I can appreciate that my acceptance into the fold or lack thereof relies on my ability to stand in the grass and catch a heavy ball if it comes anywhere near me. So of course there is pressure. The morning air kisses my face as I open the window, the rain finally gone, but having left behind the kind of crispness that is not usually felt until April. There is comfort in the day that stretches ahead, no meals or expectations, no Grandma Sue, who went home in the late afternoon, leaving her goodbye with Mum to pass along to me like a participation ribbon. Dad is talking tactics in the kitchen when I arrive upstairs to make coffee, and Mum is politely reminding him of his not-three-days-prior hospitalisation.
